An article (free registration required) in today's Washington Post discusses the challenge facing the federal government's pay-for-performance drive.
Yesterday, for example, the head of the General Services Administration, Lurita A. Doan, spent much of the morning before a House committee looking at whether she violated the 1939 Hatch Act, which was designed to protect government workers from partisan politics.
The House panel focused on what Doan had said about the job performance of some GSA political appointees. The hearing case as Congress investigates the firing of U.S. attorneys and reviews bonuses awarded by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
To be sure, the GSA, Justice and VA cases are different and are swept up in the political maneuvering between the Bush administration and congressional Democrats. But they could fuel skepticism among many federal employees that job-rating systems can be administered in an impartial manner.
The credibility of performance-management systems, as they are called, will be especially important as the government moves closer to private-sector compensation practices that give managers more discretion in setting salaries. The Pentagon is spending about $65 million to create a more rigorous system for evaluating employees and linking their job ratings to pay raises and bouses. When completed, it could be a model for the rest of the government.
Knowing, as many of you do, that trust and transparency are essential to the success of any pay-for-performance initiative, it is difficult not to share some of the above mentioned skepticism. Yet, I don't believe that throwing in the towel and returning to a tenure/time-in-job based system is in our country's best interests either. It may simply be a struggle which must be pursued for every increment of positive progress that can be achieved.
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