Tag: Civil Service Reform

Media, News, Opinion, Performance, Training

You’re Fired! and Other Federal Management Fantasies

by Jeff Neal1 Comment on You’re Fired! and Other Federal Management Fantasies

imageWith Agency Heads, members of Congress, pundits and others continuing to press the issue of making it easier to fire Federal workers (and thinking it will actually make a difference), I decided to rerun a post from last year. Nothing has changed and these proposals are not going to produce the kinds of benefits most people expect from them.

The recent news about the Department of Veterans Affairs has generated a lot of talk about performance – lack of it, failure to deal with problems, rating inflation, and so on. During a June 20th hearing of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, the VA revealed that none of its Senior Executives had gotten a rating below fully successful in the past 4 years. While that may seem shocking, the VA is not that out of the ordinary. Sub-par ratings for SES members are not common and firing them is even less common. Firing anyone in a management job is rare. There are a lot of reasons for that, including a selection process that weeds out unqualified applicants long before they could be selected and a lack of will to deal with problem employees.

The raw numbers of removals for employees below the SES level are higher, but overall there are not large numbers of supervisors and managers who get less than fully successful ratings.

The overall number of permanent Federal employees who have been fired in recent years is not large. A recent article in Federal Times cited numbers of 11,564 in FY 2009, 11,733 in FY 2010, 10,373 in FY 2011, 9,980 in FY 2012 and 9,513 in FY 2013. That ranges from a high of 0.57% of Federal employees fired in 2009 to a low of 0.46% in FY 2013. Those numbers may actually be a bit higher than true number of people fired for poor performance or misconduct, because they include people who were terminated because their appointments expired and for other reasons.

The Federal Times article points out the higher numbers of people fired from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA is exempt from most Federal employment laws as a result of authority it has in Section 111(d) of the aviation and Transportation Security Act) and the higher numbers of people at lower grades (particularly GS-5) who are fired. The high number of GS-5s is not surprising. More people enter Federal service at the GS-5 level than any other grade and, as new employees, they are much more likely to be let go. GS-5s also represent the largest number of resignations of any grade.

Federal Employee Terminations and Removals FY2009 – FY 2013

The raw number of SES terminations and removals is very low:

Senior Executive Service Removals and Terminations FY 2009 – FY 2013

Federal Times noted that lower graded employees are fired at a much higher rate than higher grades. What is not often mentioned is that SES members are fired at the same or higher rate than GS-14s and GS-15s. In fact, the FY 2012 SES firing rate was almost twice that of GS-15s and one-third more than the rate of GS-14s. In 2012, 7 of 7,815 SES (.09%) were fired for performance or misconduct, while 28 of 59,216 GS-15s (.05%) and 86 of 119,507 GS-14s (.07%) were fired.

Firing rates for higher grades are most likely lower because those employees have been screened repeatedly as they have moved up through the grades. Another factor may be the familiarity that more senior people have with one another. Firing anyone is hard, but it is easier to fire someone you don’t know as well. Firing the people you work most closely with every day is much harder.

All these numbers about firing lead to the question – why aren’t more people being fired if we want to make government better? A June 24 Government Executive article on a a House/Senate conference committee was headlined “VA Conferees Agree on One Thing: Fire More Bureaucrats.” Wouldn’t it be better if we give managers the ability to fire people much more easily so they can clear out the deadwood? Wouldn’t that lead to a general housecleaning that would make government far more effective? Shouldn’t government fire people at a rate similar to the private sector?

In a word, no.

The simple idea that it should be easier to fire people sounds good in theory. If we let good managers make good management decisions about letting poor performers go they will get rid of the poor performers. Like many simple ideas, that one is too simple. The real world is a bit more complex. Here are just a few of those complexities:

  • The simple view assumes managers will manage. This post started with the story about every SES member in the Department of Veterans Affairs getting a fully satisfactory or better rating. The numbers are not a lot better in other agencies. Most managers who talk about how hard it is to fire people have never tried to fire anyone. Keep in mind that MSPB’s 2005 report, The Probationary Period: A Critical Assessment Opportunity, MSPB reports that 1.6% of competitive service employees are removed from their jobs during their probationary period. Those are employees who can be fired easily and have little avenue of appeal. Firing them doesn’t require a lot of documentation or time. Firing probationary employees is as simple as it gets, yet only 1.6% of them are fired every year. Why should we believe a quick and easy process for firing everyone else would have different results?
  • The simple view assumes Federal employees who cannot perform are the reason for many of government’s problems. In that scenario, there are tens or hundreds of thousands of employees who contribute nothing and wiping out large numbers of them will make government better. That view doesn’t assign the blame for government’s biggest problems to the people and cultures that are actually responsible for them. Federal employees do not cause duplication of services across agencies. They don’t cause money to be appropriated for wasteful projects. They do not cause most of the problems of the federal government. For the most part, the ability of anyone other than the most senior employees to dramatically change anything is next to non-existent. By shifting the focus to them, we lose focus on the bigger systemic problems our government faces and guarantee we will never deal with the underlying causes. Are there poor performers in government? Yes. Is the number massive? No. Will rolling a few heads distract attention from the bigger problems? Absolutely.
  • The simple view also assumes those managers who do have the backbone to deal with poor performers will deal only with poor performers and not the people they do not like for personal or political reasons. The federal civil service was designed to protect government workers and the American people from a government spoils system and the toxic results it produced in the past. The great champion of the civil service, President Theodore Roosevelt, said “The spoils-monger and spoils-seeker invariably breed the bribe-taker and bribes-giver, the embezzler of public funds and the corrupter of voters.” President Roosevelt was right. “Reforms” that would lead us back to a spoils system would do far more damage to the interests of the American people than any harm that can be done by a ten or twenty or thirty thousand people who do not perform.
  • The simple view assumes performance is an individual accomplishment. I have worked 33 years in government and 6 years in the private sector. During all of that time I have seen very few accomplishments that are the result of just one person’s actions. Virtually all good results come from teams of people working together.  Most bad results are failures of a team or an organization. They fail to deal with systemic problems. They fail to provide training for their employees. They fail to provide the technology that would enable success. They fail to create a culture that gets good results. Yet, when they have a failure, they always seem to default to finding someone to blame so they do not have to accept the fact that they might be part of the problem too.

We seem to have reached a point where the solution to a problem is to hunt down the offending party and say “You’re fired!” Maybe it makes us feel better to think we made someone pay for their failure. While we would be better off if we dealt effectively with poor performance, the truth is that government is so complex, cultural norms in agencies are so powerful, and our political process is so broken, that there is rarely a single person or even a small group of people who are truly responsible. If we want to make government better, we need to deal with cultural issues that drive the kind of problems we have seen at the Department of Veterans Affairs. We need to deal with the political dysfunction that can make Congressional oversight more of a sideshow than the powerful tool it was designed to be. We need to deal with the lack of training for Federal managers that would help equip them to deal with problem employees and problem organizations. We need to deal with the unresolved questions of the scope and reach of government. None of those are easy. None are likely to be completed within a daily news cycle, and none of them give someone the satisfaction of finding someone to blame and firing that person. But – if we want to make our government better, they are what we have to do.

 

News, Opinion, Performance, Strategy

Is it All or Nothing on General Schedule Reform?

by Jeff Neal2 Comments on Is it All or Nothing on General Schedule Reform?

Last week the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report on the General Schedule. The report, “OPM Needs to Improve the Design, Management, and Oversight of the Federal Classification System” outlines eight key attributes of a modern classification system and assesses the degree to which the General Schedule aligns with those attributes. The eight are:

  • Internal equity. All employees with comparable qualifications and responsibilities for their respective occupations are assigned the same grade level.
  • External equity. All employees with comparable qualifications and responsibilities are assigned grade levels and corresponding pay ranges comparable to the nonfederal sector.
  • Transparency. A comprehensible and predictable system that employees, management, and taxpayers can understand.
  • Flexibility. The ease and ability to modify the system to meet agency-specific needs and mission requirements, including modifying rates of pay for certain occupations to attract a qualified workforce, within the framework of a uniform government-wide system.
  • Adaptability. The ease and ability to conduct a periodic, fundamental review of the entire classification system that enables the system to evolve as the workforce and workplace changes.
  • Simplicity. A system that enables interagency mobility and comparisons with a rational number of occupations and clear career ladders with meaningful differences in skills and performance, as well as a system that can be cost-effectively maintained and managed.
  • Rank-in-position. A classification of positions based on mission needs and then hiring individuals with those qualifications.
  • Rank-in-person. A classification of employees based on their unique skills and abilities.

