Some call it the blended workforce. Others refer to a hybrid. Still others say mixed. But the most accurate term is multisector, said Alethea Long-Green, director of human capital studies at the National Academy of Public Administration, which has assembled a working group to study the challenges of managing the government’s burgeoning multisector workforce.
“We prefer…the terminology ‘multisector’ to ‘blended,’” she said. “That [conclusion] was the result of the research and a very rigorous discussion among our fellows. A blended workforce implies a unified workforce, and in point of fact, it’s not. They’re workers from different sectors, they have separate constitutional and legal identifications, they’ve got separate appointing authorities and separate pay schedules, and yet they share the responsibility for the federal mission. So we think we need to start [with] common terms and definitions.”
Long-Green said that although the government has always contracted for services and products, agencies are increasingly turning to a variety of sectors for workforce support. “It’s not just contractors,” she said. “It’s state and local civil servants, uniformed personnel, nonprofits, international workers and volunteers — those are all the people that make up the multisector workforce.”
— Richard W. Walker
CXO lessons learned
Federal employees work alongside federal contractors in many information technology organizations. Chief information officers can minimize conflicts of interest and other workforce problems if they follow strategic advice from government management experts.
Here are 5 strategic lessons learned.
Never forget that federal contractors must answer to their companies and stockholders and that federal employees must answer to the public.
Organize your workplace to maximize the respective strengths and minimize the respective weaknesses of federal employees and federal contractors.
Adopt a formal workforce governance structure to handle workforce issues.
Integrate workforce planning and acquisition planning within your organization.
Ensure that your agency has skilled contracting officials who can manage contractor/agency relationships.
— Florence Olsen
Contractor employees abound in government workplaces. Often the only obvious difference between them and federal workers is the color of a security badge. But that appearance of uniformity belies the increasingly complex reality of managing a multisector workforce, experts say.
The government’s workforce — often a mixture of federal workers and private-sector contract employees working side by side — is a potential minefield, as the Army learned recently. In a March report, Government Accountability Office auditors identified what they termed a blurry line between government employees and contractors working for the Army, and they advised the Army to take steps to more clearly differentiate its contractor employees.
The appearance of a homogeneous workforce in government is “a good thing, in the sense that you want to create environments that are somewhat seamless,” said Christopher Mihm, director of strategic issues at GAO. “On the other hand, there are risks associated with that, and it gets back to the blurry line. You forget who…has a fiduciary responsibility to their stakeholders — the contractor — versus those who take an oath of office — as federal employees do — for the greater common good.”
Ron Flom, associate director of management services, chief human capital officer and chief acquisition officer at the Office of Personnel Management, said there should never be a blurry line between employees and contractors. “I want to make sure that tasks are clearly spelled out so there’s no reason” for any confusion about what is inherently governmental work and what isn’t, he said. Under federal rules, contractors are prohibited from doing work that is inherently governmental.
It’s possible to manage multisector employees as one workforce, but managers have to understand the intrinsic differences among the sectors, Mihm said. The challenge is putting the various sectors into a “public-management Cuisinart in a creative way” to reach desired outcomes, he said. “You want to know the respective strengths and limitations that each of the various sectors brings. You want to manage in such a way that you’re integrating and leveraging the strengths and minimizing the weaknesses.”
At NASA, where fewer than a third of the 58,000 employees are full-time federal workers, agency officials say they are comfortable with managing a multisector workforce.
