Raise Resentment

The federal compensation culture may be in for a big change.

In February, after the Defense Department issued the framework for its revamped civilian personnel system-featuring a shift to broad, flexible pay bands rather than a rigid step-and-grade system-I received a lot of e-mail messages from civilian employees expressing emotions ranging from fear to anger.

"As a government employee for 22-plus years, I find myself more than a little frustrated," one Air Force worker wrote. "I take a great deal of pride in the work I do. The new personnel system seems to have more cons than pros for employees. A level playing field is always the preferred way to work with others. Those who are high performers are given awards with their appraisals. Changing the program will only cause anyone not getting raises to resent those who do."

That comment immediately raised a question in my mind, which I posed on Fedlog (http://www.govexec.com/fedlog), the Web log that I write for Government Executive's site, GovExec.com: How, exactly, will employees know what kind of raise the person working next to them gets?

Of course, I was aware that federal salaries are a matter of public record, and that in the government culture, people often identify themselves openly by their grade and step levels. Over here in the private sector, most people don't know exactly what their co-workers make, much less how big a raise they receive in any given year. The only way to know is to ask, and that's considered bad form.

Many companies have salary schedules that match positions, so you can get a general idea of what people make. But it's fairly rare in the private sector for people to talk openly about the raises and bonuses they receive in any given year. And I wondered whether the government culture might change in the move to a pay-banding system. So I asked readers to enlighten me on that point via e-mail.

Many folks took the opportunity to remind me that finding out the grade level and bonuses of your co-workers is as simple as filing a Freedom of Information Act request. (Or even simpler: Let's just say that more than one person noted that The Washington Post helpfully makes this information available in a database on its Web site.) And agencies themselves are often fairly open about compensation issues; many, for example, make a big public show of annual incentive awards granted to employees.

This situation clearly emboldens a lot of workers to grill their fellow employees about their pay. "Believe me, federal employees know exactly what people in their section or branch or division are making," wrote one Defense employee. "Bad form to ask? Maybe, but a lot of people ask." Some employees try to brush off the snoops. A first-line supervisor with 36 years of government service wrote, "Each year, I advise my employees to resist the temptation to respond to co-workers' questions about their awards. I have even suggested they have three choices: to say 'no comment,' to change the subject or to lie."

But there are indications that things operate differently under pay-banding systems. A Navy employee who has been in a pay-for-performance demonstration project for 20 years wrote, "You're absolutely correct about co-workers openly discussing individual salaries-it just isn't normally brought up. Whereas, we may know which pay band a co-worker is in, we are typically not aware of where within the pay band they lie. Sometimes, the gap between a junior employee in the pay band and a 'topped out' individual is more than $30,000. And we certainly don't divulge our annual performance ratings."

An FAA employee chimed in, "I can speak from my experience with pay banding, that no one really discloses their pay anymore, since not all get the additional annual Superior Contribution Increase. When I worked at DoD, it was commonplace to discuss grade and step."

Federal pay is never going to be the kind of purely private matter it is in most private companies. But that doesn't mean the compensation culture will be as transparent as it is now, either. The structure of the pay system might not be the only thing that's about to change.