Forest Service: Culture, History, Morale, Organization, Future

This story came up in my internet searches about the Forest Service: while it’s off the general topic, it does raise some interesting questions related to morale and administrative changes.

Here’s the link and below is an excerpt:

Hager left the INFRA program manager position in 2003, and the opening was advertised in February 2004. However, an intervening change in agency policy prohibited the Forest Service from posting interchangeable listings, so the job was advertised strictly under the professional series.

Here are ssome questions this story raised in my mind:

“if it was OK for a long time to advertise in multiple series, why was the policy changed?”

“Does the new policy help or hinder stated goals to get more diverse applicants available on certs?”

And “given the likely gender ratios in administrative compared to technical series, did that policy change have an unintended discriminatory effect?” (not related to this specific case, but worthy of examination on a broader scale)

Note: back when I was working, this cap on number of series caused a great deal of unnecessary work and annoyance. Hopefully, the policy has been changed back and this is now gone. There may be a good reason for this change, but if so, I am not sure that that was ever communicated to the rank and file.

I was also interested in these statements:

That is because she would have us ignore the time period shortly following her protected activity–the precise period when we ordinarily would expect any anger or resentment that her activity engendered in the Forest Service to be at its apex–and instead focus on a period almost two years removed from her protected activity merely because it was at that point that the Forest Service had its first opportunity to retaliate against her by taking a very specific adverse action,” Holmes wrote.

“[O]ur ability to draw … a causal inference from an employer’s adverse action” based on temporal proximity alone “diminishes over time because we may reasonably expect (as a matter of common sense) that the embers of anger or resentment that may have been inflamed by the employee’s protected activity–emotions that would underlie any retaliatory adverse action–would cool over time,” Holmes wrote. Conroy’s proposed approach, which focused on events nearly two years after her protected activity, “stands at odds with this temporal-proximity, causation rationale.”

Would that strong emotions always had that rate and trajectory of reduction! There would probably be fewer armed conflicts if it were that simple.. glad to know that legal organizations don’t have long-term simmering resentments..

Thanks to Matthew for finding this and posting as a comment..

Last September, the United States Forest Service decided not to renew a longstanding contract with Avue Digital Services, a privately held firm in Tacoma that had been hosting the agency’s online jobs database since 2005. The Avue license cost the Forest Service more than $34 million in the past seven years. But the data created from that pricey partnership is now lost to the federal government; under contract, Avue retains proprietary ownership of the position descriptions it generated for the Forest Service. Now the agency faces the incredible task of rewriting potentially 40,000 position descriptions from scratch.

This development recently came to the attention of Andy Stahl, executive director of the Eugene-based nonprofit Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. A friend of Stahl’s from within the Forest Service complained to him of the seeming waste of taxpayer dollars over the years, and of the frustration of having to draft new position descriptions from a blank slate.

“She was upset because she thought that the money spent with Avue had not bought the government anything,” Stahl recalls. “All the work had to be redone.”

Stahl promptly requested copies of the Forest Service’s Avue contract as well as the agency’s payment records to Avue, all of which he later shared with the Independent. The development is particularly galling, he says, because Avue generated much of its data using previously existing Forest Service position descriptions—meaning the agency can’t use those as a template in redrafting either. Stahl wrote a scathing blog post about what he calls the “Avue debacle” in early January.

“The notion that you should…have somebody outside the government writing the document that says what government employees are supposed to do strikes me as bizarre,” Stahl says. “Here at [Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics], I wouldn’t contract with the Sierra Club to write the position descriptions for the people who work here.”

