The People Problem

t's been a rough decade for federal human resources managers. They have been targeted for substantial cutbacks by the Clinton administration's National Performance Review at the same time their area of specialization, the federal workforce, is undergoing unprecedented changes. In the era of reinvention and reengineering, those responsible for overseeing the creaky civil service system have come to be seen as the manager's enemy, rather than a partner in change efforts.

"Personnelists as we have known them are becoming obsolete," Sally Marshall, a longtime federal personnel manager who is now a private consultant, wrote in a recent issue of The Public Manager. "Their roles are changing and their numbers are shrinking. There is an almost overwhelming perception among federal managers and employees that the personnel office and its occupants are overspecialized, unresponsive, and/or inefficient."

Marshall's article, based on a 1996 National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) report, said today's HR professionals must play five roles: business partner, leader, change agent, advocate and HR expert. And they must play those roles in a personnel system that seems impervious to comprehensive reform.

HR practitioners have been calling for significant changes in the federal personnel system ever since the early promise of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act faded. While that law solved some problems of the 1970s, such as the lack of monetary recognition for performance and the confused role of the central personnel management agency, it failed to meet the far different human resources challenges of the 1980s. In a national-in fact, international-environment of deregulation, governmentwide statutory and regulatory prescriptions severely restrict agencies' ability to manage and deploy their employees.

Both Democratic and Republican Congresses have been willing to delegate limited personnel flexibilities to agencies in specific areas such as bonuses and allowances. Congress also has allowed individual agencies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration, to make systemwide changes. But despite decades of chipping away at the coverage of the regular competitive service (now only a little more than half of federal employment) and the 1949 Classification Act (which has become riddled with exceptions, special pay rates and, more recently, locality pay), Congress has balked at proposals to grant government-wide authority to develop alternative personnel and pay systems.

Frank Cipolla, a former director of civilian personnel for the Defense Department who now heads the Center for Human Resources Management at NAPA, sees no near-term prospects for general legislative reform of HR systems. "There is no consensus among the major players on the content of needed reforms, there is no real champion in the administration or Congress for system reform, and the interests of the few in those circles for reform seem to be narrowly limited to benefit programs and other potential cost-cutting initiatives," Cipolla says.

As a result, HR people have turned their attention to finding the best ways to perform their functions within the current statutory framework. Last fall, a consortium of 53 agencies asked NAPA to identify non-legislative barriers to innovation and flexibility in three specific areas:

• Organizing and aligning work around mission needs.
• Finding the right person for the right job at the right time.
• Improved approaches to making employee performance count.

The resulting NAPA report, "Innovations and Flexibilities: Overcoming HR System Barriers," was published in August. It shows that in the areas of pay, hiring and performance management, personnel managers are making the existing civil service structure work for them and their agencies.

Broad-Banding

Blizzards of paper and fires of controversy have long dogged the statutory process for describing, evaluating and grading federal white-collar jobs. Employees, managers, and position classifiers have spent unconscionable amounts of time documenting and debating the placement of sets of duties and responsibilities for jobs in more than 450 occupations and 15 grades.

Because these decisions determine what employees will be paid, they are bitterly contested by upward-striving workers, attrition-conscious managers and the guardians of the government's mandate of equal pay for equal work.

When the work of government was founded largely on hierarchical chains of command, with a broad base of workers performing routine, repetitive operations, one could justify considerable costs in time, paper and morale for a seemingly objective, analytical process that matched work to occupational and grade specifications. But today much routine work has been absorbed by computers. Mid-level and even higher work is often done by self-directed, fluid or interdisciplinary work teams reporting to different leaders for different tasks. The traditional detailed, labor- and paper-intensive classification process can neither keep up with the pace of change nor capture the nature of work as organizations do it now.

"The classification system just doesn't fit anymore," says Cipolla.

Most of the efforts to modernize that system have centered around the concept of broad-banding (also known as pay banding), which substitutes a few wide pay bands for many salary grades, allowing career progression, reassignment and management recognition of contributions without frequently resorting to detailed documentation and outside review of proposed personnel changes (see "Eyes on the Prize," September) .

The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act authorized agency experiments to test personnel system innovations that would require legislative changes. Most of the demonstration projects actually carried out, beginning with the Navy's ongoing China Lake experiment, have tried out various forms of broad-banding, to the general satisfaction of management and employees. Congress has waived the statutory five-year limit on some of these projects and ultimately made them permanent for the test sites. But it has declined to change the law to authorize broad-banding for all agencies, despite recommendations to that effect from the National Performance Review and NAPA and a legislative proposal drafted by the Office of Personnel Management in 1995.

