Within government, constant change and mission flux are at the heart of the tension between achieving results and complying with changing and often unfunded mandates. At all levels and forms of government, executives confront a challenge that would daunt Sisyphus. They endlessly must push their agency and staff to achieve their mission objectives and to see the results expected by taxpayers and legislatures. From the President’s Management Agenda to the Congress’s Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) to the latest campaign pledges, executives must find ways to meet both the missions they have and the obligations that get imposed. This is the challenge of living with constant change. While its impact is not limited to the HR department, this article focuses specifically on its effect on the HR director and staff.

Virtually all government agencies are 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 change and have generally negative results—offset only by the achievement of whatever goal triggered it.

This article is based on a Pivotal Insight context report—the tool we use to define a critical problem and set the stage for future research that drills down into the details of what senior executives around the government are doing to resolve or live with critical challenges. In the case of constant change and mission flux, if the HR department can help an agency respond more positively and effectively to change, the payoff is improved staff retention, higher productivity, and the ability to achieve the goals of the agency. This article looks at the mechanics of mission flux and how agencies deal with it.

Mission flux is a simple concept with complicating aspects and implications. Organic factors that are a part of the culture of the agency may cause flux. Since some level of flux is always occurring, there is a fuzzy agency-specific threshold that distinguishes critical flux events from ordinary organic flux. When a flux event goes above the threshold, it is significant enough to cause out-of-the-ordinary disruption to the agency’s mission, and may trigger a state of permanent flux as described below.

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

The interaction of controllability and predictability provides insight into how HR managers respond to flux at a macro level. The intersection of unpredictable and uncontrollable flux has the greatest negative impact on the HR organization and may lead to non-compliance with the tasking or poor performance if HR cannot deliver the staff necessary to deal with the change.

Flux can be both transient and permanent. Transient mission flux occurs when an agency receives new, unexpected tasking that does not eventually become part of its normal mission. Permanent flux happens when an agency’s mission is so inherently flexible, undefined, or subject to change that flux above the threshold becomes a way of life.

Flux occurs both within an agency and across agency boundaries. Intra-agency flux is a result of mission redistribution or changes in organizational boundaries (or stovepipes) within an agency, but may be caused by either internal or external forces. Inter-agency flux occurs when missions are passed or reconstituted among agencies. The most profound recent example of such reconstitution is the wholesale redistribution of security functions into the Department of Homeland Security.

Systemic flux results from a broad redefinition of an agency’s mission or practices that cuts across intra-organizational boundaries and affects several of the key management systems that have been created to support the agency. It is generally self-inflicted or self-initiated. Process flux tends to be tactical, and occurs when a key process in an agency changes, usually as a result of a directive from an organization that has some say in but does not actually perform the process.

The outcome of flux, at the extreme, frequently appears as chaos—a tidal wave of change and tasking that is nearly impossible to manage and has consequences (some serious) to the agency. In almost all cases, these circumstances are particularly problematic for the HR department.

• Best practices
• Applying intrinsic skills and resiliency
• Anticipation
• Ignoring the flux forces altogether (or until the squeaky wheel dominates), which is one of the more common responses

Our research revealed several major factors or forces that drive mission flux in government agencies including:

1. Externally imposed factors such as policy changes, events or incidences, inter- and intra-agency structural or responsibility boundary shifts, and administrative shuffling.
   
2. Intrinsic factors or forces, which include:
• Attempting to act like a business, which is profoundly changing the pressures on government HR.
• This includes the addition of new missions such as coordinating downsizing, outsourcing significant workload, and thinking in terms of ROI and equity.
• 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.
  
3. 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. Fundamentally different skills are needed, and are often available only through competition with the private sector.

Our survey participants 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%). Managers who saw their missions as stable were typically dealing with organic flux plus low levels of transient flux. The others had undergone a phase shift in which the organic flux had crossed a threshold of both frequency and scope, and flux had become permanent.

