Three years ago, my husband and I loaded all our stuff and our kiddo into the car and made plans to take the weekend to get all the way down to Orlando from Virginia to start our part of the Army’s remote work pilot. I say we made plans to take the weekend, because we ended up hitting a rhythm, the little guy (he was just a couple months shy of three then) was a trooper and happy to play on his tablet and nap, and we made the whole drive in one day.
Three years went by pretty quickly. But the biggest thing that has me staring out over my yard when I drink my coffee on the patio in the morning is that anywhere else we’ve lived, it would have been well past permanent change of station (PCS) time. It’s a rare occasion that you can make it three years in a job. At my grade, you’re looking at anywhere from 18-24 months.
Just since I’ve been down here, I’ve “PCS’ed” twice.
The Army Times was kind enough to write an article about how that worked.
I’ve learned a lot over the past three years. A lot of it has been best practices and research, and a lot of has been School of Hard Knocks. Before we talk about any of that, though, I want to address the biggest question I always get from people when they find out where I live. I don’t think I’ve addressed it yet here.
How the h-e-double-hockey-sticks did I convince the Army to let me work out of my house in Orlando, Florida, when I’m assigned to the Pentagon/Fort Knox/wherever?
It started with a retirement – but not mine
Like so many of my stories about my adventures seem to start, my remote work story started with retirement. But this time, it wasn’t just mine.
Oh, I was going to retire, though. When COVID hit, I was working hard to stand up data capabilities in Army Talent Management and at Army People Analytics. Dual hatted, running like crazy. I was deemed one of the essential people who needed to be in the Pentagon routinely, so I got early access to vaccine treatment and medical treatment and the ability to come and go as I pleased. But I wasn’t essential enough to qualify for daycare.
By May 2020, my schedule had ramped up so much that there was no way, even when I wasn’t in the building, that Scott and I could juggle care for Marcus, then about 18 months old. His daycare shut down after the first couple weeks of quarantine and he was little enough that one of us had to be with him. Scott couldn’t cover for both of us and meet the deadlines of the architecture firm he was working for, so he quit, and we found ourselves in DC on one salary instead of two. You can imagine how sustainable that was.
We found ourselves looking for other alternatives, not knowing how long quarantine would go on. Preferably somewhere close to family, somewhere with a lower cost of living. So I put in my retirement packet and we started getting ready to look for new jobs and a new house in the Sunshine State.
My boss (or one of my bosses), the Director of Army Talent Management, had opinions about my retirement. I had a niche skill set and an intrapreneur bent that the Army needed, so we sat down and talked, and he asked me to be a test case and see if he could retain someone like me. “Give me something to try and let me fail before you hang it up.” His only caveat was that I couldn’t ask for a ridiculous bonus, I had to figure out something else.
I chewed on this for a couple months. What would I ask for? What would help our family situation–and not just ours? I was noisy and visible to Army Senior Leaders in a way not too many people in my grade were, so I had both responsibility and opportunity. I could ask for something that commanders could use to help more families.
At the same time, I read an article by Michael Quinn, who provides a lot of support on LinkedIn to military transitioning out of their careers. The gist of it was, “don’t take the bonus, it won’t change the things about the culture you’re trying to leave.” That stuck with me in a huge way, and was yet another impetus to not look for a monetary solution to my problem.
I had to figure out what my problem actually was.
It came to me during a late night writing session, working from my home office while my little guy snoozed and my husband was either reading or blowing up aliens online with his friends. I was working perfectly fine from my home office, with my family all around me. Did it really matter where my home office was? And if we could figure out a way for me to move my home office AND support my work, could that be turned into something that would help the Army retain other families?
I thought back to a story my boss had told us about a commander who worked for him that he wanted to retain. The officer had been in command at Fort Carson while his wife, a fiscal attorney of some sort, was really getting established in her career locally. He looked into assignments that would allow them to stabilize in Colorado, potentially with ROTC. However, his branch told him that those weren’t post-command assignments and he would still have to move, even if the position was available. Instead of moving, he elected to retire.