The Creation of Silliness

On the first day, Forest Service employees wrote position descriptions, and they saw that they were good, and that was the evening and the morning of the first day. The second day administrators came and said “you must take your position descriptions and convert them to AVUE. Even though it seems ass-backwards to make people do things to feed a computer program, that is what you must do, or we won’t let you hire anyone.” The third day there was much mourning, weeping and groaning by employees and the plaintive wail of “but is the PD in AVUE?” arose from the valley. On the fourth day employees had accomplished the task.. almost all PDs were in AVUE. There was peace and the buzzing of happy electrons around employees’ computers. On the fifth day, the administrators returned to the valley and said “we’re getting rid of AVUE, and by the way, all the PDs that you labored over, with such great effort so that your head was spinning, even though you know that PDs can’t possibly keep up with the real world of changing responsibilities, retirements and budget cuts, and you know you don’t have the time to keep them up as living documents, you now must not use the ones you developed so painfully, yea, only a short time ago. Because despite the fact that you wrote them, they do not belong to you.”
On the sixth day there was much weeping, groaning, and wailing in the valley again, plus incredulity that their work could belong to someone else. There was some joy that AVUE would be gone; but fear that the replacement would be worse. The optimists argued that it couldn’t be worse; the pessimists were not so sure.

Later that day, Glinda, the Good Administrator, put out an email. “We are searching the network for all documents with “PD” in them. We will date those and provide them to you if they were pre-AVUE; we are also setting up a task team to organize standard PDs, and help people who need it in writing them. Finally, if AVUE actually takes us to court over this issue, we plan to launch a public relations campaign to boycott AVUE products. This is BS and we are not going to take it lying down.” And the people in the valley rested on the seventh day, content that Glinda had their backs.

If I were still an employee, I would like administrative problems that affect multitudes of employees and take lots of taxpayer bucks to have the same scrutiny as forest fires. So for example, this issue would have an outside review, with the idea of not placing blame so much as learning what to do better next time. Perhaps it was something in the procurement regulations, and finding out what happened will save all the Feds beaucoup bucks. This outside review would be posted publicly and perhaps open for comment. To me, if this doesn’t happen, the behavior says “we really don’t care.” Fires are important, but you all, wasting your time on a recurring basis, is not. Even though I am absolutely sure that in their hearts, all the people running the FS do care very much.

I think this is an important topic to discuss. I certainly can’t force people to discuss it. BUT I can repeatedly post things and ask people their opinions.

Here are my hypotheses for why no discussion thus far (except Mike and Larry, thank you!)

1) People in the FS are afraid of posting their concerns publicly. Based on my pre-retirement experience, that is a well-founded fear. So..
2) Recent retirees, and observers, need to have the conversation, IMHO.
3) Retirees don’t want to be seen as criticizing the current people; they would not have wanted to have been criticized by their predecessors (well, and sometimes were, but that’s another story). And there’s the whole “we might want to ask a favor sometime, so we don’t want to tick them off.” That cultural paradigm doesn’t go away just because we retired.
4) Lack of “straight talk” was one of Dialogos’s findings as I recall.

I know that I often disagree with Cindy, with other FS people, and with just about anybody on just about anything. Yet I think we are each richer for having shared our opinions. And I don’t think the FS can improve by “not talking about it” or the ever-popular strategy “complaining behind people’s backs.”

5) So I think we might do better, rather than critiquing Cindy’s paper per se, reflect our own perspective of the FS and what it might do better in terms of morale and leadership.

I look at this like the old story of the blind man and the elephant. Perhaps if we describe the toenail, tail hairs or saliva that we have experienced, we will jointly be able to describe this unique creature, the Forest Service.

To that end, this is Sharon’s perspective. Hopefully, this is the beginning of a discussion. I’d like to focus, as Cindy did, on the National Forest System.

I think, like Cindy did, that one’s background is significant. Most recently, I was the Director of Planning for seven years in the Rocky Mountain Region. To that end, I participated in regional personnel reviews of placements of line and staff officers, and because I was in planning, and troubled projects of various kinds made their way to our office, I got to see disagreements between line officers, and problems between forest staff and district staff, in fact all possible permutations of Ways Things Can Go Wrong. My experience was very different from the 80’s when I worked on forests in Regions 5 and 6.

