bout de papier, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2001-2002) — Winter 2001/2002, pp. 38–40
Jo you’re not pregnant, nor planning to be so soon. Why should vou care abou the new policy on maternity leave for government employees posted abroad? The policy also covers those adopting a child, and parental leave, which can be taken by either parent. Still doesn’t affect you? Don’t turn the page yet. The development of this policy is an excellent example of much that is wrong with the management of foreign service personnel. What follows is a critique not only of the new policy, but also of the broader structures and organisational culture that gave birth to it (if you will forgive the expression). These affect many of us, not just the few who give birth or adopt while posted abroad.
I should stress that this critique is a personal view, and is not directed at the individuals working in the personnel branches of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and of Citizenship and Immigration, who are trying hard to be helpful in the face of a chronic rotational staff shortage. Rather, the problems arise from institutional shortcomings and failures of management.
I will argue from the general, those broader failures, to the specific, the new policy on maternity and parental leave abroad. But first, the basic facts which you need to understand the issue: until the late 1990s DFAIT had no formal policy guidelines on maternity leave abroad. I, like others, depended mainly on notes produced by a colleague in 1995 to guide me through the intricacies of applying for maternity leave while at post. Now that more generous provisions have been made, though, DFAIT management is no longer comfortable with the previous policy vagueness and flexibility.
The new policy for employees abroad
The federal government adopted new provisions extending combined maternity and parental leave to one year (17 and 35 weeks respectively) in 2000. These provisions went into effect in 2001 as they were inserted into collective agreements. Federal government employees receive 93% of their salary while on maternal or parental leave, but 58% comes in the form of employment insurance payments. The employee’s departbout de papier Vol. ment “tops up” the payments by 35%, thus saving 65% of that employee’s salary while she or he is on leave. This is why maternity/parental leave is considered a form of leave without pay.
Rotational employees posted abroad remained subject to the old six-month leave provisions until a new policy was announced in December 2001. The full text of this policy can be found on the DFAIT intranet. The gist of it is that employees posted overseas wishing to take more than six months of combined maternity and parental leave at post will be compelled to end their postings early and relocate to headquarters prior to the birth or adoption, with all costs borne by the Crown. (It should be noted that “employee” couples employed at the post are each entitled to six months of leave, without being recalled from the post.)
This new policy may at first glance seem to “strike a reasonable balance between the personal interests of employees … and the operational interests of the Department and the government”. To understand what is wrong with it — of which more below – you have to look at the context in which it was developed. The “operational interests” in question are defined in large part by the current severe shortage of rotational staff. And the “reasonable balance” is very much in the eye of the beholder, affected by who developed the policy and how.
The big picture: staff shortages and policy drift
The biggest failure of personnel management lies in the largely reactive response of DFAIT to this shortage of rotational staff, particularly foreign service officers and secretaries. The Personnel Branch is making laudable efforts to increase recruitment to relieve the shortage in the future, but these will take some time to make up the shortfall. In the meantime, there is an effective shortage in the FS category of some 200 officers, a number which will increase with the extended parental leave provisions.
Until the events of 11 September 2001 imposed some belated, broad-brush priorities, senior management appears to have made no concerted effort to decide which positions should be filled with rotational staff and which should not. This is exactly the sort of overall priority-setting exercise that the DFAIT Executive Committee is supposed to undertake. Yet, beyond a general ruling that posts had priority over headquarters, no decisions were taken. If anything, the new practice of assistant deputy ministers having foreign service officers serve as their executive assistants is contributing to the problem.
Individual divisions have been left to fill rotational positions as best they could through burdensome ad hoc efforts that have produced patchwork staffing unrelated to foreign policy priorities. A clear example of this is the “hollowing out” of geographic divisions in headquarters, even though they carry out core elements of DFAIT’s work. This hands-off approach unfairly places the burden of finding staff on divisions, missions, and even individuals. If, as I did, you have to do much of the work of finding a replacement for yourself before going on maternity leave — with no guarantee of success — it is hard not to end up feeling guilty for burdening your colleagues with extra work, simply because you are taking your leave entitlement.
An activist personnel policy, whereby DFAIT management decided which positions to fill with rotational staff, which to fill with non-rotational staff, and even which to leave empty, would relieve these burdens. It would provide for placement of temporary duty staff in high-priority positions that come vacant, and look for other solutions for lower-priority ones. It is high time that the FS and SCY shortage becomes the trigger for decisive management, rather than passivity and a throwing up of hands because “the cupboard is bare”
What’s the fuss about?
