Guidance for executives

Setting goals for mobility

Whilst there’s no perfect amount of mobility you should aim for, you should set appropriate expectations, and possibly goals and targets for mobility in your group or agency.

As a starting point, encourage managers and HR practitioners to focus on making small, practical improvements to how they use and support mobility. If mobility is rare, you may need to allocate additional resources specifically to workforce planning or supporting mobility in your team.

Some considerations to keep in mind when setting goals and targets:

• Align goals with the problems you need to solve in the next 12 months: If you’re anticipating a surge or peak, you could focus efforts around internal and external moves to support that specific mobilisation need. If you need to develop digital or data skills (the most in-demand skills according to the APSC’s 2020 Agency Survey), you could set objectives for more moves in these areas, and consider leveraging the professions.
• Consider a focus on external mobility: Encouraging employees to take opportunities outside your agency or the APS can build understanding of other sectors and jurisdictions, or the needs of the agencies you regularly partner with.
• Set targets for yourself: Executives can greatly increase the success of mobility by putting their own time and attention into it. If you need your employees to apply a broader perspective, consider whether you should personally commit to negotiating a regular exchange program with another organisation to better enable access to experts, or support better alignment of policy and delivery.
• Be careful with blanket targets: If you are already experiencing disruption or loss of corporate knowledge due to turnover, setting a target such as “10% of the agency to take a temporary move to another agency in next year” may exacerbate the issue. In setting a blanket target, you might also create adverse consequences – employees and managers may feel incentivised towards temporary moves that are not in the best interest of the employee (either personally or professionally) or the agency just to meet a pre-determined target.

Champion the use of mobility

“The people that I have had the good fortune to work with since I joined the APS, the supervisors I’ve had, mentors I’ve had, leaders I’ve had, have encouraged the depth and breadth, have encouraged mobility, have supported me to do different things.  So, of course, I want to do exactly the same for everybody else.”

- Helen Wilson, Deputy Australian Statistician, Australian Bureau of Statistics

Your managers and employees are key to the success of mobility, and their openness to the possibility depends on clearly communicating its benefits. As an executive, you are uniquely positioned to encourage mobility by:

• Sharing your personal experiences with mobility amongst your managers and employees, and encouraging other senior executives to do the same.
• Providing a space for employees who have recently taken temporary moves to share their experience with others.
• Using your networks to enable mobility across sectors – your personal network will open doors your managers and employees may struggle with.
• Recommending managers discuss the potential for temporary moves as part of performance agreements or career discussions with employees.
• Encouraging managers to consider using mobility to solve business problems.
• Working with managers to reprioritise, delay or cease other work when a higher priority taskforce or surge requirement needs to be delivered, and backfilling is not an option.
• Encouraging managers to take on temporary employees who work part-time, live and work in regional areas, or work from home. This opens a wider talent pool and supports flexible working arrangements.
• Implementing a policy within your group that sets an explicit default of approving a move when requested and/or collecting data about approvals and refusals.

 “Within Treasury, and particularly under Secretary Dr Steven Kennedy, it’s a ‘One APS’ mindset.  He strongly encourages people to move, and one of our SES officers here, he’d been in the building for 20 years and he’s now off to another department and that’s a celebrated thing. So that messaging and that kind of expectation from the top is incredibly important.”

- Katrina Di Marco, First Assistant Secretary, Department of the Treasury

Championing mobility may be important if there is a sense in your organisation or work area that temporary moves are not for high-performers. Your endorsement of mobility can help change this mindset.

Encourage moves outside your organisation for diversity of experience

APS employees can be more effective in their roles if they can draw on a broader base of experience. For example, someone working with legislation will better understand the impact of a decision if they have some experience working in business or for a regulator and seeing the challenges first hand. Employees who have worked in more than one organisation may have broader networks that can help in addressing whole-of-government challenges. Working in another environment also gives a new perspective on how work can be done.

“We need to look at mobility more broadly - it's not just about the APS. The private sector and the not-for-profit sector have a broad range of abilities we need. The APS shouldn’t operate in a vacuum; we work with the private sector, we work with not-for-profits—we need to bring in that experience and have APS staff develop knowledge of other sectors too.”

- Rachel Houghton, General Manager, Services Australia

Mobility programs

Mobility programs can be useful in workforce planning, especially if you consistently require similar temporary resources from similar places, or frequently need to develop employees in similar ways. There are a number of whole-of-APS current mobility programs that can assist as well as established programs targeting internal mobility, such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Mobility Strategy.

If there is not an established program that is fit-for-purpose, you can also work with your HR practitioners to design a program in line with your strategic objectives, or consult them for practical advice on establishing a small scale trial.

When designing your mobility program, it is important to:

• Establish a clear vision for the program. Make sure it communicates the benefits for all participants, including home and host organisations, as well as the employees themselves. Everyone should be on board.
• Align the program with Government policy and delivery priorities, as well as your overarching organisational or business strategy. Consider the high value use cases identified under the Framework – this will greatly increase support from other stakeholders, and the chance of success. This could be using temporary moves to support a major program, or putting a multi-agency project team to work on scoping a policy response to a high profile challenge.
• Build partnerships or agreements with other agencies into the program. This will make it easier to rapidly move employees if you want to encourage moves outside your organisation.

Common barriers to mobility and how you can respond

There are often pressures to prioritise delivery over succession planning and employee development.

• Support your managers as they plan for mobility. Consider tracking requests, approvals and refusals of mobility opportunities; if temporary moves are consistently deprioritised or blocked, you may need to address a capacity risk or cultural challenge that may require further conversations.
• Consider creating an Average Staffing Level (ASL) pool in your agency to support temporary moves, and encourage employee exchanges or job swaps.
• If managers are consistently unwilling to release high performers, or become dependent on individuals to carry out the team’s function, you may need to have further discussions with them on their team structure and succession planning, and how they can better manage these scenarios. You may then need to contact your HR practitioners and conduct a wider review of the group’s capability.

It can be difficult to persuade managers to approve mobility if there is a history of talented employees not returning.

• Promote mobility as an opportunity that offers career pathways and professional development; this is a key factor in employee retention.
• Address underlying causes of turnover and embed a culture that employees will want to return to.
• Encourage managers to provide support to employees during temporary moves, continued career conversations will let the employee know they are valued. A Mobility Plan may help your managers facilitate this discussion.
• Work with managers to give returned employees projects relevant to their new skills.