Personnel Freedom

lmost every federal personnel officer remembers the day in January 1994 when Jim King, then the director of the Office of Personnel Management, hauled a wheelbarrow piled with 10,000 pages of the infamous Federal Personnel Manual (FPM) through OPM's Washington headquarters lobby to dump it in a nearby recycling truck. OPM then released a slimmed-down version that represented a significant streamlining of procedural guidance that had built up over 50 years.

"For many of you, this new document will be the sunset to some of the frustrations, anxieties and constraints of doing your work today," King told an audience of personnel specialists and federal managers. "It is also the sunrise of possibilities which will empower you to perform your job better."

The FPM's demise came at the same time as a number of other changes aimed at simplifying personnel procedures at agencies governed by Title 5 of the U.S. Code, which lays out the merit principles underlying the civil service and covers more than half the civilian workforce. For example, OPM abolished its centralized hiring system, giving agencies the power, within general guidelines, to operate their own systems. OPM also allowed agencies to design new performance and reward systems, and encouraged them to delegate as much personnel authority as possible to front-line supervisors.

In theory, it was a formula that promised more freedom and control for managers over hiring, promoting and firing employees. Give managers the necessary flexibility and authority, reform advocates said, and they will make better decisions than will headquarters officials or centralized personnel staff who are far removed from day-to-day operations.

In practice, though, deregulation and delegation have yet to affect many federal managers. Though there are pockets of encouraging news, the post-FPM world is rife with confusion, uncertainty and, in some cases, more requirements than existed before.

"There appears to be no strong consensus among managers, supervisors and personnelists on how much effect, if any, deregulation has had," OPM noted in a July 1998 report, Deregulation and Delegation of Human Resources Management Authority in the Federal Government. OPM also found that "much remains to be done before the [National Performance Review] goal of placing primary authority in the hands of line managers can be realized."

The fact that not all managers have felt the changes doesn't mean they aren't taking root, insists OPM Director Janice Lachance, who took over from King in 1997. "I'm not sure a manager is going to wake up one morning and realize that her world has changed," she says. "These are significant but small changes that occur, and I think we're only going to understand how sweeping they are when we have the time to pause and look back on them."

Old World Ways

The FPM was both liked and loathed. To managers, the document represented a morass of procedural hurdles dictating how personnel actions had to be processed. Seemingly simple requests--such as those for vacations, training and performance awards--had to meet extensive paperwork requirements. It could take months, for example, to process a bonus request. Similar rigid rules applied to hiring, promoting and firing employees, making it take far too long to make critical staffing decisions. To personnel staff charged with understanding the rules, however, the FPM represented order, predictability and a uniform way of making sure all personnel transactions complied with the law.

Although the FPM was treated by many officials at OPM and the Merit Systems Protection Board as though it had the force of official federal regulations, the contents actually were only interpretations of law. But having OPM-endorsed procedures in black and white provided a comfort level for personnel staff and helped ensure that managers and agencies didn't fall prey to grievances triggered, for example, by inappropriately handled disciplinary actions. That's why the FPM was known as "the safety blanket in loose leaf binders," Lachance says.

The trouble with this safety blanket was not only that it was 10,000 pages long, but also that departments had their own versions, as did many bureaus and even regional agency offices, creating a multi-tiered stack of frustrating rules. The first report of the National Performance Review in 1993 targeted the manual as an example of government gone wrong. "Year after year, layer after layer, the rules have piled up," the report noted. "Does this elaborate system work? No."

With reinvention efforts, the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act and technology advancements changing the way government does business, keeping the stodgy FPM would have dampened creativity and restrained agencies from designing more efficient, customer-focused systems, Lachance says. "Clearly the speed of change had overtaken the speed at which we could update and revise the FPM. It became an obsolete instrument."

Deregulation Takes Root

OPM's hope was that eliminating the FPM would spur agencies to review and pare down their own rules and tailor what remained to their unique missions. Agencies always had the power to streamline internal processes, but 10 years ago it wouldn't have occurred to most human resources officers to do so, notes a career OPM official, adding that reinvention and GPRA created a climate where people wanted to improve federal systems.

It wasn't easy, though. During the early days of reinvention, Liz Stroud, former human resources director for the Commerce Department and now a Maryland-based consultant, invited her senior staff and the department's 13 bureau personnel chiefs to a five-day retreat to discuss improving the personnel system. She asked them to come prepared with a list of critical tasks that had to be done by human resources staffers and a list of procedures that could be eliminated. But no one had any suggestions about what to do away with. "They kept asking, 'What do you want me to say?' " Stroud recalls, adding that it took a day and a half to convince them that some rules could go. "We were trying to undo a process that people, including myself, had lived with for their entire careers. We
had to reinvent our thought processes."

After in-depth internal reviews, many agencies dramatically cut their rules. The Interior Department abolished 80 percent of its procedural manual. The Health and Human Services Department eliminated nearly half of its 3,600 pages of requirements. The National Labor Relations Board cut its guidance from 710 pages to 310 pages.

Without such detailed directions, many human resources offices now depend primarily on the actual language of the Code of Federal Regulations and case law for guidance. In some agencies, personnel staff even refer managers directly to the CFR, which outlines Title 5 mandates in regulatory form. That way, managers can read as much flexibility into the legal requirements as they need and can be held directly accountable for their decisions.

