Virginia lawmaker suggests bottom-up approach to pay reform
Employees are more likely to buy into a new pay system if they have a say in its development, Connolly says.
Early collaboration with employee groups is critical to building successful pay-for-performance systems, said Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., during a breakfast in Washington on Thursday.
Close consultation with focus groups and employee representatives helped move Fairfax County in Virginia from a complicated and rigid pay arrangement where employees received cost-of-living increases that some viewed as entitlements to a flexible system where pay was linked more closely to job performance and salaries for comparable jobs in the private sector, Connolly said during the panel discussion, organized by Government Executive. The new system has guidelines for evaluating employees' work and clear procedures for employees to air grievances, he said.
"We didn't impose it from the top down," said Connolly, who was on the county's board of supervisors for 14 years, and was chairman of the board for five years before being elected to Congress in 2008.
But Connolly, who represents a district in Northern Virginia with 56,000 federal employees, noted that due to differences in size and culture, the federal government should not follow Fairfax County's model precisely.
Connolly and fellow panelist Jon Desenberg, consulting director for The Performance Institute, both said an inability to measure performance at the individual and agency levels has held back personnel reforms. Previously, Desenberg ran the General Services Administration's performance management system.
"Sometimes in the government, we fall into the trap of measuring what is easy to measure," Connolly said. Performance measurement has been a roadblock to expanding telework, he said.
"There's a cultural barrier that managers believe, if I can't see you, then you must be watching soap operas or walking the dog," Connolly said.
During a wide-ranging discussion about the federal workforce, Connolly also said the government must create more flexibility for workers to move in and out of public service, focus on internship programs to recruit young workers, and investigate allowing retirees to work temporarily as consultants to help train their replacements.
Human resources departments lost their edge as they hired fewer people during the government cutbacks of the 1990s, according to Desenberg. "If you stop the [hiring] process for a couple of years, you're going to forget how to do it," he said.
He said the process of applying for positions through USAJobs.gov, the government's hiring Web site, can be cumbersome and irks both managers and applicants. "[Managers] don't feel that they're getting the best candidates," Desenberg said.