It was in this context that DFAIT and CIC decided that rotational staff abroad could not take the full year of maternity and parental leave. So what’s wrong with this? Some colleagues’ first reaction was that it seemed reasonable. They agree that it is too expensive, financially and operationally, to keep staff abroad while on extensive leave. After all, the policy does not prevent employees from taking their entitled leave — it merely reassigns them if they do so. Delve a little deeper, though, and this “sensible” policy reveals serious flaws, both practical and in principle. So, too, does the way in which it was developed
A Poor Process …
Taking the policy process first, it had shortcomings in three areas: its basic premises; the apparent lack of a proper cost analysis; and limited consultation with PAFSO and PSAC.
Starting with the basic premises, DFAIT management seems to have come up with a policy hammer to kill a personnel flea. It took almost a year, with an officer in personnel specially assigned to it, for the policy to emerge. Yet, going by past numbers, on average only about four FS officers per year request maternity leave while at post. Even if these numbers increase with changing foreign service demographics, this policy will likely apply to a handful of employees at most each year.
Taking the policy process first, it had shortcomings in three areas: its basic premises; the apparent lack of a proper cost analysis; and limited consultation with PAFSO and PSAC.
Would it not have been simpler to allow for greater flexibility, rather than forcing the issue? Some employees might themselves prefer not to take the full year’s leave while abroad. Others might choose to delay departure or cut short a posting if the birth or adoption took place in its first or last year. If given the option, some officers might also choose to take a shorter period of leave at post if they could delay the remainder until they returned to headquarters at the end of the posting. Moreover, the cost and operational impact of an officer taking a full year’s leave would vary greatly depending on the length of the posting, size of the mission, availability of replacements, and cost of living at the post.
This insistence on a rigid policy to deal with a tiny number of cases seems to arise from a very un-modern view of comptrollership, to borrow a phrase from the Public Service Commission. One member of personnel staff involved in developing the policy told me that the Department could not afford to have employees “deliberately” getting pregnant so that they could, for example, spend a year’s leave in an apartment in Paris at Crown expense. Employees are not to be trusted, it seems, and personnel policy exists to control our tendencies to take advantage of the system.
Even if you accept the need for a set policy, it seems reasonable to assume that DFAIT and CIC would exercise due diligence in developing it. Since a primary consideration was cost, you would expect, for example, that the Personnel Branch would have studied the relative costs of reassigning affected employees to headquarters versus keeping them at post and providing temporary replacements. If this was done, the results have never been released, so there is no opportunity to examine the basic assumptions used in the complex business of calculating costs.
In addition, “consultations” with PAFSO were limited and late, putting them in an awkward position: either refuse to comment on a policy they felt to be fundamentally flawed, or comment and give legitimacy to these truncated consultations on a policy that was already drafted. In the event, to add insult to injury, DFAIT unilaterally enforced the new policy as of autumn 2001, before contract negotiations with PAFSO were completed. This prompted a complaint of unfair labour practices from PAFSO (subsequently settled with the Treasury Board).
DFAIT management did make one significant change in response to the complaint, upping the limit for leave allowed at post from an original proposal of three months to six months. It was also agreed at this time that employee couples employed at the post were each entitled to six months of leave, without being recalled from the post. It did not, however, address the fundamental questions of principle and approach that might have been put on the table if PAFSO had been consulted at the start of the process rather than at the end.
… Produces a Flawed Result The flaws in the process have, not surprisingly, produced a flawed policy in terms of both practice and principle. On the practical side, the policy presumably aims to save the government money. It must be far too expensive to keep officers on parental leave at post, mustn’t it? The short answer is, we don’t know. A closer look suggests that this calculation is much less clear-cut than at first glance. The most expensive part of any posting is generally not keeping an employee and dependents at post, but moving them to and from it. Cutting a three-year posting to a two-year increases the overall cost of the posting exponentially, particularly since DFAIT has undertaken that the employee will suffer no financial penalty from ending a posting early.
The flaws in the process have, not surprisingly, produced a flawed policy in terms of both practice and principle.
The other part of the calculation on cost is that it is too expensive to send temporary duty officers to affected posts. As things currently stand, this is a largely specious argument, since Personnel’s response to requests for temporary duty officers is that none is available. If temporary replacements were made available, bear in mind that DFAIT saves 65% of the salary costs of an employee on parental or maternity leave. Depending on the employee’s salary, the cost of living at the post and the nature of arrangements made for a replacement, that saving could cover a significant portion — possibly all — of the costs of the temporary assignment. When combined with the savings made by not moving an employee and dependents ahead of schedule, it might actually be cheaper to keep the employee at post while on maternity or parental leave without pay.