That was the retirement that really started remote work for the Army.
Because what if my boss had had the ability to make a remote work determination, and determine that that officer was a good fit and that the job didn’t require him to be there full time? Did he really need to PCS to a staff job, which most days would require him to work from a cubicle on collaborative software? Would we have been able to retain him if he’d been able to keep working from Colorado?
I’m pretty sure that answer is yes. And my boss and others agreed.
I wrote an article about all the different ways remote work and flexible work could help us support families and retain service members recently.
The culture bias against remote work
We started a planning team to see what kind of extra authorities we needed to make this work. It turned out, we already had a lot of them in place – officers and NCOs in advanced civil schooling assignments are often stationed well away from the Army Student Detachment and working on their own, and US Army Recruiting Command has recruiters spread far and wide. It was pretty easy to make it all work with policy, law, and statute – nothing needed to change.
The sticky part for all of this was, you guessed it, culture.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast, and a lot of the time, I’ll say it eats logic, too. Because I listened in on a number of phone calls with senior leaders I would not only say are perfectly intelligent but exceptionally so, and they still absolutely shut down at the idea that an officer would be able to work remotely.
How would I do physical training (PT) with my squad?
How would I qualify on my weapon?
What would my Soldiers think?
Those would all be valid considerations if I were still at a company or battalion, but I was at the Pentagon, working out of a very small office where the only people who would know I wasn’t in the office were the five other people who worked in my office, or potentially my supervisor if he came to the office to look for me. The organizations I supervised were primarily located on the West Coast, so they didn’t see me in person anyway.
I brought up that we would have to consider this person by person, position by position, because not all positions and people would be able to do it.
That’s where the culture comes in.
There is a very strong streak of thinking in the Army that posits that equality equals sameness. For us to value people and their work equally, they have to do the same things, and most of those need to be in line with what the Infantry Soldier does. We’ve been enamored for years with the Marine concept that every Marine is a rifleman first, without considering that they are an expeditionary force, and that’s necessary for them.
The bulk of the Army isn’t expeditionary. We’re designed to move really big equipment and a lot of supplies and a ton of people all over the world really quickly and to hold and build up the ground that gets seized either by the Marines or other services, or by the small parts of the Army that are expeditionary.
Only 35% of the Army is at the brigade or below level that we consider tactical, and very few of those organizations are truly expeditionary. I’ve been in expeditionary warfare. My platoon was one of several that breached the border obstacles into Iraq in March 2003. Most of our work isn’t that.
So that brings up three culture fallacies in the Army that are against flexible work, and, when it comes down to it, opposed to a lot of our talent management principles.
- Fairness = if we do it for some of you, we have to do it for all of you.
- Lethality = everyone acts like an Infantryman.
- Equality = everyone is interchangeable, no one is replaceable.
I’m sure there are more, but these are the three that get cited the most as reasons to oppose remote work.
My counters?
One size does not, in fact, fit all. If we allow one person to do a thing, that does not automatically mean everyone gets to do it. We have to set and communicate clear criteria for what the requirements are for whatever this thing is or whoever this person is, but one way of work doesn’t work for everyone.
There are almost two hundred specialties in the Army, and many of them contribute to lethality without fighting as Infantry. Take my cyber teams, for example. Or my data science teams. They build and protect the tools that enable our ground combat teams to be more lethal. Our logisticians move equipment and supplies that enable ground combat teams to be more lethal. There are a lot of people out there who need the basics–because it helps to have a common vocabulary as an organization–but if you see a data scientist leading a charge up a hill, the situation has gone to hell in a handbasket.
Some people are harder to replace than others. Every unit has that guy or gal who knows how everything works, knows everyone who can help you get something done, or knows where to find something. Maybe you can replace them with the same grade and branch, but you can’t replace the additional functions they provide. People are as unique and different as their fingerprints, and if we don’t take into consideration the additional things they bring to the table besides what we assume based on grade and branch, we’re missing out on a lot of the key functions we need to have to operate.
