Evaluating the Flexible Workforce

I had an interesting lunch yesterday with Anne Weisberg and Naomi Leventhal of consulting firm Deloitte, which is conducting an assessment of OPM's Results Only Work Environment pilot project. Almost 400 employees are involved in the project, under which the agency says that in general, they can work "whenever they want and wherever they want."

Deloitte is under contract to evaluate both employee performance and morale under the project. It already has conducted baseline assessments and is now in the process of periodically evaluating the results of the implementation.

That's no simple task, because the pilot covers a wide range of positions in retirement and benefits processing, human resources solutions, communications, and the office of OPM Director John Berry. Performance levels in some of the jobs, such as processing, are relatively easy to measure, while others -- such as HR solutions, which is essentially a consulting practice -- are more difficult to gauge.

Much is riding on Deloitte's assessment. Berry is strongly committed to the effort -- witness the fact that his own office is among the pilot participants -- and you can bet that if the assessment shows positive results, agencies will be under a lot pf pressure to implement such programs more widely. It'll be very interesting to watch how that plays out. Government is very fond of pilot programs, but its track record in taking such programs to wide-scale implementation is a lot more mixed. Remember how long the Defense Department conducted pay-for-performance pilot projects before trying to implement a departmentwide system? The time was measured in decades.