While virtually all managers see mission flux as an important factor in their workload, their sense of urgency was significantly different depending on a wide variety of factors including access/non-access to additional budgetary support, level of senior management support, and the prior implementation or non-implementation of proactive policies and processes to improve the flux situations. 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 identified flux as having a significant or critical impact on the HR function (e.g., personal stress, changes in hiring practices, increased reliance on outsourcing, etc.), and virtually none expressed any surprise at its prevalence or ubiquity.

In spite of the prevailing acceptance of flux as a way of life, respondents expressed a general sense of change fatigue ranging from ‘minor nuisance’ to ‘over the edge.’ Poor staff performance in flux situations is closely connected to the level of change fatigue.
Agencies often are told to resolve the flux situation but are not able to spend any additional money or derail any existing, popular programs. This situation is akin to that which Congress faces when taxpayers tell it to lower taxes but not cut any services.

In general, our survey respondents did not report any mission ‘relief’ when flux situations occurred. They were expected to deliver their normal services while dealing with flux, too. Among the respondents, the generators of flux (e.g., Congress, the Executive Branch, etc.) are notorious for not connecting flux tasking to financial or time resources.

Further, the government is operating at a higher tempo and in an increasingly flexible, business-like environment that is more dynamic than in the past. It is not just missions that are changing. Organizational boundaries are also constantly in flux as agencies refocus due to changes to national priorities (e.g., HLS, DOD, CIA, Energy, etc.) and then reconstituted with changed missions, new purview, and often a different workforce.

Flux Stresses Everything…

Flux causes individual and organizational stress and, in turn, all of stress’s predictable consequences (organizational and relationship dysfunction, communication problems, resource dislocations, turf battles, performance problems and, in a few cases, even aggressive non-compliance). These consequences have profound implications for HR executives and managers whose fundamental responsibility it is to deliver, support, develop and maintain the most essential resources necessary to respond to these fluxing missions and boundary conditions.

Mission Flux is “Business as Usual”—Until an Election Year

Flux is part of the normal process of change in government, but our respondents noted that business as usual becomes “unusually worse than usual” based on presidential and mid-term election cycles. Most expressed some immediate concerns about their potential for experiencing pronounced mission flux that would “most certainly” occur around the November 2004 election regardless of the political outcome.

Skills Mix and Flux

The constantly changing composition of the resources, competencies and experiences of the governmental workforce places stress on the HR system. OPM’s 2003 Fact Book shows:

• A 3.5 year increase in the average age of Federal workers just in the ten years from 1992 to
• 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 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.

However, it isn’t just the organic flux effects stemming from the aging of the workforce that impacts agencies. Government workers and their environment are going through a sea change. In the past, access to government jobs was designed to be difficult and the skills needed were primarily non-technical infrastructure skills (i.e., clerical, managerial). The role of government has changed. It now operates in the human capital marketplace as an impaired competitor and seeking many of the same technical skills (e.g., software applications knowledge, scientific skills) that are highly valuable to the private sector. Unfortunately, the HR systems that support the agencies through this transition are still mostly calibrated to the government workforce requirements of the past.

It is ironic that the government is losing functional administrative expertise while gaining specialized technical expertise, if slowly. However, the demand for the older administrative skills is not declining as rapidly as the workforce is transitioning, and the new workers often do not have the skills or flexibility to adapt to either the “old” environment or to the next “new new” environment that will emerge as their skills become the norm.

Remedying a potentially huge “knowledge gap” is HR’s task. Pressures will come and are coming from the operational side of agencies onto HR to mitigate these often unintended consequences of staff mix flux.

Government HR managers’ capacities to deal with constant change were seriously eroded in the 1990’s through a combination of downsizing, lack of hiring competitiveness, and a declining sense of the importance of public service. All of the respondents described efforts to change their agencies’ policies and procedures to meet the demands of a new environment, including additional and streamlined hiring and targeted recruitment of selected demographic groups (e.g., younger people and those with very specific mission-related skills).

