Anon posted this in a comment, which I think is important:
We need leadership as much as people on the ground, so focusing on RO or WO positions seems like the wrong tree to bark up. To me it’s about the programs, and how far the agency has strayed from its core mission. How many communications positions are out there? WEPO? Partnership positions? Fleet managers? A lot more than we need, IMHO.
It would be great if, every once in a while, bureaucracies would do a review of how their current programs are staffed, and ask whether it is optimal for today’s needs. Certainly, most programs have outside supporters who would raise a fuss. But maybe some don’t. It would be interesting to hear from both perhaps a national FACA committee and employees, again, with a reconciliation process (and maybe minority reports, remember Roger Sedjo’s comments in the Appendix to the Committee of Scientists (and one law prof)). With that document, put it out for review with some biz schools and public admin schools for technical insights. Adapt and then put it out for public comment. Sure that could easily take longer than one Admin, but we can’t just ignore the efficacy of government and waste funding with gaps and overlaps.. or decades of accretions of fundamentally useless bureaucracies…because it’s “too hard.”
While I was looking for a link , I ran across this from the introduction.
Dreams and Practicality
The current Committee of Scientists was urged by the Secretary’s office to step back and define a land- and resource-management planning framework that would last a generation, in some sense to dream a little. Our dreams have been inspired by the actions of dedicated and resourceful on-the-ground employees of the Forest Service. While some have understandably become disillusioned and defensive after years of conflict and impasse, others have risen to the challenge, experimented, and are successfully pursuing new approaches to planning and management.The lessons of their efforts provide a glimmer of hope and a foundation of experience upon which the Committee could construct an innovative, dynamic, yet pragmatic approach to planning. All the while, the Committee has tempered its dreams with the realization that the Forest Service does not need another impossible mission; our dreams should not translate to Forest Service nightmares.
I think the last sentence holds true for our NWFP FAC friends.
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But back to Anon’s comments..
I don’t know what WEPO is. I do have a story to tell. I’m hoping that others, both retirees and current employees, will share their stories of management improvement schemes and how well they worked.
In the mid-90s, I used to work in RPA in the Yates Building, in 4NW. I worked on the ill-fated 1995 RPA Program as the coordinator with R&D.
They were building the Holocaust Museum next door at the time. (There were also rats evacuating the building that became the cafeteria for the Museum, so our wildlife friends in the basement had unusual challenges.) I argued that the Museum should have done a psychological impact report for the neighbors. Can you imagine at every staff meeting (in the Director’s office) looking out over the building, knowing the material housed there, and what it represents about the capacity of humankind? As their website says:
Along the north brick walls, a different perspective reveals a roofline profile of camp guard towers, a procession of sentry boxes. Above the western entrance, a limestone mantle holds a solitary window containing 16 solid “panes,” framed by clear glass, reversing the normal order and obscuring the ability to look in or out.
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Anyway, at the time, there was a special section in the center of the building for copying and printing. There was chatting while we were waiting in line. Since Recreation was on the same floor, one of the folks was a rec special uses person. Now at the time, the RF in Region 9 had the idea that he could shrink the RO (these ideas and implementation come and go). So.. the forests in Region 9 who did have technical questions.. called the expert in the WO. Rec special uses is not something you can just guess at, and it’s usually a tiny piece of a rec person’s job, so doesn’t make sense for them to become expert. As she said “I shouldn’t be the phone pal of everyone in Region 9.”
Point being, to agree with Anonymous, cutting positions can have unintended consequences to quality (in this case with legal ramifications) or to other units.
Another story from the same time period is that we shared one printer with Wildlife and Fish. When I was picking up copies, I ran across a letter that one of their employees was sending to wildlife NGOs stating that an RO combining a Wildlife director position with something else would have bad impacts on.. wildlife programs. I was later told he wanted the job for himself, but the story illustrates that the discussion of some positions can be porous between the agency and outside groups. And of course, there is symbolism, in some cases- “we respect you by having this position.”
Another story is more recent, from the 2010’s perhaps, when I worked in the Region 2 Regional Office. There was an effort to Reimagine, Reform, Reinvigorate or whatever (I get all these efforts mixed up, and tried to stay away from them as much as possible). Most of the staff areas, including planning, gave it more or less lip service. But our Region 2 engineers actually thought the whole thing through, analyzed it carefully, and changed their organization in a reasonable and thoughtful way. They got rewarded by… well, they didn’t actually get rewarded, as far as I know. Staffs who used the “this is likely to blow over” methodology came out ahead by a) not spending time on it and b) not changing.
I’d be really interested in hearing peoples’ experiences about other management improvement efforts and how they worked for the better or didn’t.
It’s my understanding that district rangers supervise 43% of the FS workforce at present.
Which means that 57% of the agency’s employees do not work in the field.
One ranger I know has about 500 miles of system road on the district, gets $40,000 in CMRD allocations each year, has one engineering tech to manage the road system, no engineering aids or dedicated roads staff to help the engineer, and no non-fire equipment operators. Fire season = road maintenance season = no equipment operator on forest most of the time to work roads in dry weather.
So the agency seems to be top heavy in admin positions at SOs, ROs, and the WO. While the FS needs admin people, the FS is charged with conserving 191 million acres of de facto world heritage sites and passing those on to future generations somewhat unimpaired. The districts don’t have the staff and the money to do that given current priorities, and those priorities are being established by staff in urban areas who may never have worked on a district and just don’t understand the challenges the field-going staff endure day to day.
