Monday, February 26, 2007
Pay without performance
The WaPo reports that, once again, federal employees have beaten back an attempt to link pay to performance. Washington is such a strange place, and people say such bizarre things with no apparent recognition that they are completely alien to the rest of the country. Consider this bit:
The unions and some employees are skeptical about revamping pay practices, in part because they believe giving managers greater discretion over raises will let them play favorites or use pay decisions to single out employees for punitive actions.
Well, yeah.
9 Comments:
By 
D.E. Cloutier, at
Mon Feb 26, 01:28:00 PM:
Last year I met a high-level bureaucrat at a federal agency in Washington, DC.
"How many people work at your agency?" I asked.
"About half of the employees," he replied.
By Georg Felis, at
Mon Feb 26, 01:41:00 PM:
I’ve rewritten this post 4 times before posting. As somebody with Fed experience, I can say that the Federal Pay Scale and job reviews are a Kabuki play of Byzantine complexity, far more complicated than the WaPo article lets on. The Peter Principle extends into Government as well as normal companies.
People in the Civil Service are always knee-jerk in opposition to changes in the pay scale, normally because every proposed change that has been made in the past couple of decades has served to muck up the system. And the reason CS employees are leery of giving managers discretion over pay rates is the CS program was designed to fight against the system of Political Patronage. We like our system to keep out the greedy mitts of partisan politicians thank you very much.
What the Dept. of Homeland Defense has struggling with is the difficulty of attracting talented high-paid professionals who normally have a fairly mobile career to be hired into the Civil Service system, a system that only really pays off when you stay in it for the long haul. Government’s normal answer to this is to outsource the job to an outside contractor, but this gets really dicey when you start talking about analyzing terrorist attack warnings.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Mon Feb 26, 02:04:00 PM:
"We like our system to keep out the greedy mitts of partisan politicians thank you very much."
That should work both ways. In Washington, DC, many career (Civil Service) employees of the federal government loudly voice their political opinions. Many of the employees walk around with "partisan" coffee cups at work. (In my experience, 90 percent of the coffee cups feature favorite issues of the Democratic Party.)
The real problem in my view is the lack of management skills in the federal bureaucracy. Government managers--especially outside the Defense Department--need more and better training. Well-trained managers can motivate employees to achieve goals.
By 
, at
Mon Feb 26, 06:23:00 PM:
Unfortunately, union power contributes to stagnation and corruption in the workplace.
By , at
Mon Feb 26, 11:21:00 PM:
I work for New York State government. There is no profit motive for government, and virtually no objective measurement of performance. Theoretically, there is testing for promotion, allowing an objective measurement of knowledge, at least. In reality, supervisors can promote any one of the top 3 (which can include a lot more than 3) willing to accept the job. Therefore, games are played to promote those who are most connected, not those who actually perform. A person who is last on a promotion list can easily end up in that top three. Someone #1 on the list can go a career without seeing a promotion. Always in the top three, but always another excuse why someone else was hired. For people who do their jobs, and refuse to cover-up or kiss ass, unions are essential to keep their job. Unions are dying in the private sector because in many companies, employees are given a stake in the company. Profit sharing or stock options or the like. Performance, for the most part, can be measured. Sales per hour, widgets made per shift, etc. In some goernment jobs, like motor vehicles, similar measurements could be made. Trust me, the bosses and supervisors don't want them made, because then they would also be held accountable. By blaming union rules, they can continue doing nothing.
By Georg Felis, at
Tue Feb 27, 11:19:00 AM:
DEC, I really didn’t want to say it, but there’s a reason those loud people with partisan coffee cups get promoted out of where the real work is done and put in Washington where they can do less damage. Two kinds of people wind up promoted to the Washington Civil Service, the brilliant competent ones and… the ones you can’t fire. (where they sit and give each other awards)
Come to think of it, Federal Civil Service is not unique in this. NPR did a story a couple weeks ago about the Chicago school system, which has a building to which they assign teachers they can’t fire and who don’t work. Kind of a failed teacher warehouse.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Tue Feb 27, 05:22:00 PM:
Georgfelis, thanks for the additional info.
By , at
Tue Feb 27, 06:59:00 PM:
Let me comment as another Fed leery of the "pay for performance" system. I work under the new National Security Personnel System (NSPS) and it is a nightmare. Ratings are a 13-page form (the old one was two pages plus an employee input sheet), and are supposed to be based on objectives tied to the agency's mission. These objectives must be (among other things) "measurable" and "timely." How do you measure policy? Security? I'm an inspector - how do I measure what I do? Number of inspections? How about being timely? Number of findings in a given time? "Sorry, guys, I'm short of findings this quarter, so I'll have to really hammer you. Nothing personal..."
In principle, it sounds like a good idea, but the execution is another story. None of this even touches the complicated way we get raises, a system that virtually guarantees you cannot change jobs between July and January without losing any chance for even a cost-of-living increase.
I was always frustrated by the do-nothings (who always seem to congregate in the administrative offices), but this system does nothing to hamper them. Since it's so complicated, it rewards those with the time and ability to play administrative games. The professionals on the line just want to do their jobs and not mess with 13-page appraisals given by people as unwilling to write them as they are to receive them.
Oh, and it's still just as hard to get rid of the dead wood as before. Bottom line - just because the unions don't like it doesn't mean it's a good idea. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then.
By , at
Thu Mar 01, 01:06:00 PM:
I once worked in a federal agency where the employees wrote their own performance reviews. It was a rather extended, pointless exercise in self-congratulatory preening, and utterly pointless -- the promotions were generally delivered on a seniority basis, anyways.
It cost the better part of 2 weeks' productivity on everybody's part, and struck me as one of the most absurd wastes of time I ever witnessed. More painfully, as the junior person in the office, this "evaluation" process deprived me of much useful feedback on how I was doing -- and I'm not yet so full of myself that I believe my performance in the first few months on the job to be flawless.