Planning and the Political Appointees

HR directors see their agencies as “poor at planning for the future” in an environment where the mission was certain to change frequently in relatively predictable ways and from relatively predictable causes. This was most often attributed to the top echelon of political appointees in the agency who were described as having:

• Political ambitions or a political agenda that was not necessarily in tune with the agency’s mission
• A slow learning curve (potentially longer than their likely tenure in office)
• An ideological or parochial outlook, and/or
• A poor grasp of the agency’s mission and functions, the rules under which the agency must operate, and the characteristics of the agency workforce

Political appointees are commonly seen as difficult to educate and arrogant about their ability to show the agency “how things are done in the business world.” HR should bring the political appointees and the career civil servants together early and often for meaningful dialogue. When political tensions run high and constant change is dominating agency activities, facilitate these interchanges with neutral parties.

There was a direct correlation between the ability of an agency to deal with flux and its commitment to strategic planning and metric-driven management—where strategy was explicit and use of metrics was strong, the agency was able to achieve its goals in spite of flux and without demoralizing its staff.

Several respondents noted that the existence of external mission flux pressures are irrelevant to them since their agency frequently ignores these pressures under the general attitude that “we know our mission; leave us alone.” While the agencies receive many external mandates from Congress, the White House, or watchdog and policy organizations such as GAO or OPM—so many in fact that they are sometimes physically unable to respond—they automatically prioritize many of those requirements lower than their existing missions on the basis of “here is what we can do,’” “here is what we will not do,” and “we know what is important, not you.” The practice of de facto nullification of flux-related mandates is generally ignored by the creators of the mandate.

Finding and publicizing best practices is a key goal of Pivotal Insight. All best practices are not created equal. Some have a very high impact on the organization while others are less important. Some are easy to implement while others are more difficult. Finally, some require little investment of time and resources, while others are investment-intensive.

The diagram below looks at change management best practices across these three dimensions. For agencies dealing with mission flux and constant, the highest value and easiest to achieve practices are in the upper right corner. The larger the bubble, the higher the investment required to implement the best practice.

The next phase of our Change research will drill down on these and other emerging best practices to provide a clear picture of the paths that will help HR directors thrive in this environment.

Our research highlighted many best practices for mitigating mission flux and dealing with constant change. We have listed the ‘best’ of the best practices below.

• Be dynamic, interactive, fast moving, and decisive. “Fail fast”—success comes from experience, experience comes from failure.
• Think about problems from your boss’ perspective. Educate the political appointees about your agency, job, constraints, and staff—this strategy pays big dividends when you get their attention, and cuts down on flux.
• Don’t just be “transaction people” in HR. Take charge of end-to-end problems recognizing that your activities are crucial to the success of the agency as a whole. See the big picture.
• Communicate constantly, including with the management support staff, about the change environment and the importance of the tasking.

Compensation Systems

• Implement and leverage pay-for-performance where it makes sense for your agency.

Measures and Metrics

• Create a system of measures that looks at HR activities through the lens 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 stovepiping and misunderstanding of the ROI.
• Build a dashboard that ties metrics to performance.

Strategic Planning

• HR needs to position itself as a strategic player, not an order taker of tactical directives. Raise your game to the strategic planning level and become a player in the formulation of strategy for your agency.

Management Education

• Do more reading about management and leadership. Create a management bookshelf (including research reports, magazines, popular books, bibliographies, biographies, etc.) and actively continue your own informal education. “Rebirth yourself” continuously as a manager and as a leader.

Performance Management

• Move to a hybrid behavioral/outcomes-based system for employee evaluation. Take advantage of the latest research in performance management to craft your system.
• Improve communication with employees. Give feedback early and often throughout their careers.

Relationships

• Build relationships with top management, Congressional staff and key influencers of policy immediately—-these pay off when flux hits.
• Gain an understanding of your vendors, their motivations, and their constraints. Don’t act as if profit is a dirty word. They may save you in a changing situation.
• Engage with the public as a source of assistance. Listen to their needs and problems. Request their help.
• Consider outsourcing when the circumstances make sense.