Taking the view that congressional action could be years away, NAPA in its new report describes how agencies can develop interim broad-banding systems of their own within the confines of current law. First, NAPA says, the agency should define broad groups of occupations based on similarities in career progression, basic competencies or performance management. Then they should aggregate General Schedule grades within those groups into two to five pay bands based on agency-determined criteria. Bands may be defined, for example, by level of competence (such as developmental, full performance and expert), and also could account for such factors as whether an employee works in headquarters or a field office.

The NAPA broad-band system, designed by former classifier and long-time independent consultant Helene Liebman, contains several streamlining features. Among them are:

• One position description containing a set of duties for each grade in the band.
• Delegation of authority to HR offices to classify positions to a band.
• Delegation of authority to managers to classify and promote within bands and, under certain conditions, to move an employee to the next band.

But Liebman cautions that in her view, "80 percent or more of agencies aren't ready for innovative compensation systems. There's a lot of work to be done in eliminating industrial work models, establishing relevant performance measures and getting solid management backing for system changes."

Other Innovations

Broad-banding isn't the only cutting-edge personnel initiative. Two years ago, the Veterans Affairs Department's New York City regional office, which uses a team-based management system, adopted the idea of skills-based pay. The office created five categories comprising 26 different "skill blocks," and GS grades were defined as collections of several different skill blocks. At least every six months, the coach of each team discusses progress with each employee and, where appropriate, begins a process of certification for the next pay level based on skills acquired and used.

The system's link to the GS grades keeps it within the bounds of the Classification Act. However, with OPM approval, the VA's New York office has recently embarked on a demonstration project requiring waiver of statutory restrictions.

In addition to pay system changes, Liebman says, agencies are making advances in standardizing and automating personnel procedures. "Agencies can save a tremendous amount of time in this area," she says.

The Education Department, for example, has set up a position description library on the agency's internal network. Managers can select from among standard job descriptions, add any necessary unique elements, and obtain a quick review and action by a classifier. Education officials report that the library is now used for a majority of classification actions and saves at least half the time previously required for processing. But Veronica Trietsch, the department's HR director, cautions that "customer input had to be sought and used and the library had to be marketed" before it took hold.

Two automated classification tools, the Defense Department's COREDOC and the commercial product COHO, are in use at several agencies. COREDOC produces classification descriptions and evaluations and then turns out lists of knowledge areas, skills and abilities and portions of performance plans. COHO does that and adds a vacancy announcement, a plan for rating candidates, a structured interview guide, and performance and training plans.

Helen Gough, executive assistant for base operations at Fort Riley, Kan., says COREDOC's speed helps compensate for the loss of classifiers and other administrative personnel who reviewed job descriptions before recent staff cuts at the base. "It's a very good tool for the heavily populated occupations already covered," she says. "Some of my colleagues think it's wonderful. We wish more jobs were covered."

Shelah Portoukalian, a veteran classifier in the Environmental Protection Agency's Atlanta regional office, calls COHO "a delightful system. It meets a great need because of reduced resources in government. Managers and supervisors love it because it takes the mystery out of classification and it can turn out a useable position description in five minutes."

Changes like these, says Harry Felsen, director of fleet maintenance management support for the Naval Sea Systems Command, mean that "the whole process of getting a PD accepted so you can hire or promote someone has gotten much faster and easier in the last few years." But even more importantly, he says, personnel managers "don't fight you anymore. They work with you now. That's the biggest change."

Making Hiring Easier

Nevertheless, actually hiring someone for a federal job can still be a daunting process. Managers and human resources officials remain handcuffed by rules and procedures focused on preventing political or personal favoritism or improper discrimination in appointments.

"Finding the right person for the right job at the right time" should be the paramount objective today, NAPA concluded in its report. Even in an era of widespread downsizing-and perhaps even more so because of the unprecedented demands it places on agencies-timely hiring of quality candidates remains vital.

Cipolla sees "a welcome trend" in the approach of both OPM and individual agencies to innovation and flexibility in staffing operations. "A great deal of delegation [by OPM to agencies] has already taken place and is continuing," he notes, "much more so than in classification and pay." But many agencies still find OPM requirements for entry-level hiring, delegated competitive examining, and merit promotion processes time-consuming and labor-intensive.

For the last two years, a group of OPM representatives and staffing officials from 18 agencies has met frequently to exchange information and advice on regulatory and legislative issues related to hiring. The effort has already led to the clarification and liberalization of the OPM handbook on delegations, says Candy Irwin, the NASA member of the group.

Irwin's experience in negotiating a NASA agreement for delegated examining and hiring authority from OPM highlights both the recent gains and remaining difficulties in changing the process. NASA considered several provisions of the standard OPM agreement overly restrictive, including requirements to publish announcements for five days and to accept applications postmarked as late as the closing date.

"When you're in a hurry to fill a clerical opening in the Washington area, you don't really need five days to collect all the applications you need," says Irwin. "And in the era of faxes, e-mail and applying online, why should you have to check your mail after your closing date for applications with a timely postmark?"

