Review targets public service executives
KATHRYN MAY
OTTAWA CITIZEN
12 January 2014
OTTAWA — The Conservative government is planning a review of the work of the nearly 7,000 executives in Canada’s public service that could change the structure of the senior ranks and affect their total compensation.
Treasury Board offered no details on the two-part review that executives say is in the works, but the government is hiring consultants to come up with proposals to “modernize” the way executives are organized and classified in the public service.
Classification and job evaluation are directly linked to how jobs are organized and employees are compensated and a request for proposal issued by Treasury Board suggests the review could have a major impact on the entire public service.
“The proposed solution for job evaluation for the EX Group has the potential to significantly impact senior management structures and positions in the (core public service) and will likely influence other federal public service job evaluation methodologies, systems and tools. It may also lead to recommendations regarding total compensation of executives,” said the request.
The Conservatives have long felt the public service is top-heavy with too many executives. The executive cadre grew twice the pace of the public service and ballooned nearly 70 per cent after the numbers bottomed out during the Liberals downsizing in the 1990s.
Some speculate whether the review could resurrect previous proposals to de-layer and collapse the five levels of executives into three. There are now five levels of executives from EX 1, entry level, to Ex 5, a senior assistant deputy minister.
“There has been a huge growth in all levels and in a federal department today … there are more layers of executives between the working level and the deputy minister than ever before and lot of that has happened in the past six years, said David Zussman, the Jarislowsky Chair on Management in the Public Sector at the University of Ottawa.
Andrew Graham, a professor at Queen’s University and former president of the Association of Professional Executives of the Public Service of Canada (APEX), said options discussed in the past included merging EX 4s and EX 5s, as well as EX 2 and 3s, and leaving the EX 1 group. Another called for collapsing Ex 1 and 2 in one group, EX 3 and 4 in another and leaving EX 5.
Treasury Board has been promising classification and job evaluation reform since the colossal failure of the Universal Classification Standard in 2003 when Treasury Board abandoned the scheme after spending years and millions of dollars.
A decade later, new standards have been introduced for only about 10 per cent of the public service, such as economists, border guards and foreign service officers. Many are still working in jobs with standards that predate computers and mobile phones. The classification and evaluation methodology or executives was last updated in the 1990s.
David Orfald of the Public Service Alliance of Canada said it seems unfair that executives are jumping the queue when many jobs are still classified using much older standards.
“It looks to me like they are fast-tracking executives and taking care of themselves before the other groups. Their current methodology has been in place since the 1990s while among the other groups, the vast majority go back to 1967 or 1972.”
The Conservatives signalled in the last budget that all human resource management practices are the table for review. Similarly, the blue-chip advisory committee on the public service that has the ear of Prime Minister Stephen Harper called for a new “employment model” to replace a 40-year-old labour relations regime, job classification system and pay and benefits scheme that were built in an “industrial era” when public servants largely performed “standardized repetitive work.”
The nature of work has changed dramatically since then. The public service is now dominated by university-educated knowledge workers who need tools to work and manage in the digital age.
The growth of executives was driven by a variety of factors. The jobs of public servants, along with the policy and management issues they wrestle with, are more complicated. Changing technology, the push for transparency, 24-hour media scrutiny, a growing posse of parliamentary watchdogs and the reforms of the Federal Accountability Act have all added layers to the cost and management of public servants.
But Graham said the review could be a piece of the government’s plan for executives. He argued executives have been awaiting direction since the government mothballed the Stephenson committee, which advised Treasury Board on how to retain, manage and pay executives.
The advisory committee was created in the late 1990s after the Liberals’ downsizing and a six-year wage freeze created such a gap between the private and public sectors that the government feared an unprecedented flight of top talent for better-paying jobs. That mass exodus never materialized.
For years, the committee’s main strategy for keeping and attracting executives was to ensure entry level executives or EX 1s were paid similar to those in the private sector. It recognized the government couldn’t match the rich compensation packages of private sector executives so it recommended eliminating the gap at the entry level and banked that once public servants were on the management track that they would stay.
Treasury Board President Tony Clement has said he is re-evaluating the advisory committee’s mandate and wants more focus on “constraining costs” than retaining executives.
Graham said Clement could want a smaller executive cadre, which could mean moving junior executives to a new senior middle management or supervisory management group. Former Ontario Premier Mike Harris adopted this model when he “took control of the executive,” slashing the number of executives, and jacking up their pay with record increases, said Graham.
A new senior management group, however, would lead to showdown with unions because employees outside the executive ranks are largely unionized and the government would likely want senior manages excluded from collective bargaining.
Graham said there’s long been a sense that the EX-1 group was too big and content of the job watered down over the years so it was no longer a real executive position. He said some argue promotions into management became a “retention tool” to keep professionals when they reached the top of their pay scale.
Along with the nature of work, Graham said executives are facing a change in their traditional role as the top policy advisers to government. Today, they are among many sources of policy advice for the government which he said needs a mix of talent, including “policy managers” who can assess all advice and implement whatever the government decides to do.
The government has been using since the 1990s the Hay plan or methodology, which also allows comparisons to the private sector. By 2000, KPMG was hired to examine whether the Hay method suited the needs of the public service. KPMG concluded the Hay method met all the requirements except for neutrality and flexibility but was still the best-suited. One of KPMG’s recommendations was to reduce the number of executive levels to three.
In its request for proposal, the government asked consultants for a sweeping review of evaluation methodologies in other government agencies, as well as those used by provinces, crown corporations, some private sector and not-for-profit organizations and public sector organizations in Britain, the United States, Australia and two other Commonwealth countries.
It also wants a review of all the off-the-shelf software used by large employers with more than 10,000 employees. The consultants final report and proposal is expected later this year.