Here are several thoughts:
1) I’m not sure you can say anything about “the Forest Service”. Different regions have different cultures, as do forests.
2) In my region, “compliance” was sometimes perhaps more like “apparent compliance.” Which is not really compliance at all. On one bus ride back from a Regional Leadership Team, I asked a Deputy Forest Supervisor why they didn’t warn us about things until it was too late. He wisely noted that the Districts don’t necessarily tell the Supervisor’s Office either.
3) Some Forest Supervisors didn’t think that the Regional Forester had legitimate authority to override their land management decisions. According to what I call the “Cult of the Line Officer” the local official is always right. So if you defend your Ranger, and you are the Supervisor, that is good. If you are Regional Forester and you defend your Forest Supervisor, you are good. But if you disagree with the next level down and try to change it, you are losing points with them at an extremely rapid rate. Now, my experience may have to do with the personalities involved, but I just think the real world is much more complex and colorful than the organizational theories- and may be a function of… the personalities involved!
4) I think perhaps we could learn about the culture more by telling our stories and discussing what they mean, and whether others’ observations are similar or different.
5) When I read the below paragraph…

This position power model could further illuminate the conflict between staff and decisionmaker goals found in recent NEPA studies (Stern and Predmore 2011) as well as employees’ growing critique of leadership in the Partnership for Public Service and other surveys. It could explain recent burdensome business procedures handed down by managers who treat each new societal mandate (a set of rules to enforce new society priorities such as civil rights or homeland security) as not only a new rule but a new priority. Overemphasis on line officers’ careers, adherence to rules for their own sake, and the resulting impact on staff effectiveness might contribute to other Forest Service–acknowledged problems such as ineffective and process-heavy NEPA analysis (Bosworth 2001).

I have listened to line officers complain about the new Dilbertian requirements of the Department or the whole USG. It really isn’t the FS who makes most of these decisions, in my experience. Just attend a District Rangers’ Meeting to get the FS line officer perspective.

6) Finally, I think if you want to know what causes the morale problem, you would have to ask people directly in interviews. Then you would have to figure out what could be changed, within the decision space of the FS . I am all for doing this as a public discussion.

It doesn’t seem fair to me to blame “FS leadership” for ideas of the Department or higher levels. If we wanted to experiment with FS leadership, we would move them to the Department of the Interior (controlling for the “Department and higher ideas” variable) and then comparing them to the BLM (which has the same multiple use mission). Just sayin’

Here’s a link to a discussion piece by Cindy Chojnacky titled: Leadership Impact on Forest Service Operations: Intriguing Ideas from Public Administration Theories. This article has raised much interest in FS circles, and some have suggested that this would be a good place for a discussion.

It is from the Journal of Forestry current edition, so SAF member have a hardcopy in their mailbox or house somewhere. The Journal will be printing some responses, so if you are interested in doing that also, here are the requirements. Here is what it says in the Journal about that:

The author, Cindy Chojnacky, may drop in the discussion, but hasn’t made a commitment to do so..so please keep that in mind when we are discussing.

The Journal of Forestry invites readers to submit a response of no more than 1,000 words that reflects on the preceding discussion. Responses need not necessarily be critiques of the ideas presented in the discussion, but may expand upon elements that were not included and should be considered. Responses must be professional and courteous.

All responses will be considered for publication in a future issue. Send responses to [email protected] or Editor, Journal of Forestry, 5400 Grosvenor Lane, Bethesda, MD 20814-2198.

Let the discussion begin!

I don’t believe that I ever heard from anyone whether folks would like me to post “People, Places and Things” every week. It may be that all the people who want it already get it. Please comment below if you would like to Tsee it posted here. (You could also comment on items you find interesting)

Here’s a link to 1-11-2013

We’ve blogged before about employees ranking the Forest Service as one of the worst places in federal government to work. That discussion focused on senior leadership, which ranks 274th out of 290 agencies evaluated.

But, there is one category that ranks even lower. When it comes to “Strategic Management,” Forest Service workers score their agency 286th. Only the benighted Transportation Security Administration, the Cold War relic Voice of America, the 200 obviously disgruntled employees at the Office of Post-secondary Education, and HUD’s apparently clueless Office of Chief Information Officer rank below the Forest Service when it comes to strategic management.

So what does the survey mean by “strategic management?” The survey says it “measures the extent to which employees believe that management ensures they have the necessary skills and abilities to do their jobs, is successful at hiring new employees with the necessary skills to help the organization, and works to achieve the organizational goals with targeted personnel strategies and performance management.” In other words, strategic management is all about Human Resources.

Consider Avue. Avue is a privately-owned subsidiary of Carahsoft Technology Corporation whose gig is leasing computer-based human resource “solutions” to government agencies. In 2005, the Forest Service entered into a contract with Avue to subscribe to its “ADS Modules.” The ADS Modules wrote job announcements and position descriptions. When a Forest Service office wanted to hire a seasonal firefighter, for example, its HR staff would turn to the on-line Avue database to create the job advertisement and when the FS hired the employee, Avue would print out the worker’s duties.

FS employee antipathy towards Avue is exemplified by this comment on a firefighter website.

HALLELUJAH!!!!! The end of AVUE is coming soon!!! Lets do this RIGHT Forest Service! To be honest, if we were required to use a 1972 typewriter and mail the application on one of those Wells Fargo stagecoaches, that would be better than AVUE. Anything would be better than AVUE.

Between 2005 and 2011, the Forest Service paid Avue over $34 million for this service (2.7 MB pdf). Last year, the Forest Service decided not to renew its contract with Avue and return the work of job recruitment and position description writing to government employees.

So, just another example of Bush-era outsourcing that didn’t work so well. But, wait, there’s more.

It turns out that the Forest Service has to re-write position descriptions for its 40,000 employees because the FS doesn’t actually own any of the PDs written during the Avue era. What the Forest Service bought for its $34 million was a subscription license to use Avue output during the contract period only. Avue retains title to the position descriptions themselves and the license agreement bars the Forest Service from using any of the PD content for any purpose, including to crib from while writing its new PDs.

Even more galling is that most of the content of each PD was input originally into the Avue system by Forest Service employees using their pre-Avue PDs. The Forest Service is not allowed use of this original source data either, having forfeited its ownership when it entered the data into the Avue system.

Here’s a link.

So a cursory analysis (more holiday chores call today) suggests that once again, the further you get from the direct supervisor (65% )to “senior leadership” (37%) the less people felt good about their leadership. We had the same kind of thing in our Region’s morale survey before I retired.

But here’s the thing; most people on the ground and many people higher don’t know for sure whether irritating programs and policies come from the “Forest Service leadership” or the Department. I always wanted to follow this survey up with more interviews in depth about what folks wanted leadership to do that they weren’t doing or, more likely, what they want leadership to not do that they are doing, and to parse that out.

‘Cause it could be that, say in some of the more draconian diversity efforts, the Department is chewing on FS leadership about not doing enough, and the folks on the districts think that the FS leadership dreamed up some of the more Dilbertian policies. So it’s easy to say that “leadership should” and much harder to figure out exactly how that would work. I gotta say that I feel a great deal of sympathy for these folks who can be between a rock and a hard place.

In our region’s surveys we also had narratives which I found to be much more illuminating than numbers, at least in terms of what kinds of things might make a difference. You have to listen with the “ears of your heart,” as Benedict of Nursia would say, and you can’t “listen” to percentages. Based on his Rule, I bet he knew a great deal about management and leadership. I bet there is a management book out there somewhere based on his teachings.. anyway, I digress.

I always like to compare the FS to BLM which has the same kind of mission, in the same kinds of places, with many of the same kinds of people.

You can always break it down by demographics as well.

But here’s my check on what I would call “related” agencies:

FS 53.4 down 4.7 (this “down” seems to be of concern in such a large agency)
Rural Development (USDA) 56.5
Farm Services Agency (USDA) 59.5
Solicitor’s Office (INT) 60.4
OGC (USDA) 60.4
Reclamation (INT) 61.3
National Park Service (INT) 61.3
BLM (INT) 61.8

Now, you could analyze to see if, as there appears to be, based on this 10 minute analysis, there is a “USDA” effect. Also, we know many folks who work with both agencies on Service-First and do some interviews. Anyway, that’s what I would do. I would also examine small versus large agencies, as sometimes that might make a difference. So I would take agencies of comparable size and missions and compare across Departments. The problem with this approach is that there is only one large one in USDA. So it seems like the Forest Service is hopelessly confounded with USDA in this kind of analysis.

The Forest Service has a cadre of bright and talented social scientists.. it would be interesting to set some of them to analyze these data in detail (publishing their findings on the internet with opportunities for discussion, including follow-up interviews). Seems like this has been going on long enough that understanding more would be good.

Anyway, what is y’all’s take on these numbers?
Anyway, what do you all see in these figures?

And a less upbeat story…
Here’s the link.

I have pointed out when I was an employee of the Forest Service, that if you do the math and you want to hire more:

People in fire suppression and fuels (lower percentage than 50% are women)
Ethnically diverse people (in natural resources, a lower percentage than 50% are women)
Vets (a lower percentage than 50% are women)

Which I agree are good things to do..if you are not careful you could have many fewer women than in the workforce or the population. Which may if you are not careful lead to a resurgence of the macho culture that we tried to moderate in the 80’s and 90’s. Which makes the workplace less comfortable for women, and so on..

So you have to be conscious of these trade-offs as part of your diversity hiring and Cultural Transformation.

Before I retired I was the first female in an otherwise an unbroken link of testosterone molecules that extended from my boss to the President of the United States. From my boss (black male) to his boss (Hispanic male) to the Chief (white male) to the Undersecretary (white male) assisted by Deputy Undersecretary (Native American male) to the Secretary (white male) to the President (black male) assisted by Vice-President (white male). We had two female forest supervisors on 11 forests. My statement when I looked at the numbers tended to go along the lines of “I can’t believe this is 2012.”

I worked in timber management on the neighboring Eldorado from 88 to 91, twenty years ago, and here is someone in timber on the Plumas today. My experience is that there is something deeper than training will fix, not measured in EEO complaints, and probably addressed more comprehensively and openly than through individual complaints or class actions.

I recommend listening to the mp3 of Elaine Vercruysse (on the left sidebar), one Forest Service employee who is filing a discrimination class complaint. One thing she says is that things used to be better 20 years ago, and that on forests, numbers are way down.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is tackling a history of discrimination with more training and accountability as part of a cultural transformation program. But some current and former USDA employees say they’re not seeing cultural changes, and sex discrimination is still prominent within the agency.

Specifically, female employees in Region 5 of the Forest Service are objecting to the disparity between how men and women are hired and promoted. The employees also point to hostile workplace conditions, where, in some cases, egregious sexual harassment.

“We want to see more women get the opportunities they deserve, getting promotions … getting jobs and getting paid for their skills and their experience level commensurate to the men,” said Elaine Vercruysse, a logging systems planner with the Plumas National Forest in an exclusive interview with Federal News Radio.

In my experience, in other regions there might not be as much overtly jerky behavior, as a pervasive questioning of folks who are not Good Old Boys (even Diverse Good Old Boys) that may harken back to a lack of acceptance of what leadership without testosterone can look like.

If we went back to my example of “currently no women Station Directors” and you asked someone, they might say “females didn’t work out” and “there are none in the pipeline” or the popular “all the good ones move to the National Forest System.” To which I would reply “I think this is a problem, do you?” “have you asked folks why they aren’t in the pipeline?” “could you hire some coaches or others to help root out people with undesirable traits and encourage those with desirable traits?” “have you ever asked the ones who moved to NFS why they did?”

I suspect this is not the last we’ll hear of this.