Seeking Systemic Change

any observers say that the key to recruiting and retaining high-performing leaders and a talented, diverse workforce is overhauling the federal civil service system.

When Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review began cutting red tape in 1993, one of the areas Gore's reinventors saw ripe for reform was the civil service. "To create an effective federal government, we must reform virtually the entire personnel system: recruitment, hiring, classification, promotion, pay and reward systems," NPR's 1993 report recommended.

While some processes have been deregulated and simplified administratively by the Office of Personnel Management since 1993, many of the fundamental reforms NPR called for never materialized. Because much of the civil service system is codified in laws dating back to the 1883 Pendleton Act and carrying through the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, it would take acts of Congress to make big changes. But an NPR-led effort in 1994 and 1995 to push through civil service reform failed to garner support on Capitol Hill.

So managers still complain that it's difficult to deal with poor performers, employees don't feel like they are rewarded for their contributions and applicants lament the long and winding road they must walk to obtain a federal job. In one finding that seems counter to the anti-patronage goals of the civil service, the Merit Systems Protection Board discovered from a recent survey that the number one way people find out about jobs in the federal government is through relatives and friends.

But after a four year lapse, NPR--now the National Partnership for Reinventing Government--has again set its sights on the federal personnel system, though this time the effort is being called "civil service improvement," rather than full-fledged reform.

Administration officials worry that the word "reform" harbors too many negative connotations. Plus, they want to keep intact the civil service's basic merit principles--none of the proposals being floated by NPR touch the redress system federal employees follow when they believe merit principles have been violated.

The cornerstones of NPR's new effort are pay for performance and delegation of authority. NPR Director Morley Winograd says civil service statutes should be rewritten to establish the basic values of the federal personnel system, yet allow agencies to work out the details that best meet their staffing needs.

"We can write a set of statutes that are sufficiently empowering so agencies can tailor a system that makes their agency work best, and still retain protections of the interests of individuals," Winograd says.

The administration would also like to develop a performance management system that creates incentives for managers to take responsibility for program outcomes, rather than for successfully completing the technical requirements of job descriptions. The current system's attempt to scientifically set expectations and measure performance doesn't really work, reformers argue.

"There's an overemphasis on making sure everybody gets treated exactly the same," Winograd says. "You can retain that merit principle of making sure people are treated equitably and still allow for greater differences in compensation based upon contribution to the success of government operations."

New Comptroller General David M. Walker has joined in the chorus of civil service reformers. In a recent speech, Walker pointed out that Congress has enacted reforms to the government's systems of financial management, procurement, information technology management and strategic planning, but has yet to address human resources.

The main problem is the federal job classification system, says Mark Abramson, director of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for the Business of Government. The most effective leadership development happens on the job, Abramson says. But rigid and narrow position descriptions for government jobs, along with a General Schedule system that requires people to apply for promotions rather than grow into new responsibilities, hinders on-the-job development.

"We need to broaden the concept of leadership development to include job enlargement," Abramson says. "Job enlargement is giving people more responsibility and giving people room to grow. It's also related to mobility. The way people grow is through new experiences and new jobs. But the present civil service system is based on rank-in-job, meaning you're only what your job is classified as. So if you're a GS-12 and you want to be a GS-13, with more responsibilities, you have to apply for a new job to grow."

Abramson points to the military and foreign service personnel systems as models for reforming the classification system to make it easier to develop people. Those systems are based on rank-in-person, which means a person's rank moves with them from job to job. That makes it easier to move people around so they are exposed to more challenges, Abramson says. Broad-banding--simplifying the 15-grade, 10-steps-per-grade General Schedule into four or fewer pay bands--would also give managers more flexibility to compensate people for taking on various levels of responsibility.

But such fundamental changes may have to wait until a new administration, observers say. It tends to be difficult to enact major reforms in the waning years of a presidency. Congress has shown almost no interest in the subject this year. And even within the bureaucracy, labor unions have dragged their feet on civil service reform since Gore first announced NPR's new focus on the civil service in January.

The unions first want to see the administration make good on a promise to force agencies to increase the scope of labor-management bargaining. Federal managers, meanwhile, have protested the expansion of bargaining rights. Winograd has decided to settle that dispute before moving on to civil service changes.

But even if NPR does proceed with civil service changes before the end of the Clinton administration, it can expect strong criticism of its ideas.

For example, more delegation of personnel authority to managers worries some observers, who say that even in the present system merit principles are routinely ignored.

Twylah Jagielo, a member of the NAACP's Federal Task Force and an employee of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis, worries that the culture of the federal government is not conducive to delegation of authority. Employees do not trust their managers to make decisions based on merit, she says, and the climate of diversity must improve before managers are awarded more power.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis is experimenting with reforms similar to NPR's proposals under a personnel demonstration project. "Such flexibilities raise questions about accountability," Jagielo says.

Broad-banding has its share of critics as well, not the least of whom is Diane Disney, head of civilian personnel policy for the Defense Department, where broad-banding has been tested at several locations.

"All the pay-banding systems have raised costs," Disney says. "On balance, people would rather get more money than less. The problem is not the classification system, but the inflated rating system."

Disney would like to see changes to the government's performance evaluation process. Managers complain about the quality of some of their employees, yet few can say that they've given any of their workers less than a fully successful rating in the last five years.

"You can't use the argument that everyone is above average and then say there's all this dead wood," Disney says.

Abramson suggests that all civil service watchers start preparing ideas for improving the government's ability to recruit and retain effective leaders and employees over the next two years, so the next administration can be presented with a case for civil service reform. The Office of Personnel Management has already taken Abramson's advice; it has recently begun a study of the total compensation package for federal employees, due to be completed by 2001. And Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs is scheduled to release a report on civil service reform this month, following a conference on the subject funded by Abramson's endowment.