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1. I want to talk about nearly constant change as a reaction to nearly constant change, in the context of a Federal government agency. What I say will be largely anecdotal & experiential as someone retired from @DeptofDefense civilian service after over 30 years.
1. I want to talk about nearly constant change as a reaction to nearly constant change, in the context of a Federal government agency. What I say will be largely anecdotal & experiential as someone retired from @DeptofDefense civilian service after over 30 years.
2. The agency for which I worked faced almost constant difficulties with hiring, retention, and promotion. Reagan-era hiring boosts, which came on very soon after I started there, produced problems in terms of the rewards system at my agency.
3. Quite simply put, there was hardly ever a "promotion cycle" to occur when we would not hear from our management that there just weren't enough promotions (raises in pay, not necessarily changes in position or duties) to go around.
4. Based on my performance trends in my early career, I was told I needed to look for work that lit a fire under me. I found that work in a change of career field, an opportunity that did not reveal itself to me until I did extensive work looking for it.
5. The promotion eligibility hit I took (management said I would) was offset by the tenfold boost in my productivity. But the whole situation was complicated by the nearly simultaneous arrival, at the agency level, of an Era of Change.
6. Many civilian technical direct hires, in all of the agency's technical disciplines, were looking for a career advancement strategy that did not require transitioning to a management position in order to achieve promotion to higher grade levels.
7. A Technical Track program had come into existence, but there was much debate as to whether it made technical advancement better - higher grades were still going to those who gave up their slide rules & put on suits. Also, upper management told us Tech Track was *their* tool.
8. So once my career change had made me, as I said, a tenfold better worker, the circumstance of the new millennium was now imminent, and leadership was looking at the technical worker problem from the angle of how to make our agency ready for the 21st Century.
9. An internal social media network engaged the workforce. I used various "intranet" media to try to engage management about what concerned me most. I became infamous for being somewhat outspoken - to my professional detriment, i suppose - but it did not really hurt my work.
10. Top leadership also attempted to use the intranet social applications to engage the workforce in planning for the future. "Future Day" was touted as a full day of setting aside one's regular duties to get together, in person and online, to share ideas on how to change.
11. I was not the only one who was, though fully involved in Future Day activities and pointed in my questions, still skeptical about what good it would do. And then came a new top-level leader who implemented "100 Days of Change."
12. "100 Days of Change" would be a mixture of action and engagement, again using live events and internal social media, to spark discussions but also to let the workforce know that top leadership wanted to make things right.
13. The "100 Days of Change" strategy made people definitely sit up and take notice. The top-level leader of our agency got his face on the cover of a newspaper of national renown, which interviewed him extensively about his courageous & groundbreaking efforts to make us better.
14. We who worked in technical fields saw no decrease in our trials and advancement difficulties from any of this. Frequent reorganizations took productive work right out from under some of us. Promotions were even more scarce than they had been before these programs.
15. Y2K arrived and found us more than ready. (9/11/2001 would later find us less than ready.) And a huge takeaway from "100 Days of Change" was a set of statements from agency leadership that they were trying, not to better compensate technical civilians, but to phase them out.
16. The era of the career civil servant in a technical field was over, we were told. @DeptofDefense would depend more on contractors. Many of my brilliant and talented friends did walk out the door and come right back in wearing a contractor's identification.
17. I saw no pay raises at all for what I had done to boost my work performance tenfold. Our agency was caught flatfooted by tragic historical events. And I've read in the news that the Reorganization Tango there has not stopped.
18. All of these plans and programs - which I saw as expensive and ultimately almost fruitless - took place under administrations of both of the Top Two parties. All of the bowing and scraping before Congress, the promotion of sycophants only, was on the taxpayer's dime.
19. It was a deep, dark, close look - one that hurt me in a practical sense - at government waste and inefficiency perpetuating itself while ostensibly being programs, policies, and procedures to get rid of said waste and inefficiency.
20. It seems even then, long before the @realDonaldTrump and extremist @GOP leadership years, what my agency and the @DeptofDefense leadership most wanted was, not productivity, but loyalty to the whims of the powerful pulling their strings.
