Month: May 2019

News

Where Have all the Classifiers Gone?

by Jeff Neal3 Comments on Where Have all the Classifiers Gone?

When today’s General Schedule was created by the Classification Act of 1949, most federal workers were clerks, with more than half of the workforce serving at grades GS-5 and below. Agencies had offices full of Position Classification Specialists, most of whom were GS-9 and GS-11. The General Schedule ranged from GS-1 to GS-18. The “super grades (GS-16, 17 and 18) were abolished by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and replaced by the Senior Executive Service. The intent was to provide employees with equal pay for substantially equal work. It provided structure so the government could manage pay in a way that was fact-based and manageable.

In the 70 years since the Classification Act, the federal workforce has shifted dramatically. The clerks who made up more than half of the workforce are mostly gone. Just over 106,000 clerks remain in a workforce of 2.1 million. Only 129,000 employees are GS-5 and below. Most of the lower graded work has been eliminated by automation. Some has been outsourced. This clearly is not your father’s or grandmother’s civil service. As the work has shifted, grades have crept up to the point where traditional job classification is almost a thing of the past.

That’s a good thing, because finding a good classifier is next to impossible. Few people do classification work as their primary job. Those offices full of Position Classification Specialists have been replaced by generalists who often have very little classification expertise. A 2011 Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) survey showed less than 3 percent of federal Human Resources Specialists reported pending more than half their time on classification. In the past eight years that number has certainly gone down.

The demise of the position classifier is intertwined with the demise of classification as an art, and the lack of interest most agencies have in accurate classification. Like many of the negative aspects of the federal HR environment, this one can be traced back to the gutting of federal HR by the National Performance Review during the Clinton Administration, and the misuse of automated tools that were supposed to assist rather than supplant the judgment of HR Specialists.

At the same time HR offices were being cut in half, agencies and the private sector began building automated tools to help with classification work. Starting as position description libraries, they morphed into pseudo-classification systems that managers and HR Specialists could use to back into the grade levels they wanted. Rather than writing a description of the work that needed to be done, they could say what grade level they wanted and the system would tell them the words they needed to put on paper to get there. As use of those tools grew, demand for classifiers dropped and interest in classification as a line of work diminished. Ask any HR manager today how easy it is to find an experienced classifier and s/he will most likely just laugh.

So what has been the result? A recent article in MSPB’s Issues of Merit asked “Are Federal Employee Position Descriptions Accurate?” MSPB cited a 2016 study where 30 percent of federal workers said their job descriptions were not accurate. I think even that number is low. Employees get concerned about the accuracy of their job descriptions when they believe their job is under-graded. MSPB reported that much of the inaccuracy stems from agency overuse of standard job descriptions. While standard position descriptions are very useful when agencies have large numbers of substantially similar jobs, overusing them can result in job descriptions that are a mix of fantasy and reality.

MSPB cited a second problem — lack of adequate classification advice, as another cause of inaccurate job descriptions. MSPB said ” … only 58 percent of agency leaders said they received assistance in classifying positions from their servicing HR office to a moderate or great extent, while 17 percent said they did not receive such assistance at all.”

A third problem that MSPB did not address was deliberate over grading. Agencies rely on misclassification of jobs to compete for talent. The National Capital Region (NCR) is a great example of how rampant over grading is driven by the completion for talent. The District of Columbia alone has 140,000 federal workers, with 90,000 at grades GS-12, GS-13, GS-14 and GS-15. There are more than 47,000 GS-14s and GS-15s. Some people look at that and assume that it is that way because this is the seat of government and the classification system was designed that way. Sounds good, but it is not true. Take a look at the statutory (5 U. S. Code 5104) descriptions of those grades:

GS — 14 includes those classes of positions the duties of which are —
(A) to perform, under general administrative direction, with wide latitude for the exercise of independent judgment, work of exceptional difficulty and responsibility along special technical, supervisory, or administrative lines which has demonstrated leadership and unusual attainments;
(B) to serve as head of a major organization within a bureau involving work of comparable level;
(C) to plan and direct or to plan and execute major professional, scientific, technical, administrative, fiscal, or other specialized programs, requiring extended training and experience which has demonstrated leadership and unusual attainments in professional, scientific, or technical research, practice, or administration, or in administrative, fiscal, or other specialized activities; or
(D) to perform consulting or other professional, scientific, technical, administrative, fiscal, or other specialized work of equal importance, difficulty, and responsibility, and requiring comparable qualifications.
GS — 15 includes those classes of positions the duties of which are —
(A) to perform, under general administrative direction, with very wide latitude for the exercise of independent judgment, work of outstanding difficulty and responsibility along special technical, supervisory, or administrative lines which has demonstrated leadership and exceptional attainments;
(B) to serve as head of a major organization within a bureau involving work of comparable level;
(C) to plan and direct or to plan and execute specialized programs of marked difficulty, responsibility, and national significance, along professional, scientific, technical, administrative, fiscal, or other lines, requiring extended training and experience which has demonstrated leadership and unusual attainments in professional, scientific, or technical research, practice, or administration, or in administrative, fiscal, or other specialized activities; or
(D) to perform consulting or other professional, scientific, technical, administrative, fiscal, or other specialized work of equal importance, difficulty, and responsibility, and requiring comparable qualifications.
We do not have 47,000 jobs in the District of Columbia that fit those descriptions. What we have is a labor market where people have to over grade the jobs to compete for talent. Take Human Resources work as an example. During the 1950s and 1960s, HR Specialists in the field were mostly GS-9s, while those in the NCR were GS-11. Then they went up to GS-11 in the field and GS-12 in the NCR. Now more than half of HR specialists in the District of Columbia are GS-13 and GS-14. One in ten are GS-15. The work has not changed so much that it supports those grades, but try classifying most of your HR Specialists at GS-12 and see how long you can hold on to them. The same has happened in other occupations as well. Competition for talent drove agencies to not care about either the accuracy of job descriptions or job classifications that actually match the classification standards and the law.
The public position of most senior HR executives is that they classify jobs accurately. The private response is acceptance of the need to compete and doing what it takes to allow them to hire the talent they need. At the same time, OPM cannot keep classification standards up to date because they lack the resources to do it, and most agencies are wasting money on a process where they pretend to accurately classify the jobs. Is it any wonder federal workers doubt the HR system is working? If we no longer have fact-based classification, how can it be managed properly? How can the government determine what levels of pay are competitive with the private sector if much of the data is based on bogus job descriptions? What is comparable pay? It is clear that the system is not working. Or maybe it works, but only by breaking the rules.
Clearly it is time to rewrite those rules. If we want accurate job descriptions and pay that conforms to the law, and we want some basis for comparing federal pay with the private sector, agencies need a functioning classification process that is rooted in reality rather than in the inflexible approach our parents and grandparents used in 1949 for a workforce that no longer exists.
News

Dismantling the Argument for Dismantling OPM

by Jeff Neal1 Comment on Dismantling the Argument for Dismantling OPM

Former Office of Personnel Management Director Linda Springer systematically dismantled the argument for doing away with OPM during her testimony on Tuesday afternoon before the House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee. Springer, who served as OPM Director from June 2005 – August 2008, methodically built a case for revitalizing OPM rather than dismantling it. The testimony was remarkable in its directness, avoiding the pablum, sugarcoating and coded language that is common in government. She said “I also believe this proposal is not a presidential initiative, but rather the culmination of years of intent by OMB, spanning administrations of both political parties, to acquire ownership of personnel management policy from OPM.”

Her full written statement is here. Ms. Springer’s views on the proposal are significant because she is a longtime republican, a President George W. Bush-appointed OPM Director, and she worked for the Trump transition and as an advisor during the early days of the Administration.

Her conclusion was that, while OPM has strengths and weaknesses and some significant problems that must be corrected, the solution is to fix OPM rather than abolishing it. Here is a summary from her statement:

Like other departments and agencies, OPM needs to refocus on its core statutory mission and original intent. It needs to eliminate functions that are duplicative, obsolete, low value or peripheral to its mission. This was the essence of the federal government reform program that was launched early in this Administration. I led the initial months of that initiative when I served as Senior Advisor to the management area of OMB. I can confidently say that what has emerged as the OPM reorganization plan was never in view during my tenure, nor would it have seen the light of day.

OPM has always had deep federal personnel policy knowledge and subject matter expertise. Many of OPM’s responsibilities are executed reliably and accurately. Remarkably, over the past year since the announcement of the plan to carve up their agency, OPM employees have continued their dedicated service. However, OPM must finally evolve from its reputation of sluggish service delivery and antiquated technology. In some instances, this profile is very real and in others it is mostly a perception. It really doesn’t matter which is the case. OPM’s services need to become more visionary and innovative in content as well as delivery. It needs to incorporate such techniques as predictive analytics to anticipate the personnel management demands of the future and move to a proactive, rather than reactive, posture.

Ms. Springer supported the move of background investigations to the Department of Defense, but did not agree with moving OPM’s fee-for-service work to the General Services Administration. She was particularly critical of the idea of moving workforce policy to the Office of Management and Budget, saying “The proposal places federal personnel policy setting right back in a place where the spoils and patronage system had taken hold. At best the optics are terrible. But even worse is the opportunity it creates for enabling a return to unfair personnel practices. Mechanisms for appealing such practices would still exist, but why create a situation that retreats from the statutory safeguard of having personnel policy set in an independent agency?”

Linda Springer is not a bomb thrower. She is not the type of person who would take a stand so strongly without having deeply held convictions that it is the right thing to do. Some would argue that former OPM Directors are mostly very protective of the agency and its people, but in this case I believe there is more to Ms. Springer’s testimony than loyalty to her former colleagues and agency. She is pushing back hard against a proposal from an Administration she served, and most likely harming relationships with the White House in the process. At the beginning of her testimony Ms. Springer said “As a retired individual with no employment relationships, I have no other motivation and do not stand to gain in any way from the ultimate outcome of these deliberations. My insights are based on fifteen years of leading and advising federal agencies. As the director of the agency that is the target of the reorganization proposal, OPM, the controller and head of the Office of Federal Financial Management at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and a senior advisor to the OMB management area, as well as years of assisting agency management leaders as an outside advisor, I have credible, relevant experience behind the things I’m going to share with you.”

Earlier in the hearing, Acting OPM Director Margaret Weichert made the case that OPM’s financial status is perilous, which I believe is an accurate assessment. She argued that OPM’s mission is too critical to risk failure, which is also true. Other witnesses and members of the Committee argued that the Administration is trying to dismantle the civil service. After my own discussions with Ms. Weichert, I believe she is acting in good faith and without malice toward the civil service or federal workers.

I also believe the proposal needed far more work before it saw the light of day. At this point the extensive due diligence we would expect to see with a proposal of this magnitude is missing. Although I think there is virtually nothing the Administration could say that would convince both the House and Senate to support abolishing OPM, a much better case could be made for moving some of the fee-for service work to GSA. A strong argument can be made that it presents a conflict of interest to make policy and then sell services and provide oversight of those policies and services. Policy and oversight go together and are the core mission of OPM. Among the fee-based services, one could make a good case that OPM’s outstanding leader development training (such as the Federal Executive Institute) is so closely related to the core mission that it belongs in OPM as well. The same case could be made for other services such as running USAJobs. Selling routine human capital consulting services is different. GSA leads government shared services efforts, and has a strong track record on selling services of various types. GSA could effectively bundle and sell shared services that include human capital, most likely via a mix of contractor and government resources. It already manages the HCATS contract vehicle. Such a move would eliminate any hint of an organizational conflict of interest and would allow OPM to focus on its vital core mission.

At this point, any legislative movement to authorize dismantling OPM is most likely dead in the water. The real question is what Congress and the Administration will do next. Will they address OPM’s financial weaknesses? Will they plus up the appropriated dollars or increase fees to agencies to put OPM on a sound financial footing? Will OPM become more modern in its thinking,  eliminate the bureaucratic hurdles that delay policy development, and embrace a more flexible approach to workforce policy? Will they listen to agencies more and become more responsive to the mission needs of their customers? If those things do not happen, this discussion will happen over and over until something breaks. That is not in the best interest of a merit-based civil service any more than moving workforce policy to the White House would be.