Over the last twenty years, I’ve given numerous presentations on preparing for competitions in the federal public service (aka my HR guide called Be The Duck!). Lately, it is less of a presentation and more of an “Ask me anything (AMA)”-type format. I did one a few years ago with Health Canada, and they invited me back again this year as a joint presentation organized between Health Canada and PHAC, plus various friendly departments around town. My presentation was called Career Compass: Navigating your career in the public service, and I knew some of the Qs in advance. I grouped … Continue reading →

As you can see on the PolyWogg.ca site, I have a PolyWogg Guide to HR competitions in the Canadian Federal Government. I cheekily called it Be the Duck as an extended metaphor, and I wanted something similar for another book in the same vein about being a manager. So this week’s FlashForwardFriday project is my future guide on being a manager, called Be the SheepDog: Managing from the Middle. I went with the idea of a sheepdog rounding up sheep. It’s cutesy, a bit whimsical, maybe, and the dog is cute. The challenge is to know what to cover in … Continue reading →

Last week, I mentioned that I would start doing FlashForwardFriday (FFF) where I will talk about upcoming projects. At the time, I outlined my plans for an introduction to astronomy. This week, I’m revisiting my first, only and original guide, Be the Duck: Succeeding in Canadian Federal Government Competitions. The current version The short version of the long history is that, way back in 2004 or so, a friend asked me to present to a bunch of new, young civil servants on how to prepare for competitions. Two weeks later, I got an email from someone asking me about my … Continue reading →

My biggest output to date is my HR guide, in all its forms, going back to 2004 or so. I’m happy people like it, the price doesn’t hurt ($0, downloadable PDF with no friction to access), and there is limited competition in a narrow niche. But I have plans for other guides, and to that end, I’ve been working on some cover pages for the books to serve as inspiration. My list of planned books is growing, though, and I have decided to start working on some of them before I retire instead of waiting. HR-related books First and foremost, … Continue reading →

For those of you who have read my PolyWogg guide for competitions, you know that I have the general “slogan” of “Be the Duck!”. The idea being of course that if a manager wants to hire a duck, then your best chance to get hired is to tell them you’re a duck. Not someone who speaks Duck, or who knows Ducks, or who has worked with Ducks, but rather that you are indeed a duck. Preferably the best dang duck they’ve ever seen. But definitely you want to say “I’m a duck”. I developed the cover long before I had … Continue reading →

I think I’ve mentioned more than once (hah!) that I think in frameworks. It’s one of the reasons why I wrote my HR guide. I have a framework that works for me, it makes sense to me. More importantly, it lets me make sense of the HR world AND to be able to communicate that approach to others in a way that often resonates with them and let’s them understand it. I’m not the smartest guy in the room. I don’t have the deepest insights. I’m not the most experienced with the most profound understanding of a topic. But I … Continue reading →

If you read through my PolyWogg HR guide, Be the Duck, you know that the general approach to a federal government competition looks like this: That is the whole process start to finish, generally speaking, for a fully-assessed pool. By contrast, a partially-assessed pool would be if they stop / pause their process any time before Step 6 (the last assessment phase before language testing). Let’s look at an example Let’s assume someone wants to hire three junior analysts and they have nine very basic common elements: Now let’s assume that there are three OTHER knowledge elements, as if there … Continue reading →

I received a really interesting question from a commenter who wanted to know how to handle a specific type of element in an interview process. Let’s say the interview is evaluating you on four elements A, B, C and D, with perhaps D being communications. In a traditional interview process, and the default of most managers, they’ll ask you three questions: And then they’ll grade D for communications on how you did across all three questions. Sometimes they’ll give you a question and evaluate your Comms only on that question, but most do a global score for Comms. But today’s … Continue reading →

I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to do some Friday Questions, and there is a really persistent question that people in non-managerial positions have trouble wrapping their heads around. In the shortest form, someone wants to go on an assignment, and their boss said no. They think it’s mean of their boss, and they want to know why the person is such a jerk. Even some inexperienced managers frequently want to say, “Well, of course, you should say yes. Holding people back is just short-sighted”. If that is your frame, it DOES appear to be mean … Continue reading →

Someone on Reddit asked this question this past week, and it is a great question because it brings in a combination of culture, classification, and delegation authorities. I’ve decided to use it for my first Friday Question for HR issues in the federal government. The question is often answered with an easy response — no — but not quite for the reasons most people assume. And when you drill down, the answer is actually wrong. The question actually has three separate components. A. Can a PM report to an EC? If you ask the question of classification experts, you will … Continue reading →

When people ask me about HR interviews for government, my answer is pretty standard. As per the guide, all interview questions are tied to the statement of merit criteria. And, in almost all cases, that means they are focusing on Experiences, Knowledge, Abilities, or Personal Suitability. Seems relatively straightforward, right? Now, if you add in the fact that your cover letter / initial screening deals with experience, and a written exam normally knocks off most knowledge if there was a knowledge component identified at all, then the interview becomes more about abilities or personal suitability. In those instances, the popular … Continue reading →

This past week, I had the opportunity to speak to the Young Professionals Network at Health Canada about HR processes and what happens after a pool is established. Earlier sessions had already covered how to get into the public service and how to prepare and participate in various processes. There were a LOT of questions provided before the session and even more posted in the chat during the event, so I offered to try and do a blog response for some of the pieces I didn’t get to during the event or where I didn’t have the luxury to go … Continue reading →

