Tag Archives: bureaucracy

It’s just policy…

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Policy
–noun, plural -cies.
A definite course of action adopted for the sake of expediency, facility, etc.: We have a new company policy.

Most of my professional life, I’ve been a policy guy in some shape, form, or fashion whether it’s writing, interpreting, or ignoring said policies. As a policy guy, it’s part of my mission in life to point out the general foibles of those who set policy… Even (and perhaps especially) when those policies are promulgated by those with whom I share bonds of affinity, friendship, and respect. Though it’s sometimes harder to poke the people you like with a stick, that mostly just means that it’s really worth doing.

As a matter of policy, my employer has decided that supervisory personnel are not allowed to work at locations other than at their assigned duty location (i.e. from home, a telework center, etc). Notwithstanding the fact that somewhere north of 60% of all personnel work somewhere other than the “corporate headquarters” and most of us supervise people who are geographically dispersed, the general belief is that you can’t manage what you can’t see. I have philosophical differences with this position, but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with such a policy per se.

The challenge comes when, for unforeseeable reasons, the message goes forth that all personnel, including supervisors, will telework until such time as they are directed to report to the office. Seems all well and good from the outside, but the malcontent in me has a compulsion to poke at it just a bit further. The message that was really sent here is that “we know you’re capable of doing your job from a remote location and that’s what you’re going to do when it’s convenient for us… But don’t ask to do it when it’s convenient for you.”

I don’t have any moral qualms with hypocrisy and I certainly don’t have issues with working from home. I’m better able to focus on writing and reading when I’m not interrupted by “walkups” or people yelling across the room a couple of times an hour… And as we all know from our previous reading, a productive Jeff tends to be a happy Jeff. Still, it would be nice to do it occasionally when it helped me meet some of my own requirements rather than being marks on a tally sheet showing how quickly we got everyone “back to work.”

I’m just sayin’.

Well, there’s your problem…

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One of the biggest challenges of being young and ambitious and employed by the federal government all at the same time is that due to it effectively being a closed system, the ranks are filled with crusty old bastards who are blocking your route to plum assignments. They’ve been retired in place for years now and have no intention of leaving. For the generation coming up through the ranks, these are nothing so much as roadblocks, whose skill sets and mentality would be better suited for the government of 1967 than that of 2007. I’m not suggesting here that there should be a mandatory retirement age, just that there reaches a point where it’s no longer in the best interest of the government to keep these people on the payroll. In fact, I don’t know why you would reach 40 years of service and actually still want to hang around. Personally, I’m planning on playing a hell of a lot of golf by that stage of the game.

Of course the reality is that the federal bureaucracy is, at some unspoken level, a make work program whose personnel system has an unfortunate tendency to softly discourage young employees from turning a job into a career. When there is no clear path to advancement or even lateral transfer into a more attractive position, what incentive does a mid-level 20-something employee have to stay the course? Why would they wait, possibly for years, for a position or a promotion that no one can guarantee? Organizational loyalty is a great thing, but it has to work both ways. If you can’t reward the hard work and dedication of the Young Turks who designed and helped build the organization, they have to look to other opportunities and to their own future. Our generation isn’t one to sit around and “pay dues” just because that’s what our parent’s generation did.

The time has come to distribute the spoils of the transition we helped carry out. Historically, though, revolutions have a bad habit of eating their own young – just ask Robespierre or Marat. I’d recommend we all stay out of the tub for a while, just to be on the safe side of things.

Gloria In Excelsis Deo…

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It’s what I’ve been waiting for. It’s what has eluded me for the last six months. It’s what, late at night, lying in the darkness, I feared would never come. It’s the prize I felt cheated of, the gods of the bureaucracy conspiring against me.

Now, at last, it’s mine. Permanent, undeniable, irrefutable proof that my work has not been in vain. I am promoted. I’ve seen the paperwork and held it in my own hands. I’ve scrutinized every box and am convinced of its legitimacy. I am exhausted, spent, but I am at last happy.

Gloria in Excelsis Deo.

What’s next?