A guide for the public service curious
Michael Wernick
Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management
University of Ottawa
Recently a lot of attention has been paid to the aggregate size of the federal government workforce, which has grown considerably over the past decade. I have always found that any “macro” statements that begin “the public service……” are usually too general and mask many of the most important “micro” dynamics within the public service. In reality, there are a number of fault lines and seams that are familiar to those of us who have worked within the federal service and have been engaged in efforts to improve its effectiveness. What follows lays out nine of them, with no attempt to rank them.
ORGANIZATIONS AND ENTITIES
For some purposes it is useful to think about the public service in terms of the 300+ organizations into which it is sorted. There is a clear line of accountability of each organization to Parliament through an answerable Minister. There is also a chain of accountability for finances and human resources that runs through Deputy Ministers and their equivalents. These lines are referred to as “vertical” accountability.
You will find a lot of information about organizations in the plans and reports tabled in Parliament every year, but also in tools like GCInfobase, and in the regular Public Service Employment Survey. To some extent each organization, and the sub-units within them, develops its own track record and its own culture. But thinking of the public service only as the summation of these organizations is far from the only way.
HEADQUARTERS AND REGIONS
About 60 percent the of the federal public service is located away from the National Capital Region. With a few notable exceptions the “HQ functions” are in Ottawa-Gatineau. HQ usually includes the most senior leadership and the central units for policy, personnel and finances. HQ has proximity to the Minister and Minister’s staff and to the web of other federal departments. “Regions” are mostly about service delivery, whether the service is individual benefits, application-based funding programs, regulatory and adjudicative bodies, or direct front line services such as parks, border crossings, prisons or nursing stations in First Nations communities.
The ongoing dynamic within the public service is how best to connect the two: to bring regional managers and staff into the shaping of policy making and into management decision making; to harness the intelligence gathering and feedback they can provide as eyes and ears of the organization; and to make HQ managers more alert to implementation issues and regional sensibilities. Large departments wrestle with the best way to organize “internal services” such as human resources and finances. A wide range of approaches to close this seam have been tried by individual departments and by the system as a whole.
POLICY AND OPERATIONS
Overlapping with the geographic seam is an ongoing dynamic between the community across the public service that focuses on “policy” and the much larger community that delivers operations and services. The policy people are developing proposals to Cabinet, bills for Parliament and submissions to Treasury Board to modify policies and programs or create entirely new ones. A closely related community is tracking, auditing and evaluating policies and programs and generating a lot of reporting. These public servants connect across departments and spend a lot of time working with the “central agencies” (Finance, Treasury Board, Privy Council Office). They work with Ministers’ staff and the supply chain of policy ideas outside of government. The operations people are working on implementing the most recent changes to policies and management directives and keeping up with the flow of cases, applications and files, as well as meeting constant reporting requirements.
The ongoing dynamic is that the operations community often feels unseen and unheard until something has gone wrong and the roving eye of “the centre” focuses on them to practice “crisis management”. The policy community sometimes sees the operations community as change resistant and insensitive to bigger context and strategy. An old grievance, that has a lot of merit, is that the job classification system is more generous to the policy community and undervalues operations and delivery. There have been efforts over the years to create councils and bodies that bring together the federal public servants that work in each geographic region.
JOB SECURITY CASTES
The federal workforce includes three distinct “castes” when it comes down to job security and vulnerability during periods of downsizing. The castes are strongly correlated to age.
The largest community, historically a fairly stable 80 percent of the total workforce, are “indeterminate” which is a euphemism for quasi-permanent. They skew older and are covered by legislation that makes them difficult to fire. They are also covered and protected by labour relations agreements and policies that invoke a complicated algorithm for layoffs -here the euphemism is “workforce adjustment policy”.