Since these provisions, though standard, are not required by law or regulation, Irwin succeeded in negotiating them out of NASA's delegation agreement. In addition, she won agreement to language specifying that the contents of OPM's huge examining manual are guidance, not requirements. Until now, OPM's enforcement arm has criticized agency violations of manual guidance as if it were binding. In the bureaucratic world, there are few deterrents to innovation as powerful as the fear of criticism by reviewing authorities.

The Federal Communications Commission has negotiated similar modifications in its agreement with OPM. Other agency managers who feel hampered by particular OPM procedures would be well-advised to learn whether they are in fact legally binding.

Many agencies have only "spotty knowledge of existing flexibilities" in personnel regulations, says David Mischel, principal author of the NAPA report's chapter on staffing. "Even when they are aware of them, they're often reluctant to use them because of the threat of litigation by people not selected for a job."

Mischel, who has extensive staffing experience at both OPM and in agency HR operations, says there's still plenty of room for improvement in regulatory flexibility. The OPM merit promotion process, he notes, has been criticized for years as overly restrictive in regard to temporary promotions, rating and ranking procedures, and exemptions. Revisions have been promised several times but are not yet in sight.

Another area of growing interest is term appointments, currently authorized for work assignments of one to four years. A brisk demand for longer terms has developed because of the unpredictability of programs and budgets and because of potential employees' preference for particular assignments rather than long-term careers in government. Much time and paperwork would be saved, Mischel argues, if agencies had the authority to exceed the four-year limit.

Managing Performance

Lack of flexibility and the dead hand of past practice also seriously handicap efforts to streamline and improve the management of employee and organizational performance. But even more than with hiring, the guiding principles have not been modified to fit the emergence of a corps of knowledge workers who are, in the words of the NAPA report, "expected to make recommendations for improving work processes, function as a team and serve as generalists rather than specialists."

In the course of research for NAPA, Robin Van Mechelen, a former agency personnel director, found that the typical federal performance appraisal system contains numerous time- and paper-consuming features required by neither law nor regulation,including:

• Different performance elements
  for each employee.
• Descriptions of at least three
  performance levels.
• Performance ratings upon transfer
  or detail.
• Multiple-page, multiple-copy forms.
• Five-point rating scales.
• Extensive supporting narrative for ratings.

OPM ushered in a new period of innovation in 1995 by officially relaxing performance management system requirements. Several agencies responded by implementing two popular private-sector practices: pass/fail systems and multi-rater, or 360-degree, programs (see "The Ratings Whirl", February).

The pass/fail system saves time and paper, and it eliminates complaints and grievances arising from the previous gradations of successful performance and their consequences.

The 360-degree concept, under which employees are rated not only by their managers but by their co-workers as well, has proved useful in organizations that have adopted team-based management.

The Education Department, plagued by severe employee discontent with the established performance appraisal system, worked with the American Federation of Government Employees to devise a system combining pass/fail and 360-degree ratings features. After a year, department HR officials believe that painstaking preparation and constant monitoring are producing an effective system.

"There seems to be a high level of satisfaction pretty much across the board," says John Allen, the department's director of personnel policy. "Raters are pleased that it takes only a few minutes to do the ratings with the help of the software they were trained to use. But we have to be sure that standards and criteria are understood by all. For instance, if we see inconsistencies between scores and comments, we go back and question the raters," he cautions.

Recognition and awards systems are vital to effective performance management. With that in mind, many agencies are turning increasingly to cash and nonmonetary awards. The General Services Administration, for example, has developed the Fast Track system, which enables authorized
supervisors to order awards up to $2,500 with one phone call. Fast Track is available to all agencies using the GSA payroll and HR information system.

Another important component of performance management is a system for dealing with employees who do not perform adequately. The standard disciplinary process is notoriously unwieldy. In recent years, much progress has been made with alternative discipline programs, particularly in the Defense Department. The new approach, Van Mechelen says, "tries to change behavior, rather than punish wayward children."

Alternative discipline programs generally involve an employee acknowledgment of error or wrongdoing, a joint employee-manager plan for improvement, and a deferral of penalty conditioned on improved performance. The Naval Surface Warfare Center in Port Hueneme, Calif., which has had an alternative discipline program since 1988, reports that grievances have declined by 50 percent in that period.

A looming challenge for performance management, Cipolla says, is linking employee performance to the requirements of the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, which requires agencies to develop and implement strategic plans to measure the success or failure of their programs. Only a few agencies have begun to make that connection.

In the areas of classification, pay, hiring and performance management, many federal human resources professionals are experimenting with innovative approaches. Others, though, are laboring along with less than full knowledge of what is being tried and what works. They risk coming out on the losing end of the struggle for the future of their profession.

David Hornestay, a veteran of more than 20 years in federal personnel work, was a senior consultant to the National Academy of Public Administration on its report on overcoming human resources barriers.