Here’s a slide I use often when talking about Data Driven Talent Management that shows why we need to stop assuming people are interchangeable and recognize and capitalize on the unique knowledge and abilities of our people.
What has the pilot accomplished?
A lot, believe it or not. For me and for the DoD.
Three years into this and, much to my shock, I’m not only still in the Army but I was promoted to Colonel, selected months after I’d left Washington for Orlando. My boss flew down to Orlando so that we could meet with the DEVCOM and PEO footprints here and we tacked on my promotion on the end of that trip, right out on the back patio where I’ve had a lot of these reflections.
Being promoted to Colonel also drastically changed my visibility and the Army’s willingness to let me be a free agent. More junior officers’ positions are approved by Army Human Resources command; as an O6, my position now had to go to the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army for approval. And our various VCSA’s took some convincing that I was worth keeping around, when there were other leaders who decidedly thought that was not the case.
I’m also decidedly hybrid. I spend about 50% of my working days on travel orders to some other part of the country, often working out of an office, holding a workshop, being part of a planning team, attending a conference or event, or doing something other than knocking out policy documents, research, code, or taking meetings and calls online from my home office.
I’ve also had to develop both a really thick skin and some good wellness habits.
When you’re working the hardest you’ve ever worked to bring better processes and care to service members and families, it’s a gut punch to have a leader discredit all of it because you’re not working the way everyone else works, or to tell you that it’s great you did what you did, but it’s time to move into a position where the work has absolutely nothing to do with what you spent eight years developing expertise and authority in.
I’ve received a lot of hatred from my peers and been vilified by superiors, just because I’m trying to show that we can do things differently. And maybe save a few valuable individuals and their careers in the process, if only I can convince Army leadership that it’s worth allowing people to be evaluated for their strengths and needs beyond the one-size-fits-all model. Because that one-size-fits-all model actually fits nobody at all.
There are plenty of times I have to call a good friend and mentor of mine and ask him for a sanity check. He usually gives it to me and tells me to get out of the office and go enjoy my weekend with a margarita. But there are also times where I close the laptop, get on the bike or go run or go walk the dog or just get out in the sunshine, smell the flowers, soak up the Vitamin D. Good health and exercise habits are the greatest things you can give yourself when you’re under pressure.
And we also have to celebrate some of the things we’ve done that have worked.
There are some personal goals I’ve met with the time I’ve had to serve. Data literacy for the Army, piloting remote work, introducing and getting the concept of customer experience adopted, and, of course, continuing to further principles of data driven talent management are all big ticket items, and we’re making huge inroads there.
But the biggest one so far has been DoDI 1035.01, the DoD’s policy on remote work and telework…for civilians AND SERVICE MEMBERS.
Yeah. In January of this year, DoD gave the services both the authority and the directive to write policies on how to provide telework and remote work to service members and their families, and what kind of resources they could provide them for this to be effective. This is huge. This is everything I wanted to see happen.
Now I just have to get the Army to write our version, and commanders to start using these authorities to retain our people!
So…what’s next?
I’m standing up a new innovation organization for a new command. I’ve been in my role about six months now, and it’s challenging, demanding, frustrating, and hugely important. So it’s exactly my thing. I promised to dedicate at least two full years to this effort before I retire or do anything else, so that at least gives me (crossing fingers here, because anything can happen) about two years to continue to press on the Army for change before I can retire.
I’m hopeful that in that time, we realize the practicality and the necessity of data driven talent management, including flexible work and distributed teams. My part of that is going to be assisting with the Army policy that enables this for our folks, and I’m also working on a best practices handbook for Army leaders who find themselves running distributed teams for the first time, or needing to stand one up and needing a resource. I’m looking to build a community of practice on the future of work so that we can talk about how to evolve work as needs and expectations of experience evolve.
And I will continue to push for data and AI education across the force, continue work for transformative talent management practices, and work hard to implement good change management to anchor the new processes so that we can build off them.
This isn’t easy work, but little that’s worthwhile ever is.
See below for a couple more reflections on working remotely:
