Today’s government HR executives face significant challenges and daunting obstacles in responding to mission flux – the unexpected and unplanned-for mandates that add to or shift the agency’s mission and require them to continually reshape and/or re-mix their workforce’s size, skills, systems, processes, and programs. For Federal agencies and their leadership, mission flux is a serious condition, which places a significant burden on human resource organizations to find and develop the staff needed to respond to flux, often with highly constrained resources themselves.

This article excerpts recent findings from the initial stages of Pivotal Insight’s report, Responding to Mission Flux in the Federal Government, which relates how HR executives are dealing with mission flux in Federal agencies through the use of both internal and external resources. Pilot interviewees were solicited and selected from a list of approximately 400 senior government HR directors (mostly GS 15 or SES, with some levels GS 12-14 included to provide contrast and additional depth). All respondents have over 15 years in government service, and over 30% have more than 25 years. Accordingly, this article opens the door to exploring and acting on mission flux ... its causes, impacts and constraints. The result of this work will yield an upcoming study
on how Federal organizations and their service providers can utilize best practices, strategies, and recommendations (ours and others) for mitigating and managing the profound impact of mission flux.

Federal HR directors surveyed fell into two categories: those who saw their mission as fundamentally stable (under 20%) and those constantly dealing with a change or increase in mission (over 80%.) This latter group, the majority of HR executives, commented that it has undergone a phase shift in which the mission flux has crossed a threshold of both frequency and scope to become a permanent consideration in their strategic and operational planning. Interestingly, the size of the organization and its highest-level mission (i.e., whether it was providing a direct service to the public such as INS or HHS, or fulfilling a primarily regulatory function such as EPA) did not have an impact on the respondent’s perception of mission flux.

Virtually all executives claimed that flux has a significant impact on the HR function. HR directors also commented that they must constantly push their respective agencies and staff to achieve their mission objectives and deliver the results expected by taxpayers and legislatures, often under draconian constraints. From the President’s Management Agenda, to the Congress’s Government Performance and Results Act, to the latest campaign pledges, executives must find ways to meet both the missions they have and the fluxing obligations that get imposed. This is the challenge of mission flux.

Government agencies are constantly undergoing transformations involving their mission, goals, programs, technologies, and workforce on either a routine or ad-hoc basis. Some of these changes result from administrative or legislative policy revisions, while others occur because of catastrophic events (e.g., the restructuring brought about by 9/11.) Many factors contribute to mission flux and produce generally negative results – hopefully offset by the achievement of whatever goal triggered the flux.

A wide variety of situational factors produce flux: legislative or executive directives (such as the flux impacts of “no child left behind” directives on the Department of Education, state education programs, and local school districts,) national or international events (e.g., the rise of world terrorism,) changes in technology (i.e., the Internet’s responsibility for a wholesale redefinition of how government approaches its work,) executive leadership turnover, and many more.

In order to effectively capture and process all of this, we can use a simple matrix to show how HR executives can foresee and manage flux at a macro level by examining the interaction of “controllability” and “predictability.” The intersection of unpredictable and uncontrollable mission flux has its greatest negative impact on the HR organization, and may lead to non-compliance with or poor performance of the required task if HR cannot deliver the staff necessary to respond.

The outcome of mission flux frequently appears as chaos - especially in unpredictable and uncontrollable situations - and yields a tidal wave of change and tasking that is nearly impossible to manage, often resulting in serious consequences to the organization. In most cases, these consequences are particularly troublesome for the HR department. HR managers often find themselves between the proverbial rock and hard place when dealing with flux. They are constrained by their respective agency's mission, goals, and staff demographics, while also required to respond to mission flux's pressures, again often with inadequate resources to respond.

As one HR Director commented, "Flux did not just creep up on us. Twenty years of ownsizing hurt us." In fact, research among leading Federal HR executives shows that there are several major factors or forces driving mission flux in government agencies, including:

• Externally imposed factors such as policy changes, events or incidences, inter and intra-agency structural or responsibility boundary shifts, and administrative shuffling." Externally imposed factors such as policy changes, events or incidences, inter and intra-agency structural or responsibility boundary shifts, and administrative shuffling.
• Intrinsic factors or forces which include:
• Attempting to act like a business, which is profoundly changing the pressures on government HR - e.g., ROI.
• Widespread demographic shifts that chronologically, geographically, sociologically or economically modify the internal and external populations served by an agency.
• Changes in demand or service provision patterns of government services.
• Wholesale shifts in the expectations and flexibility of the governmental workforce.
• Technology factors affect the HR department both as a source of new demands for skills and training, and as a tool for supporting the workforce.

