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This post makes me wonder, do EA organisations ever offer permanent staff the flexibility to do a secondment or loan to another organisation? I could imagine someone from CEA and someone from Allfed being loaned to Rethink Priorities while they try to start a particular megaproject, for example, with the security that they can return to their original employer after a set period of time if the megaproject hasn’t worked out.

I’m interested in this idea. I also really like and endorse the idea of making very clear, actionable, mostly objective goals for employment even if that employment is open-ended and not tied to a specific length.

Hi Ben,

While I appreciate the sentiment of a tour of service, I would also like to highlight the asymmmetrical power imbalance of a tour of service. As I understand it, the difference between contractual work and your tour of service is the spirit of the work relationship: a mutual understanding between the employed and the employer.

However, the only person in that relationship that could extend the relationship, or make it permanent, is the employer. This is to the disadvantage of the employee, and for all practical purposes is no different than a time-limited contract for the employee.

Why would it not be possible to have the spirit of the tour of service and still offer full-time employment? No one gives or accepts a full-time position with the anticipation that they will work their until the retire anyways, so I dont understand what advantages this has for the employee. If after two years an employee feels that their position isn’t worthwhile for them, then they can quit, as many do after 4 years regardless of their contract. A company can fire a person, in some countries, for their role being redundant if the work isn’t necessary anymore. In that case a person can file for unemployment, which they could not do under a time-limited contract.

If the logic for the tour of service is due to the role being temporary or having uncertain funding, then I would suggest that the role is both in practice and spirit just a contracting gig, with all of the moral hazards that accompany those hiring practices.

[strange reply warning]

I am afraid to ask what is the alternative. I’d hope that in all jobs and also in “tours of service”:

• Employees get:

  • recognition

  • skill

  • “CV bullets” that make them more hirable

  • honest references from the employer

• The company gets useful work done

• Any party can end the relationship if they’re not happy with it, both must be happy with the relationship to continue

no?

I wonder if I misunderstood something big

The thing I do find inspiring in your management approach is setting measurable long term goals and not interfering with how the worker decides to accomplish those (if I understood this part correctly)

Thanks for sharing. This is quite compelling.

There seem to be some similarities here with how generalist careers go within the UK Civil Service^[1].

There, you typically do 2-4 years in a role before moving onto something which is usually unrelated, at least in theme if not in role. For instance, in the FCDO, you might go from 3 years working on trade with India, to a new post working on Brazil’s internal politics, before going to work on human rights at the UN. Sometimes people also go from working in policy roles, to comms, to HR etc., but that seems less relevant here. Some stay in a particular thematic area for much longer, or go back to things they’ve previously worked on—but that’s the exception, particularly early in careers.

My sense is it’s fairly popular amongst staff because you get to try out lots of things, meet more people, learn more (at least more broadly), move if you don’t like a job/​team, potentially travel etc. But there are some fairly obvious costs that might also apply to the Tours of Service described above:

1. You lose subject-matter expertise. That’s more obvious if it’s ‘India trade policy’, but in the above jobs, this could be something like ‘knowledge of the office contract’ for the Office Manager role, or more general knowledge about CEA internal systems.

2. You lose (other) productivity benefits of working in the same team for a while, like adapting to others’ working styles, better communication etc

3. You lose institutional knowledge e.g. ‘we tried this before and it was a disaster for reason x’

4. You lose the (more vague) value of having spent a lot of time thinking about problems related to the specific job—connected to 1-3, but slightly different

5. You start again with relationships—external as well as internal ones

6. You have other costs for onboarding staff, doing handovers to new staff etc.

7. Some staff find it personally disruptive, so it’s not good for their motivation.

Chris Kerr highlights some of the benefits, and includes helpful ways of making it work. You could also take my points 1-7 and see related benefits to each of them. And it sounds like it’s also been useful in attracting staff that wouldn’t otherwise have taken the job. So I don’t mean to be positive or negative overall about EA Tours of Service. I think some of it depends on the employees, and the circumstances of the organisation/​team at the time. But I wanted to highlight some of the potential downsides too, based on my somewhat-related experience. Hope that’s helpful!

[In case it’s not obvious, I’m not talking about the ‘concrete outcomes’ bit of this model—that seems like it should be the default for most roles anyway, especially within EA.]

1. ^

   I’m mostly not talking about specialist roles, like lawyers, for example—though they also move between thematic areas quite a bit.

Many intergovernmental organizations have a similar recruitment model with limited term contracts for most staff members. (My experience is with EMBL but I don’t think the practice is limited to research-focused organizations.) The explicit aim is that staff members will join (possibly on secondment from national governments), bring their existing knowledge and share it with other staff from other countries, and then return to their home country bringing new experience to improve things there too.

The packages of benefits and perquisites offered by these organizations include some that EA organizations should consider duplicating if they want to encourage “tour of service” style employment.

• Relocation assistance not only before starting the job but also after the end of the contract period.

• Travel subsidies to encourage continuing links with the home country (and with the seconding organization, if applicable).

• Dependents allowance, to compensate for the fact that e.g. if one spouse relocates to a foreign country for work then this lowers the earning potential of the other spouse.

Thanks for writing this, it’s a cool idea.

I’ll consider doing this when I next run a hiring round!

Thanks for sharing this, Ben!

I see a lot of value in this model (assuming you successfully clarify that they are full employees, legally and otherwise), especially compared to the high level of contracting in the EA space. That said, I believe it might be beneficial to further evaluate the effects of having explicitly time-contingent employment.

I haven’t fully thought through the benefits/​costs yet, but I wanted to share my initial thoughts and hopefully come back to discuss further.

Did Max write this and Ben post it? I got confused when it talked about “my tour of service”