Pay-for-performance

The current federal pay system does not sufficiently reward employees who do exceptional work, according to House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va.

"Managers, who are held accountable for what happens in their department, have got to make sure that they have a team underneath them that is performing," Davis said Wednesday at a lunch sponsored by the Partnership for Public Service.

The government's seniority system discourages good people from staying in the federal workplace and creates a safe haven for poor performers, the lawmaker said. But while pay-banding and pay-for-performance measures may be more attractive than the current structure, implementing them "is a more difficult matter," he said.

"I think the administration starts out with a couple of strikes against them in terms of the suspicions among a lot of federal employees," Davis said. "But somebody has to evaluate what people do somewhere along the line."

Under pay-banding, the 15 grades of the General Schedule could be whittled down to four or five salary ranges. This system would give managers more freedom to set salaries than they do under the General Schedule, which limits managers to 10 salary options in each grade. Some readers welcomed pay-banding:

• "Good supervisors can use the flexibility to better reward their highest performers. In contrast to the rigid time-in-grade restrictions in the General Schedule, it now takes much less time for a new, hard-charging employee to rise to the higher pay bands. Salary increases can permit us to stay (more) competitive with the private sector, resulting in less resignations to accept higher paying corporate jobs," said an Army civilian employee.
• "One problem with the current pay system is that peak performers cannot be rewarded for the true value of their contribution to the organization. As it is now, we are locked into rigid grade structure, and limited to 10 steps per grade. Once you reach Step 10, there is no way to be rewarded other than promotion. For an individual that either does not wish to be in management, or that does not fit the current mold for those type positions, there is little incentive to excel, other than personal pride. This situation leads to late career apathy among many senior nonmanagement civil servants," said an Air Force program analyst.
• "The existing rigid structure rewards length of service, not performance. The fear that managers will reward some more than others is the whole idea. Managers will reward the ones who carry the workload and are dependable. Employees who are just doing the minimal to get their job done will also be minimally rewarded. Folks, the train has left the station, let's get on board," noted a Navy civilian employee.

But pay-banding usually goes hand-in-glove with new performance appraisal systems, and most readers expressed concern over managers' subjectivity in the evaluation process.

• "The view of the performance evaluation system by the general federal workforce is that the system has little value. We know that all managers' expectations are not equal (they are people, too). Consequently, one manager might think a level of performance is outstanding and worthy of a monetary award while another manager views the same performance level as adequate and not worthy of recognition. It is difficult to imagine that an equitable 'pay-for-performance' system could be achieved," an employee from the National Institutes of Health wrote.
• "In government service, it is seldom that standards for performance are written in a format which is measurable, objective, and nonambiguous, or understood in the same way by employees and their supervisors. If the standards are not written in such a format, the employee has difficulty in understanding what is required for superior performance-which should be the goal- and difficulty proving inequity if an unexpected performance rating is received," said one government employee.
• "There will always be problems in performance appraisals systems when the human factor is added. If an employee and supervisor have issues between them, the supervisor could use paybanding against the employee," said an employee at the Naval Sea Systems Command.

According to Davis, people who do a good job should not fear pay-for-performance measures.

"We have a lot of good people out there who put their life into this, who are there on Saturdays and after hours and everything else, and they ought to feel that there is a reward for that," Davis said. "I think sometimes in this [current] reward system, they don't get that, and so sometimes people leave."