States find success with civil service reform, report says

Personnel directors in three states that have eliminated civil service laws can more quickly hire, fire, promote and reassign workers than they could when the laws were in place, a new report says.

The report comes out as Congress debates whether to ditch civil service laws for employees of the proposed federal Homeland Security Department.

The personnel directors in Texas, Florida and Georgia told report author and Governing magazine correspondent Jonathan Walters that once civil service protections were removed, politically motivated hiring and firing did not increase.

But the personnel systems that replaced standard civil service rules increased administrative burdens on personnel administrators in the field, hurt the concept of equal pay for equal work and required some form of central monitoring to ensure effective workforce management. Still, personnel directors were happy that they no longer had to work under civil service strictures.

"Virtually every agency personnel director interviewed for this report expressed the strong opinion that there was life after civil service reform and that it was considerably better," Walters wrote in the report, "Life After Civil Service Reform: The Texas, Georgia and Florida Experiences," published this month by the IBM Endowment for the Business of Government.

In each of the three states that Walters studied, the legislatures eliminated laws that were designed to ensure fairness, promote competence and limit political favoritism in the state government workforces. In place of the laws, the legislatures have allowed personnel directors in state agencies, usually with some central guidance, to develop their own human resources systems.

Personnel directors in the three states have set up systems that still attempt to meet the goals of civil service laws but give managers more discretion over how to manage their workers. HR systems in the states also place fewer restrictions on personnel actions and reduce appeals rights for workers who are fired or receive poor performance ratings.

The Bush administration has proposed a similar approach for the planned Department of Homeland Security, eliminating many civil service laws and giving authority for developing a new personnel system to the new department's secretary and the director of the central Office of Personnel Management.

In Georgia, civil service reform was enacted in 1996. All those hired after July 1, 1996, serve at will, meaning they could be fired quickly. Each agency is required to have an appeals process, but appeals can go no further than the agency director, unless an employee files a lawsuit. (No lawsuits have been filed.)

Agencies in Georgia are hiring people much more quickly now than they did when civil service laws were in place. The state's Department of Human Resources, for example, reduced its hiring time from months to weeks.

Georgia also lets agencies write their own job titles and set their own pay rates for many positions, rather than relying on a central classification and compensation system, such as the federal General Schedule. Now that agencies can set their own pay rates, agency directors in Georgia told Walters that they are under pressure from managers to pay different pay rates for people doing similar work. The number of job titles in Georgia has increased by one-third.

"Someone in one programmatic division would tell me, 'We need to pay this person $65,000 if we want to keep them,' when someone doing similar work in another division was only making $50,000," a retired agency personnel director told Walters.

Walters found that none of the states has been able to quantify how, or if, civil service reform has improved state services. Instead, personnel directors measure the effectiveness of reform on speed and flexibility of personnel actions. On both of those counts, directors in all three states report improvements.

Reform did require agencies to take more responsibility for personnel management, a change that took some getting used to. The retired personnel director in Georgia told Walters that it used to be convenient to blame the civil service system. "The new difficulty for personnel managers in Georgia, he says, is the buck now pretty much stops with them," Walters wrote.

The report did not address front-line employees' or managers' feelings about civil service reform, although it did note that the state employees' union in Florida had reported a rise in dues-paying members since civil service reform was enacted.