The last few weeks have seen a direct offensive launched against pay for performance efforts underway across federal government agencies, including a letter from a group of eight committee and subcommittee chairmen to White House budget chief Peter Orszag asking for a government-wide halt in the expansion of merit pay.
More on this, including my take, in a post at the Compensation Cafe today.
Amen! Amen! Amen!
It is madness to think that federal entities that have spent so much time and energy in developing pay-for-performance under bipartisan Congressional guidelines should now go backwards to the old GS system in order to go forward!
And its also madness to think that the current Congress who has at best a spotty record for designing federal pay-for-performance should even think themselves qualified to regulate private sector pay-for-performance!
But let’s not paint so broad a brush on this issue to ignore the few federal entities that have had success with pay-for-performance. A handful of federal entities have been selected to the balanced scorecard hall of fame organized by Kaplan and Norton. Pay for the Senior Executive Service has been administered under solid pay-for-performance principles for 4 years. The US Postal Service has had an award winning pay-for-performance program for its 70,000+ white collar employees for 14 years and counting, and has results on a balanced scorecard of performance metrics to show PFP works (see this WorldatWork Journal article by Schuster, Weatherhead and Zingheim: http://www.worldatwork.org/waw/adimLink?id=16925&nonav=yes).
Fortunately, there are a handful of us federal bureaucrats who still feel that pay-for-performance can work in the federal sector; although these days we feel more like Don Quixote tilting at windmills!
Posted by: Paul Weatherhead | April 22, 2009 at 10:42 AM
hmmmm, it was a good information.
Posted by: juliashing | May 06, 2009 at 03:56 AM