United States

Office of Personnel Management

Office of Merit Systems Oversight and Effectiveness

Digest of Significant Classification Decisions and Opinions

June 1998

No. 21-06

Standard:	Job Grading Standard for Supervisors (WS) (December 1992)

Factor:	Factor III, Subfactor C, Workforce Dispersion

Issue:	Crediting Workforce Dispersion to Second Level Supervisors

Identification of the Classification Issue

The issue arose in an Office of Personnel Management oversight division's adjudication of a job grading appeal. A second level supervisor had subordinates working in ten different shops, all located on the same base. Five of the shops were located in the same hangar complex. Others were across the street or a few blocks away. One was located approximately three miles away. Each shop has either a small shop chief, responsible for technical direction of the work, or a first level supervisor. Much of the work in the shops was cyclical in nature, consisting of periodic inspection, maintenance, and repair. Projects generally ran from less than a day in duration to several days for complex repairs.

Resolution

The small shop chiefs and first-line supervisors primarily were responsible for monitoring the performance of work and directly coordinated work between shops. Workforce dispersion imposed additional demands on some of these individuals, but it did not significantly add to the second level supervisor's coordination and monitoring demands. The appellant's job possessed significant coordination demands, but they were already recognized under other factors of the standard. They related to the work operation itself, rather than to workforce dispersion.

The purpose of Subfactor C is to recognize the additional demands monitoring and coordinating a geographically dispersed workforce may impose. Under some situations, a dispersed workforce requires continual attention to the available staff, skills, tools, equipment, supplies, and schedule in order to ensure the timely accomplishment of work at multiple sites. The more these factors are subject to change (e.g., when staff or work moves from site to site), the more difficult monitoring and coordinating become and the greater the supervisor's involvement in such activities. Such activities contrast with the long-range planning and priority setting that typically occupy the recurring attention of higher level supervisors regardless of whether or not the workforce is dispersed.

The additional demands that workforce dispersion places on a supervisor may require more than simply contributing staff or equipment to various work sites. Workforce dispersion may require the second level supervisor's personal attention in determining:

the work load demands of each site;

the staff and skills that may be drawn from multiple units without jeopardizing the work accomplishment of the supplying organizations;

the tools, supplies, equipment, and material that must be available;

the schedule that will accommodate such requirements; and

the adjustments necessary to adhere to the schedule.

These additional demands were not present to any significant degree in the second level supervisor's job. Hence, no credit under the subfactor was warranted.