The other community is comprised largely of “term” employees, hired for a fixed duration as well as short term “causal” and “seasonal” jobs. The term employees skew younger and less senior. From the system’s point of view it makes sense to have a mix of permanent and temporary staff based to adapt to the ebb and flow of workloads. From the individual employee’s perspective there is a world of difference. Over time, younger term employees sometimes become a stable underclass living with stressful uncertainty about future income. They are vulnerable to bad bosses who control the renewal of their appointments. They tend to migrate and roam in search of a stable indeterminate job, contributing to churn.
There is actually a third caste, sometimes referred to as a shadow public service, made up of external contractors who are outside the public service but live off piece work from governments in fields such as translation, program evaluation, technology and management consulting. Many of them are former public servants.
PROFESSIONS, TRADES AND COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
There are many professions and trades that are spread across the 300+ organizations (e.g. lawyers, scientists, accountants, auditors, human resources, communications, technologists). Some are organized into about 70 specific occupational groups for the purposes of collective bargaining with a range of bargaining units and there is a much larger number of categories and sub-categories that complicate the pay system. The full matrix allows comparison of occupational structures with other levels of government and the private sector
For other purposes it can be useful to look at communities of practice. There have been successful efforts to them bring together for learning events and professional developments. There is usually an ongoing linkage to the evolving practices and standards of accreditation of their professions and sometimes there is a link to a national body that also takes in provincial and municipal public servants. Some of the organizations also pursue advocacy and representation linked to workplace policies and conditions of employment (federal lawyers, foreign service officers, financial officers).
Examples of the larger communities include the Community of Federal Regulators, the Communications Community Office, the Policy Community, a Data Science Network. Other less formal affinity groups have been self-organizing through social media tools, including GCCollab, Facebook and Reddit.
PLACE BASED, HYBRID AND REMOTE WORK
A lot of attention has gone to the debates around place of work. There was always a small segment of the public service who took up “remote work” arrangements. Then the pandemic sharply accelerated the introduction of convenient platforms for meetings and document sharing that open up options for many more public servants to perform tasks from a home office. Like many employers, the public service has struggled to find the right approach to blending “work from home” and “return to office” and there are mixed and often strongly held views among the public servants for whom “hybrid work” is an option.
Lost in the noise are the many public servants who never had that option and have to go to specific workplaces. They may work in laboratories, prisons, parks, museums, border crossings, military bases, police detachments, coast guard vessels, nursing stations, or be the key tech support workers within large organizations, or people who work with highly classified information. Others go out to work in the community: inspectors, frontline physical service counters, outreach and consultation jobs, trade and investment promotion, etc.
This seam along workplace lines will show up in future if there are large scale layoffs. Part of the layoff algorithm is the idea of a “reasonable job offer”, which in the past was always attached to setting a geographic radius from the job being terminated. It is far from clear how this will work now that hybrid and remote work are more realistic options.
SENIOR MANAGEMENT, MIDDLE MANAGEMENT AND THE REST
Level of authority is another important seam in a system that is hierarchical. During times of stress, union leaders adopt language that treats “management” as some sort of adversary, rather than fellow public servants. For labour relations purposes most, but not all, of the “excluded” positions that have been removed from the union and not allowed to strike are “managers”. The rest are workers whose functions are deemed to be essential.
On closer examination the seams based on authority are more complicated.
The most senior leaders are executive appointments – Canada calls them “GICs” or Governor in Council appointments because they are recommended to and signed off by the Governor General. GICs fall outside most, but not all, of the legislation that covers the rest of the public service. Generally, these are Deputy Ministers and the heads and CEOs of Crown Corporations, agencies and tribunals.
Other common usages of “senior” tend to also include all “executives”. These are not GIC appointees but instead they are generally part of the EX occupational group, which has its own human resource system and learning support. It has its own advocacy and community building group, the Association of Professional Executives of the Public Service of Canada – APEX.
Both the GICs and the EXs are eligible for performance pay, usually shorthanded as “bonuses”. Their job security is far more limited than unionized indeterminate employees, but in practice terminations are infrequent for both.
In some contexts, the lower ranks of what is currently a five-tier executive group are lumped together with the higher rungs of other occupational groups under the label “middle management”. Some of these non-executive managers are considered “front line supervisors” if they have direct responsibility for a single team with no intermediaries. For the most part they can’t strike. There is also a representative group for middle managers – the National Managers Community. What makes someone a manager is that not just that they supervise team and direct workflows, but that they exercise some authorities in financial and human resource management that have been delegated to them from higher up the hierarchy.
The periodic survey of the public service asks several questions about how employees see “senior management” or “my supervisor”. The mood and the perceptions have shifted over the years and across organizations.
DIVERSITY OF DIVERSITIES
In many contexts federal public servants are seen, or see themselves, in terms of identity groups. Demographic analysis can often be useful in looking at the public service.
One seam has been language. Since the first-generation Official Languages Act of 1969, and through its updates in 1988 and 2023, practices regarding language of service and language of work have evolved.
Since 1986 the federal government has also pursued another dimension of inclusion through “employment equity”. So, in some contexts, public servants may be viewed in terms of language and in others they may be members of the four designated equity seeking groups: women, persons with disabilities, Aboriginal peoples and “visible minorities”.
There has been pressure to update the employment equity law and its categories but as of August 2024, the government hasn’t acted. There has always been a degree of tension around requirements for some positions to be filled by people with skills in both official languages, especially the management positions described earlier. On the other hand, for francophone Canadians the ability to work and to be supervised in their own first language is an important part of inclusion. Public servants who speak languages other than English or French often want to see greater recognition of this as an asset in selection and promotion processes.
In addition to groups centred on language, or the original four employment equity categories, other identity-based advocacy and community building groups have emerged, often self-organizing on social media. These include a Federal Youth Network, a Black Employee Network, a Jewish Public Servants Network, a Network for Neurodivergent Public Servants, a Muslim Federal Employees Network, a Network of Asian Federal Employees, and more.
Since 2017 legislation and policies have been updated to implement new approaches to gender identity and gender expression. However, “women” are still a relevant category for the older employment equity and pay equity legislation. They currently comprise about 56 percent of the federal public service, about half of the executives and about 60 percent of new hires.
GENERATIONS AND AGE
In some contexts, age matters. When combined with cumulative work experience age creates “seniority” for the accumulation of vacation and sick leave. The unions want it to play a bigger role in the algorithm for layoffs, which may not go over well with their younger members the next time downsizing hits.
Some observers have attempted to sort the public service by broad generational categories: boomers, Gen X, millennials, GenZ and so on. They argue there are meaningful generational differences in values, priorities, expectations, and behaviours that cause tensions around workplace policies and between supervisors and their teams. It is posited that these generations, because of their different cumulative life experiences, have different relationships with technology, and even different expectations about career and work.
This isn’t easy to measure and prove. The most prominent example would be the discussions around hybrid work following the pandemic and leading up to the strike in early 2023. It was asserted at the time that more stringent requirements to attend at workplaces rather than online would make the public service less attractive to younger cohorts, but this doesn’t appear to have shown up yet in departure data.
The other area where it is asserted that generational expectations are different is the use of social media, particularly whether it is appropriate for public servants to be commenting on open platforms on government decisions or overtly partisan politics. This is likely to be discussed further as the next federal election draws closer.
IMPLICATIONS OF THIS COMPLEXITY FOR CHANGE MANAGEMENT
There will no doubt be continued attention to the aggregate size of the federal public service workforce and the overall cost of wages, benefits and pensions. The preceding walk through nine seams within the public service is intended to make a couple of simple points:
- A “macro” perspective on the public service is enriched by a “micro” perspective and some understanding of the internal complexity
- These seams turn out to be very important in day-to-day management of the public service and in any efforts to increase its effectiveness
The next time you read or hear a sweeping general statement about the federal public service, keep this field guide in mind.