Local government offers pay-for-performance lessons

If pay-for-performance is going government-wide, as Office of Personnel Management director John Berry reportedly says it will, federal agencies should heed the advice of a veteran of such a process.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) says several lessons learned by OPM and other agencies should be considered before changing the government-wide pay system.

"Agencies will have to go slow," says Connolly, who as chairman of the Fairfax County, Va. Board of Supervisors led an effort to move 12,000 county employees to a pay-for-performance system. "We started with a pilot and asked 'what could go wrong and how can we deal with it.'"

Connolly says Fairfax County spent two years convening focus groups of employees and managers, and task forces of experts and stakeholder representatives to ensure they developed a system that would work.

"We adjusted along the way," he says. "Any system must be credible so employees have faith that you've done everything you can to minimize subjectivity in employee evaluations. And should the employee feel like they haven't been treated fairly, there is a clear appeals process that is fair, equitable and their concerns will be heard."

Connolly spoke Thursday about the changes needed across the federal human resources system during a panel discussion in Washington sponsored by Government Executive magazine.

Over the past decade, agency success with moving employees to a new pay system has been mixed. For instance, the Government Accountability Office is using pay banding and it generally receives good reviews. But the Defense Department's National Security Personnel System (NSPS) is on the other end of the spectrum where the program did not fair as well as expected.

DoD and OPM created an advisory board to decide how to move forward with NSPS. The board's first public meeting is June 25.

Jon Desenberg, a senior consulting director with Performance Institute, says DoD made a few big mistakes with NSPS.

"DoD tried to move out too fast and NSPS was a too political," Desenberg says. "They were trying to cram a lot of issues into the system that did not fit into pay-for-performance."

He adds that despite NSPS's shortfalls, there is support in DoD to keep moving out with the system as long as the Obama administration fixes the problems.

Desenberg says any new attempt across the government first must separate pay from performance.

"We need to come up with what are good performance metrics," he says. "We need three to five of them. There is a big misperception of what a performance measure is."

Desenberg says NSPS managers were not given the proper training to come up with quality performance measures.

"You can't do both pay and performance at once," he says. "It was much too much and too soon with NSPS. You have figure out performance and slowly work pay into it over time."

Connolly and Desenberg both believe pay-for-performance is one piece to a larger puzzle of how the federal HR system needs to be improved.

Connolly says federal human resources processes need to be modernized, meaning more flexible schedules, telework options and non-monetary incentives to make sure employees know they are valued. These incentives could include child care, gym memberships or other similar benefits, he says.

Desenberg says while much has been said about the arduous federal hiring process, agencies need to improve how they retain workers as well.

He points to the Veterans Affairs Department as an example of an agency doing a good job in recruiting nurses, but missed the mark on retention. He says a large percentage of nurses left after 18-24 months. VA did not do enough to ensure these workers were retained.

"Retention is a long term indicator, you have to keep your eye on people," he says. "Whereas recruiting is a human resource issue, keeping people is more of a business issues. It's not under direct control of human capital office. It's more complicated and it involves more culture issues and that is where the problem is."

Desenberg says the retention issue is part of a bigger issue: the government should treat management as its own career.

"Performance metrics around management needs to be emphasized," he says.

Many of these changes can be done by OPM at the policy or regulation level, Connolly says. But Congress also is watching to see where it can jump in from a legislative perspective, he adds.

-----

On the Web:

FederalNewsRadio - Analysis: What OPM's Berry is doing right in Pay for Performance

FederalNewsRadio - Robert Tobias on Measuring the Performance of Pay for Performance

FederalNewsRadio - Joint review holds future for NSPS

(Copyright 2009 by FederalNewsRadio.com. All Rights Reserved.)