Maybe the FS could take a page from the Chic-Fil-A management book and put the executives and administrators on the front lines for at least one pay period each year? How would that work for a reorg?
I think that idea has great possibilities.. for one thing, connections would be established and trust built across the organization for two-way informal communication. Many of us had a great deal of trust and networks with people we had “grown up with” even though we all moved on to other jobs.
I think maybe prioritizing by people who had come from outside the FS (which seems more common) would help, because there would be much travel which would have financial impacts.
As to the roads, there are probably people saying.. “just remove the roads and there won’t be problem” or “match the road system with whatever bucks come down the pike” but that isn’t particularly helpful in my view. It’s almost as if $ are being transferred from doers to thinkers, rethinking reanalyzing and restrategizing into infinity.
The public who drive the roads to access their public lands pay taxes too. So the onus is on the agency to accommodate the public within reason (no mudbogging, gate cutting, and other tomfoolery), and that might mean fewer wellness seminars and staff areas devoted to things other than the integrity of the National Forest System and more focus on equipping the field to meet the management challenges of the 21st century. Or something like that.
I don’t know if you’re a current employee, but I can imagine that the FS could do a survey of employees “ways to streamline” and come up with some useful ideas.
I think that’s a great idea. Fundamentally, I think there’s a through line in some of the anon. comments coming in that points to:
1. The agency is not optimally organized.
2. Even if such a goal is not attainable and ever-moving, things could be done to address that sub-optimal organization.
3. The field levels, however delimited, are the most put-upon by current shortages.
4. The location of bloat or whatever term is disputed but it’s likely not at ranger districts.
Some frontiers to explore, then:
– What are the actual results of staffing reviews? Where is the agency staffed and where isn’t it?
– What functions are best located where? It’s not clear, for instance, that planning functions are best located at districts versus Forests, while it’s definitely clear that timber and recreation admin are probably highest functioning when most locally-located.
– What is the relation of staffing levels and the agency mission? I hesitate to call some jobs unnecessary but there’s been a shift in the agency from ‘get it done’ to ‘how can we support employees’. This sounds better than it is. One suspects there’s a few districts’ worth of staffing caught up in jobs that largely exist to ape corporate culture seminar-speak. Culture emerges organically from shared mission, not from seminars.
(imo, so there’s a tangent here about mission drift or mission loss. support for employees -sorry- is not a mission or even a mission function. I’ve a bit of a cranky view here that there has emerged in recent years a clamor for hand-holding and validation among the ‘upper-middle-class’ of employees)
Those are great questions!
Here are my thoughts:
1. Are there any current/have there been any such staffing reviews?
2. Location: this is harder to figure out, especially with work from home. but clearly there are community relational issues (for Rangers) and practical issues (for field going people)
3. I too find parts of the FS I deal with more or less unnecessary. I suspect part of that is that I’m a cranky old retiree. It seems like there’s quite a good deal more talking, planning, having conversations about, generating grants for others to have convos, about ..things that really aren’t that complicated to… do.
I’d argue that the SO folks are very much also field.
Well, that was the beauty of what the R2 engineers did, they broke down what everyone’s job entailed, as I recall. Was it direct support to the field or not? That’s what’s often missing from these discussions. At the same time, SO folks often know more and have more experience that they can contribute. It’s not simple.
When Term Appointments became options for Temporary Employees, some Units moved quickly to hire useful people into them. After two seasons, my Ranger District decided we were too expensive, and jettisoned us GS-7s. They complained that we were ‘just as expensive’ as a Permanent. They did keep some GS-3s and 4s. Our Ranger told us to “Get on with your lives… there will be no new Permanent positions”.
I haven’t seen Term Appointments offered in a very long time, now. (Of course, many Units did fill new Permanent positions in the last several years, I assume.)
I am a longtime employee, and from my perspective there is an utter lack of understanding about what it takes to do the work. We measure our success by outcomes or outputs, but we fail to fully account for the human capacity (time as well as expertise) to produce those outcomes. We tell managers, “Here is the money you get; here is the outcome expected; and here is your timeframe for getting it done” without validation of the reasonableness or feasibility of the ask. How can an agency do meaningful workforce planning when it lacks this basic understanding? I know the government is not and should not necessarily act like a corporation, but investing in a review of the requirements that lead to outcomes, including pre-NEPA surveys, environmental analysis, other regulatory compliance, and implementation (and possibly monitoring) would inform workforce planning, setting realistic expectations, and possibly relieve a burden of stress from those who feel they are being asked to do the impossible. This doesn’t really address the question that was asked, but it’s a related matter.
I wonder when the last formal “review of requirements” occurred?
WEPO is “Work Environment and Performance Office”, FYI.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/inside-fs/leadership/work-environment-and-performance-office-working-all-employees
Thanks, that sounds very useful On the other hand, I’ve been on both sides of employee disputes (disputes with my employees and my supes’ disputes with me) and our R2 HR/Civil Rights folks and contractors did just fine. The link was for 2019, perhaps there will be a 5 year “lessons learned?”
As to harassment and so on, it is my observation that folks located on the same or nearby units have a better context for helping than someone who is a disembodied voice somewhere. I think that ship has sailed, though.