Yep, I started with a trilogy and ended up with 9 posts. A few people have said, “What if I miss one?”. I don’t think of that as a normal risk per se, but sure, I can do a single post with all nine linked… Related posts: WFH vs. RTW, part 6: If management is left to their own devices WFH vs. RTW, part 7: No black swans required WFH vs. RTW, part 4: It’s not about Subway Stargazing 2019, outing #22 – Outing to the AstroPontiac Observatory

When it comes to figuring out the way forward, we’re pretty much at showtime. In September, departments started mandating RTW options, “forcing” people into the office as it is pitched by employees and unions. Some people want to argue whether the government as the employer has the right to make the decision unilaterally. Others want to argue that the employer has consulted with employees on the best way forward and many have said RTW is a good thing that offers benefits that WFH don’t. They did pilots, and the people have spoken! Others want to argue that it isn’t safe … Continue reading →

My normal schtick is description. I explain why something is like it is, why seemingly opaque decisions or processes are not as dense as people might think. Other than sharing tips and tricks in my HR guide, I rarely try to tell people to do x or y. I’ve been a bit more directive on some of these topics, maybe a bit more rant-y. But, today, I have a different goal. I want to tell people what to do if they want WFH as a continued option for the future and not as a slowly diminishing option until everyone is … Continue reading →

When I started this series of posts two weeks ago, it was with the intent simply to share some views on what’s going on for preparations around Return to Work options in the federal government. I’d been seeing a bunch of stuff online where people were saying, “Hey management is a bunch of idiots, everything is working fine, blah blah blah”, and while that may be an employee/bottom-up view, it is NOT what management is seeing looking “down”. While people in the past might have complained about stuff if they were actually AT work to colleagues, etc., the growth of … Continue reading →

I’ve been struggling to figure out how to organize this post, ever since I started the first one in the series. I want to talk about what departments are doing, but I don’t want it to be some sort of inventory. That’s not why I’m writing. I don’t care if Fisheries is doing one thing and Environment is doing another. I don’t care if one person reports that Transport is doing something and all heck breaks loose arguing it’s either not what someone else heard or it’s not the right thing to do or they spelled cluster truck wrong. But … Continue reading →

So let’s recap my series so far and reorder the elements a bit. Hardly revolutionary, but decisions about RTW will be taken in a larger context: Pre-pandemic “norms” that assumed everyone was working “in the office” but that even face-to-face interactions were not enough, transactions and communications were not enough, you still needed intentional effort to make proper connections; Early pandemic transitioning to WFH and rolling out of all the cyber tools we take for granted now, while managers have been left to mostly “muddle through” too; Throughout the pandemic, public servants have been working with their paycheques intact, and … Continue reading →

If you’re reading this, you’re probably in the public service (not necessarily federal, but mostly), and unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will have heard the story about the health townhall meeting where one of the executives suggested that going back into the office was a good thing because you could go to Subway for lunch and support local business. There are lots of people who argue there was more to it, and memes blew up about Subway-gate, with many of them coming from people who weren’t even in the room nor work in the same department. It … Continue reading →

For all the departments looking to have people back in the office, they frequently will use the phrase, “So, yeah, we’re looking to have people back in the office at least some of the time because the research shows that it’s better.” And when they say it, most people listening think it is complete bullsh**. Particularly EC policy wonks who see and hear that phrase every day from stakeholder groups, academics, think tanks, lobby groups, Joe who works at the corner deli. Everyone. And our job is to look at their evidence. “Really, you have research? Well, let’s see that … Continue reading →

In the world of performance measurement, a friend and I have a cynical joke between us that it seems like every year is a baseline year for some programs…if you’re always moving the baseline, there’s never anything to measure or report other than activities undertaken. There’s no standard for success. When it comes to the question of working from home, any year up to the end of 2019 would have been a baseline year, and there is still not much evidence of a performance standard for success. What did it look like? If you looked around the government on January … Continue reading →

As everyone has seen over the last 2.5 years, every business entity has had to deal with the labour organization aspects of the pandemic. Separate from all the labour and health and safety issues, or supply-chain issues, one of the most pervasive questions has simply been one of location. Could employees work from home or did they need to return to work at a specified location? In the private-sector goods and services world, many of those business decisions were obvious. For example, fast-food restaurants in set locations needed employees to be on-site to work. It’s hard to flip a burger … Continue reading →

If anyone has read my HR guide, you already know that there are notices of appointments that go up on the Jobs.gc.ca portal. When it is a non-advertised appointment, and it says promotion, you really have almost no idea why the person is being promoted. It just says “non-advertised” and “promotion”. Common rationales for non-advertised appointments From a process perspective, a non-advertised appointment is a perfectly valid tool to be used by any manager. The requirement isn’t to assess everyone everywhere in the world for the position, nor even to choose the best candidate available, it’s to demonstrate that the … Continue reading →

Normally when I write about HR, I do so as a public servant talking to other public servants on how to prepare for competitions. I might draw on my own experiences competing or running processes from the other side of the table. But rarely do I write as simply a manager talking about my job. Today, I’m frustrated with the tools available to me as a manager for a specific type of non-advertised appointment process. I apologize for the upfront context, but it takes a bit to get us to where the problem comes up. If you already know all … Continue reading →

For those who work in government, almost universally around the globe, the workforce response to the pandemic was pretty much the same. Everybody pivoted to work from home (WFH). And as time goes on, people are generally coming to the conclusion that WFH was not as terrible as everybody used to think, the current “normal” is generally working in many if not most areas, and so as people discuss how to “build back better” (BBB), there is a general informal consensus that BBB means WFH is now permanent. In short, while WFH started as an accidental outcome of the pandemic, … Continue reading →