Archived: Actions taken to date and planned actions to stabilize pay

DFO and Coast Guard have progressively built a multi-disciplinary team to respond to pay issues. This team led by the Commissioner meets on a weekly basis to monitor progress and ensure consistency of information-sharing and alignment to PSPC’s efforts.

This team consists of senior leadership from DFO and Coast Guard, HR professionals, former compensation advisors, IT, finance, communications, and reporting and analytics experts who are dedicated to the task of stabilizing pay. In addition, we have leveraged more than 100 individuals from across the Department, including Timekeepers and Coast Guard pay support staff.

We are very proud of this dedicated team. Its members are relentless in their efforts to support employees every day, while working with our colleagues across the Government to develop and introduce sustainable fixes to get us all to a stable, reliable pay system.

DFO/Coast Guard has been actively working with PSPC both bilaterally at the DM level and through the existing governance structure. Our bilateral efforts at the DM table have produced a joint project plan that defines our collaborative commitment to meet the departmental critical needs through 2019.

In parallel, we have dedicated our experts towards a number of PSPC’s initiatives, including the Interdepartmental Analysis Working Group (IDAT), and will continue to do so. Representation on all 40 working groups would pose a capacity challenge for the Department. Nevertheless, we will ensure representation on all working groups critical to us and seek cooperation with other operational departments to ensure our input to all working groups.

We have put in place rudimentary reporting mechanisms to consolidate multiple data sources provided by PSPC on items such as S34 transactions, PAR rejection rates, etc. We have a small team that analyzes existing data from PSPC and monitors our overall case load, but we are unable to directly monitor issues related to S34 transactions with the information available to us; we are working with PSPC to ensure ongoing access to this information.

DFO/Coast Guard is currently piloting the set-up of a business intelligence unit with the capacity to perform data analysis and reporting that will consolidate multiple data sources to better inform our strategic efforts and lead to more robust reporting capabilities.

As an example, we have attached as a reference a map indicating the scale of pay issues across our Department (Appendix A). This important back office work will support PSPC’s efforts, both on its project plan for DFO/Coast Guard (referenced above) and on its broader efforts for all departments.

We communicate with our entire workforce on a bi-weekly basis in order to ensure employees can access the assistance they need with their pay issues. In addition, we relay all information received from PSPC to employees once our communication experts have adapted PSPC’s messages to suit the needs of our unique workforce.

Caring, timely, targeted, focused, and accessible information-sharing with employees and managers is critically important to us given the unique challenges we face. As our seagoing personnel and other operational staff have little or no access to the Internet or departmental intranets, we rely on supervisors and ship captains to provide pay information to their crews. All managers are expected to canvass their staff and ensure any hardship cases are handled quickly.

We are committed to enhancing pay-specific communications to employees and ensuring employees have the best information and tools to understand the pay situation and participate in pay stabilization efforts. This includes creating information hubs, disseminating updates and information from PSPC, and creating DFO/Coast Guard-specific communications products. Any communications plans to meet our needs must consider seagoing and remote employees without connectivity. We have unique communications challenges due to our operational context, and will continue to develop messaging for our own employees.

We are currently reviewing our communications approach with an eye toward making general pay information more easily available to employees without network connectivity. In future, we envision an internal communications campaign aligned to the elements of our strategic plan and PSPC’s training programs for employees, managers, and HR professionals.

Prior to the launch of Phoenix, DFO/Coast Guard’s pay response teams have regularly engaged senior management tables, S34 managers, and employees, with respect to their roles and responsibilities in the HR-to-Pay efforts. This includes briefing the department’s Executive Table, extended management tables, Bargaining Agents, and Departmental Audit Committees on our efforts.

Thirty percent of our employees have positions that do not easily align to the way Phoenix has been configured. To ensure these people are paid under Phoenix, we have developed and implemented training for our Timekeepers, internal Phoenix support teams, and S34 managers.

We are committed to providing training to our employees, both connected and non-connected. We have concerns about whether standard training products and platforms will meet the needs of our employees, particularly sea-going and operational employees, but intend to create internal capacity to ensure that our employees receive training that meets the Government of Canada’s requirements and is reflective of our operational culture and requirements.

We have completed enterprise-wide engagement but obtaining satisfactory S34 results has so far defied our best efforts. Therefore, we are doubling down and making this one of the key components of our strategic plan. This plan will have a particular focus on ensuring S34 approvals for seagoing and other operational staff.

We have sent a recurring meeting invite, every two weeks on the Friday of pay-week, to DFO/Coast Guard Managers to ensure they dedicate some time to the approval of outstanding S34 transactions. We will also examine whether asking employees to e-mail managers about pending approvals in our non‑connected and operational environments would further decrease outstanding S34 approvals and undertake that activity if it is found to be helpful.

DFO/Coast Guard has undertaken an analysis of outstanding S34 approvals and rolled out specific coaching and mentoring activities to address these transactions. This includes training on S34 responsibilities and how to fulfill them, identifying and reassigning approvals assigned to the wrong manager, and working with PSPC to solve system issues that create “phantom” approvals.

The S34 issue is compounded by our work environment and is troubling because the number of S34 approvals (and subsequent issues) is orders of magnitude higher for operational personnel compared to office workers. For some specific groups within the Department, enhanced training is required because delayed S34 approvals will cause compounding issues.

We also face difficulties with acting and allowances for at-sea personnel. Base pay in the Coast Guard is made up of three elements that can sometimes cause confusion. Coast Guard’s pay structure is not well-suited for Phoenix as it was designed for entry ahead of time, whereas Coast Guard as a group has a high rate of short-notice acting appointments whose shift premiums, overtime, and allowances are considered part of base pay.

The DFO/Coast Guard strategic plan includes a mechanism for verifying HR entries, including, but not limited to, personal contact information for employees, before pay issues are escalated to the Pay Centre. This will ensure that pay issues resulting from errors in HR entries are not added to the Pay Centre queue. A proactive check of personal contact information could also be included as part of our plan.