Organizational excellence begins with leaders who embrace change and innovative ideas. Service leadership at all levels must anticipate opportunities, remain transparent, and take calculated risks. The Service must be flexible and adaptive.
Changing times call for a critical review of business management practices and operating procedures, as well as organizational structure. Internal programs including human resources, engineering and water resources divisions must be analyzed in the greater context of effectively providing support across the Refuge System in light of changing times. The Service should strive for consistency and efficiency in budgeting and work planning in order to ensure that a true system of wildlife refuges is maintained.
The Refuge System has been organized at three distinct levels – field, regional offices, and headquarters – and the overwhelming majority of the Refuge System’s workforce has been concentrated in the field. Indeed, the cultural and organizational emphasis has always been at the field level. The Service’s Regional Offices contain mostly staff support, and supervisory and line authority positions. Although the structure has served the Refuge System well, the evolution to functional specialties, along with the accompanying economies of scale, require that the Refuge System explore a structure that both meets functional specialty needs and enhances career pathways amongst specialty and supervisory or management tracks.
Recommendation: Review the Refuge System organizational structure and design a business model that more efficiently meets the needs of employees and accomplishes its wildlife conservation mission.
Recommendation: Identify needed staffing levels for wildlife refuges and ensure that the appropriate range of skills and expertise are available on the ground, at the wildlife refuge level.
The Refuge System requires a national organizational structure that provides an adequate balance of decentralization, with employees positioned closest to the resource where the work needs to be done, and centralization to gain efficiencies from consolidating similar work into fewer locations. In periods of declining budgets, every Region has explored creative management strategies that bring efficiencies. Such structural analysis must continue and be reinforced.
Organizations are increasingly part of larger networks that share missions, purposes, and even responsibilities. The field of networked governance looks to the interconnectedness of essentially separate entities and looks at how relationships and connections between them affect the overall network or system. The Refuge System should adopt communication tools that facilitate the exchange of experience, knowledge, and ideas among Service staff, and with practitioners and specialists from other areas and organizations. At present, such “communities of practice” are too often isolated from each other by regional or administrative barriers, or “stovepipes.” These barriers must be broken down. Sharing knowledge is a fundamental strategy for adapting during periods of rapid change. It promotes the transfer of hard-won experience and knowledge from an experienced workforce to a new generation of Service employees, and allows staff to learn how practitioners in other areas have dealt with similar issues.
Part of this is working across the organizational boundaries of federal agencies by establishing positive working relationships and partnerships. The Service must take the opportunity to leverage other federal dollars across agencies to meet multiple missions, where possible, and contribute to ongoing management. While state wildlife agencies have always been strong partners for the Refuge System, collaboration can be improved. Likewise, incredible opportunities exist to partner with the Departments of Agriculture, Defense and Education. In a similar way, transportation and trails programs, for example, have a major return on investment for the Refuge System. The Refuge System’s organizational structure must include opportunities to weave other agencies into its conservation mission. The American people expect fiscal responsibility, and the Refuge System will take advantage of agencies’ respective expertise to provide efficiencies.
Recommendation: The Refuge System will find innovative and efficient ways to work with other agencies to establish positive relationships and partnerships.
All natural resource agencies must look to each other for opportunities to collaborate, where appropriate. Federal agencies can work closely together to further the mission of each while celebrating their differences. Fiscal responsibility dictates that all agencies and resources must be shared to efficiently manage the people’s business. In some circumstances, one environmental education specialist can speak about four agencies while in a classroom instead of four environmental education specialists providing separate programs to the same class. Agencies must take advantage of their respective expertise and capitalize on each other. The American people expect that entities in their government will work with each other to enhance efficiencies. The Service may not have all the resources to implement the ideal organizational structure, however, there is the commitment, fortitude and passion to build it with others.
Comment below and/or move on to next section of Chapter 5 - Increased Productivity
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It is important for land managers to live and work in the communities near refuges. Managers should be involved in community planning and education in a very direct way. Complexing has removed the land managers ability to make decisions on behalf of the refuge, with full and direct consideration of the communities needs and input. Communities do not understand complexing and do not care about it. They want to work with a neighbor. Because of this we appear to the public to be “top heavy” and removed from the relevence of the daily lives of people living within the communities near refuges. At the Eastern Virginia Rivers National Wildlife Refuge complex headquarters was located on one of the 4 refuges. At the Fairbanks office the Arctic, Kanuti and Yukon Flats NWR are co-located. These models seem ideal to me. No additional staff are required to support another office located away from the field where managers are located. In the case of the Fairbanks office, managers can work together and share staff and resources. In my opinion, complex offices located anywhere but the refuge should never be considered “field”.
If we really want to achieve organizational excellence, we will need to devote resources to hiring staff. Staffing models for individual refuges have already been identified. Many refuges are operating with less than half the number of FTEs they need, and sharing employees among refuges. The Visions document should include language that recognizes these critical shortages, the events that led to the shortages, and realistic solutions for restoring capacity.
I agree completely with you Raye…”The Visions document should include language that recognizes these critical shortages, the events that led to the shortages, and realistic solutions for restoring capacity.”
Even though we may not be able to acquire the positions due to budget shortfalls, we still need to keep focus on the fact that we simply need these critical positions to accomplish our vision.
I’m not sure if these comments are better meant for the bold ideas section, but I will post them anyway in case there is some way to incorporate them.
1. Should be a better availability or setup under the recommended business model to actually move an employee from an employee to a supervisory position. In most cases, many employees without supervisory experience but individuals who would be good as a supervisor are blocked from the HR process for supervisory jobs because they do not have the experience. How is one to obtain that experience? It seems in a lot of RO offices, there are no longer team leads…which was always a stepping stone to supervisor or a similar program of promotion potential should be created.
2. the Upward Mobility program seems to have disappeared and/or a replacement program that helps employees to move forward should be considered.
3. Although the Youth Conservation Corp is an extremely beneficial organization, it tends to attract those individuals who already have a passion for conservation. If the organization is looking to attract other youth from other programs to help “diversify” our workforce…then more programs need to be created to bring them “in the door.”
4. In that same vein, the SCEP/STEP programs need to either be improved or advertised. They are the only programs that help new employees to the workforce come through the government doors…but, they are poorly advertised, literally unknown and not offerred to a diverse population of students. They seem to be only open to the few that actually know about them or happen to be in the right place at the right time…any chance SCEP/STEP opportunities could be advertised via USA JOBS or some other avenue?