For NLRB managers, most of whom are attorneys, deciphering CFR provisions is not a problem, says Sharlyn Grigsby, the agency's human resources director. But for managers and even personnel staffers without legal training, relying on the CFR hasn't always been easy.

"The abolishment of the FPM has only made regulations and requirements more confusing to the personnelists," notes a civilian Army manager who has worked on both sides of the personnel fence. From her experience, personnel staff haven't been adequately trained on where to find answers in the CFR and don't always provide correct information. "This ends up with bad feelings on both sides: the managers not confident with the personnelists' answers and the personnelists feeling abused by the managers." Focus group interviews by OPM suggest managers fear this confusion may lead to inconsistent interpretations of Title 5, ultimately creating inequities in the system.

Part of the problem is that federal personnel offices are trying to help agencies adapt to the new flexible way at the same time they're struggling to adjust to their own reduced staffing levels. Between September 1993 and September 1997, the number of employees in civilian personnel offices across government fell by nearly 9,000, or 21 percent, according to a July General Accounting Office report (GGD-98-93). At some agencies, human resources staff cuts exceeded 40 percent. A smaller staff means fewer people to educate managers about changes.

Echoing the thoughts of personnel officials across government, Dave Anderson, chief of the plans and programs division at the Interior Department's Office of Personnel Policy, says the results of deregulation have been a "mixed bag." Deregulation has "opened our eyes to flexibilities and got us reading the laws again," he says. But guidance for personnel specialists and managers in lieu of the FPM has been too slow in coming, he admits.

Re-Regulation

Despite genuine efforts at deregulation, there's a sense among many human resources officials and managers that the benefit brought by the FPM's elimination has been at least partially offset by new requirements. For example, as OPM noted in its July report, they complain about regulations related to the Interagency Career Transition Assistance Plan, a program designed to help displaced federal workers find new government jobs. Some also say new family-oriented policies have brought more complexity to the system.

An even greater complaint involves new requirements created by union-management partnership agreements forged under a 1993 executive order. "The more you allow managers flexibility and discretion, the louder the union will call for more procedures and protections," says Ray Woolner, an IRS manager on leave this year to serve as president of the Professional Managers Association. Woolner says managers are not adequately represented at the partnership negotiating table.

New requirements are especially burdensome at agencies that have resisted change altogether. According to Lachance, some agencies simply have kept their versions of the FPM, in effect holding on to the old bureaucracy. More than 20 percent of human resources directors surveyed by OPM said their agencies had added rules, policies and practices since the FPM was abolished.

Delegation Developments

OPM began delegating authority to agency human resources offices--with some of those offices, in turn, redelegating to managers--long before President Clinton took office. But not until the dawn of the reinvention era did OPM make it a priority to urge agencies, especially those that had never delegated personnel authority, to pass more control down the chain of command.

Still, of the more than 100 possible general delegations, most have been for things such as staffing, training and performance management, with relatively little for classification or disciplinary actions. In other words, managers still don't have as much control as they'd like over staff salaries or poor performers.

Defense Department agencies have passed on far more authority to supervisors than have non-DoD agencies, according to OPM. One telling example: 75 percent of DoD agencies report giving supervisors complete hiring authority, while only 20 percent of non-DoD agencies do. In most agencies, for example, supervisors can only recommend that a candidate be hired for a job. Although their recommendations are usually honored by the personnel office, the fact that they don't have final say frustrates many managers.

Agencies that haven't redelegated have various motivations. A bureau in one department, for example, hasn't wanted to relinquish budget control over personnel issues to managers, notes a department-level human resources official, because managers tend to be more generous in approving awards than do personnel staffers. At other agencies, delegation simply hasn't made sense. "You can talk theory all day long, but you must look at what's feasible and practical," says one agency human resources director. Managers already are overwhelmed with work, and the agency's budget won't allow them to be adequately trained on personnel matters, she says.

Indeed, with downsized staffs and increased supervisory ratios, many managers view their new authorities as more headache than help. "People tell me, 'I signed on to be a leader of technicians and wound up being a time keeper, leave approver, everything but a facilitator of the business I'm here to manage,' " Woolner says.

Some managers even predict an adverse impact on government service. "[The] more personnel and administrative requirements are transferred to the first-line supervisors, the less time they have for providing technical direction to their workforce and monitoring the results," says a civilian Navy manager. "This can only lead to a downward trend in quality and productivity."

Bright Spots

Managers may still feel too constricted by personnel rules, but there have been significant, if subtle, improvements. At HHS, for example, Senior Executive Service appointments for operating divisions such as the Food and Drug Administration used to be made by senior department officials. Now, each operating division has an SES allotment and can make its own selections. In the old days it took between nine months and two years to hire or promote a senior executive, says Mary Babcock, FDA director of human resources and management services. Today, promotions occur in five days and recruitment takes only a month.

At Commerce, managers requesting a performance award for an employee used to submit a recommendation to personnel staff, who usually returned it for revisions based on FPM requirements. Sometimes requests traveled back and forth for months before receiving final approval. Most managers now have the authority to approve awards. A similar change at FDA has sped up incentive award processing time from six weeks to no more than four days.

Lachance wants managers who've received new authority to use it. She also wants feedback on the changes and encourages managers and supervisors to call OPM or e-mail her directly at lachance@opm.gov. "For those who haven't gotten [more authority] yet, push back until you get it," she says. "Now that we've gotten it out horizontally to all of the agencies, we have to push it down vertically so that everyone can benefit from this."

Katy Saldarini provided additional reporting for this story.