Perhaps, then, cost wasn’t the issue? Perhaps the true rationale for this policy is to meet operational requirements at post, given the shortage of temporary duty staff. In that case, sending employees home early and replacing them may sometimes do so, but at considerable cost to the Department and by dint of shifting the staff shortage to headquarters. It still does not fully meet the requirements of posts, though, given the inherently unpredictable nature of pregnancy. If, as stated in the policy, employees opting to take the full year of leave are to be sent home before that leave starts, this will often be out of synch with the posting cycle. Thus affected posts will still be short an officer while they wait for the replacement to arrive with the next posting cycle, and with no prospect of a temporary duty officer in the interim.
Nor does the policy address the shortage of temporary duty staff to replace those taking the six months or less of leave allowed at post. A more flexible policy would have allowed posts to explore other ways of meeting their operational needs to fill behind longer and shorter leaves, including part-time work, job-sharing, employment of spouses and temporary duty assignments bout de papier Vol. for employees from nearby posts or for the increasing pool of non-rotational staff filling rotational positions at headquarters.
The practical shortcomings of this policy may well become evident during the initial two-year period, after which it is due for review. If these were its only failings, it might be enough to wait and hope for a revision at that time. But there are important issues of principle at stake here too.
In the first place, one has to ask why operational and cost considerations were allowed to determine the new policy at all. Atter all, there are also operational and financial costs to employees at headquarters taking leave. If these considerations do not affect statutory entitlements in Ottawa, why should they at post?
In addition, the text of the policy states that “the new policy is not designed to discourage employees abroad from exercising their full entitlement to maternity and/or parental leave” and that “all employees will be relocated/reassigned in a manner which protects against career or financial penalty”, without expanding on these blunt assertions.
The fact is, however, that employees exercising the same rights to maternity or parental leave as colleagues in Ottawa will be penalized for doing so in ways that the latter will not. No employee in Ottawa will have to disrupt his or her children’s schooling or spouse’s career simply to take the leave that is their due. Inasmuch as rotational positions abroad tend to be more challenging and to involve greater responsibility — they are after all, the core of our career — cutting short a posting may well hurt that career.
Officially, of course, headquarters disposes in operational matters and rotational staff go where they are sent. But the days of “pay, pack and follow” are long over. Employees lobby for good postings. We train for them, with as much as two years’ language training in some instances. We plan our careers around them. Cutting short a posting after as little as a year, or less in some instances, will inevitably affect one’s career and family life.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly of all, this policy reinforces the widespread view that family life and a rotational career are hard to reconcile — particularly for women. One need look no further than Personnel Branch’s own March 2001 study on employment equity (the Employment Systems Review (ESR) Report, on the DFAIT intranet, on the employment equity sub-page of the Personnel Branch page) for evidence that this perception is discouraging female candidates. The report states that “women… in rotational positions indicated that there aren’t more women in rotational positions because of issues related to spousal employment and balancing work and family responsibilities”. In specific cases, it may be that it makes sense for an employee wanting to take more than six months of maternal or parental leave to end a posting early. But by making this compulsory in all cases, DFAIT management is sending a clear if unspoken message: pregnancy and postings don’t match. This can only reinforce the perception that the ESR report speculates is a significant impediment discouraging women from applying to join the foreign service, that it’s not a woman’s job.
Time to bring in the professionals
The flawed processes and outcomes of this latest piece of policy raise again an issue long debated within DFAIT: should rotational staff be doing their own personnel administration? The rotational groups have always liked to think that only those who have experienced the rotational life can administer us — even if that meant a reluctant personnel officer, with little or no training for the job, and who was competing with you for the same pool of postings. Surely the message from the flawed assumptions of this policy and other recent personnel disasters (think of the 1998 FS01 to FS02 promotion exercise) is clear. We need professional personnel administrators.
For those still concerned about our supposed uniqueness, in this age of single-assignment postings and private sector mobility, add a few rotational advisors to the mix. But why not have personnel policy developed by professionals who really know and like the work?
This sort of structural change, along with a greater assumption of responsibility by senior management, might at last bring the foreign service into a new era. It might allow for personnel policy that was more than damage control and clean-up exercises. Until then, though, don’t plan on getting pregnant at post.
Editor’s note: For those with access to DFAIT’s internal “intranet” site, the full text of the maternity/parental leave policy can be found at: http://intranet.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/department/hr/leave/maternleaveabroad-e.asp or http://intranet.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/department/hr/leave/maternleaveabroad-f.asp
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2001-2002) — Winter 2001/2002, pp. 38–40. Read the rest of this issue →