While these and other factors and forces will be covered in more detail in the final report, more detail about two aspects in particular will illustrate how various factors can and do drive mission flux:

The constantly changing composition of the resources, competencies and experiences of the governmental workforce also places stress on the HR system. According to the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM’s) 2003 Fact Book, there are a number of emerging trends:

• A 3.5 year increase in the average age of Federal workers just in the ten years from 1992 and 2002 (average age going from 43 to 46.5)
• An increase of 2.7 years in average length of service (from 14.1 to 16.8)
• An increase in standard retirement eligibility from 10% to 23%

The last of these trends is the most worrisome because of the potential implications of massive knowledge and experience depletion during windows of time insufficiently long to recruit, place and develop new resources or train and mobilize existing, but less experienced workers. When content or process knowledge is essential and staff replacement options are limited, the most immediate flux impact falls squarely on the shoulders of HR organizations and processes. Although the ultimate impact of these effects is on the operations of the agency, remedying the potentially huge "knowledge gap" is HR's responsibility.

Fundamentally different technical skills are needed, and are often available only through competition with the private sector or on an outsourced basis. There have been many changes in underlying technology delivery/support and the technology “boundaries” in government - e.g. stove pipes realigned or inter/intra-agency system definitions or begin/end points expanded, contracted or modified - which include:

• Organizational support of technologies (outsourcing, third party providers, etc.) Examples include the Defense Logistics Agency’s Business Systems Modernization (BSM).
• Functional boundaries in software implementations (large scale system integration, and organizational requirements abound.) Examples include The Internal Revenue Service’s Business System Modernization and the Department of Defense’s Standard Procurement System.
• Network boundaries (intranets, internet, extranets and e-gov initiatives). Examples include the Department of the Navy’s NMCI, and the IRS conversion to Internet based electronic filings of tax returns.

Mission flux has profound implications for HR executives and managers whose fundamental responsibility it is to deliver, support, develop and maintain the most essential people necessary to respond to fluxing missions. Flux can be mitigated in several ways or by several important factors – for example, by applying intrinsic workforce skills and resiliency, through effective anticipation and avoidance, or, in some cases, by simply ignoring the flux forces altogether (or until the squeaky wheel dominates), which is one of the more common responses often generated from the sheer inability to respond.

However, among federal HR executives, there was also a common response regarding the use of best practices, which many Federal agencies have developed for dealing with mission flux. Best practices divide broadly into a number of leadership categories and skill areas, including management education, strategic planning, relationship management, technology development, compensation, recruiting, performance management, and ‘management-by-metrics’ techniques. A few highlights, excerpted from HR executives’ responses are outlined below. Senior Federal HR executives commented that agencies need to …

• Eliminate administrative and operational stovepipes when addressing a flux event.
• Position HR as a strategic player, not an order taker of tactical directives.
• Develop a strategic HR training program and cadre that understands ROI.
• Gain an understanding of your vendors, their motivations, and their constraints.
• Don’t act as if profit is a dirty word. Contractors may save you in a flux situation!
• Take full advantage of automation – e.g., utilizing electronic application processes and employee surveying systems to help in areas where agencies are short on staff.
• Normalize and use similar systems across your agency. Don’t allow homegrown systems to exist in stovepipes. Integration of data and transparency of process is extremely important to help you weather the flux storm.
• Create a system of measures that looks at HR activities in terms of the broad organizational mission, which means that you will need to include data from other parts of the agency – don’t limit yourself exclusively to HR data if you want to avoid stove-piping and misunderstanding of the ROI.

Mission flux is a phenomenon that has been a part of government service at least since World War II, and will not disappear in the future. In fact, initial research results forecast (and Pivotal expects) a period of higher than normal flux associated with the national election beginning in July 2004, and continuing through July 2005. Federal agencies should take steps now to prepare for the next mission flux bubble and mitigate its effects. If you would like to know more about this subject and/or to participate in our ongoing multi-client study on mission flux, please contact Pivotal Insight at www.pivotal-insight.com.