GAO recognized that some of these attributes appear to be in conflict with one another. For example, classifying positions based upon rank-in-position and based upon rank-in-person appear to be polar opposites. GAO also criticizes the Office of Personnel Management for not having adequate oversight of GS classification, not updating standards frequently enough, and not adequately resourcing the program. OPM partially concurred with most of GAO’s recommendations, but did not concur on the issue of developing a strategy to systematically track and prioritize updates to occupational standards.

Both GAO and OPM positions have merit. GAO is correct that the GS system is outdated and overly complex. They are right that OPM has not adequately resourced the program. They are right that OPM should address the shortcomings of the GS system sooner rather than later. OPM is correct in saying it does not need a new process to get classification standards written and updated more regularly. OPM also said it has only 6 full time classification policy staff. GAO says OPM has to make tradeoffs the same as any other agency.

That last point is one that I think is important. Yes, OPM has to make tradeoffs. I have not hesitated to criticize OPM when it is off track. In this case, I think they are in a no-win situation. The agency’s recent budget requests show OPM’s appropriated dollars are significantly less than they have been in the past. The agency operates more on revolving funds than appropriations. They also have trust fund money that covers management of retirement and insurance programs. Those color-of-money distinctions are important, because they limit the number of people OPM can devote to policy and oversight work. While the agency has over 5,000 employees, less than 20% of them can be assigned policy, oversight and agency management tasks. That puts OPM in the position of playing management whack-a-mole with priorities. If they decide to devote far more resources to classification, they will have to come from other programs, leading to those programs being under resourced.

GAO’s Recommendations

GAO’s report established a good set of criteria for an effective classification system. It also made three recommendations for executive branch action:

  • Working through the CHCO Council, and in conjunction with key stakeholders such as the Office of Management and Budget, unions, and others, should use prior studies and lessons learned from demonstration projects and alternative systems to examine ways to make the GS system’s design and implementation more consistent with the attributes of a modern, effective classification system. To the extent warranted, develop a legislative proposal for congressional consideration.
  • Develop cost-effective mechanisms to oversee agency implementation of the classification system as required by law.
    • Develop a strategy to systematically track and prioritize updates to occupational standards.
    • Develop a strategy that will enable OPM to more effectively and routinely monitor agencies’ implementation of classification standards.

The first recommendation is the most critical, because it could negate the need for at least one of the other two recommendations. In recent years the CHCO Council has become an effective means of driving government human capital policy. A CHCO Council working group, partnering with OMB and with unions (at the national level), could develop a set of policy recommendations that would make the current classification process far less complex, without changing the underlying laws. That last point is critical – the likelihood of significant Civil Service reform that is enacted by the Congress is remote, due to the combination of Congressional dysfunction and a lack of appetite for Civil Service reform.

Reform Does Not Require Congress to Act

How would we dramatically change GS classification without rewriting the law? Most people think the highly complex GS system is entirely a creation of the Classification Act of 1949 (as amended). It is true that the Classification Act created the General Schedule and defines each of the 15 GS grade levels. Much of the complexity (23 occupational families and 420 job series) comes from policy decisions made by OPM and others in the 65 years since the Classification Act passed. There is no legal requirement to have 420 job series. OPM creates new series when it determines they are necessary, is asked by the White House to do so, gets statutory direction, or they are requested by agencies. A great example is Cyber Security. There is a lot of pressure (including in the intro of the GAO report) to create a Cyber Security job series. OPM has not done so, and with good reason. At the Department of Homeland Security we had a need for more Cyber Security professionals. They were not in a single job series and could not be. Cyber Security is a complex field that includes Computer Scientists, Network and Systems Engineers, Security Specialists, Digital Forensics Specialists, Program Managers, Intelligence Specialists, and about 10 more categories. A single job family cannot address so many different positions that have radically different duties and qualifications requirements. In fact, GAO points out that the use of 420 job series adds unnecessary complexity to the GS system.

Where we need to go is in the opposite direction. The number of job series should be reduced by at least half, and more likely by three quarters. One reason OPM cannot maintain current standards for all of the jobs is that there are too many of them. GAO also points out that the stove piping of jobs into narrow series may hamper career growth. So – we have too many series, we cannot maintain the classification standards because of that, and the number limits agency flexibility on reassigning staff. It also makes for an arduous and overly complex hiring process for applicants from outside government.

If the number of job series is reduced to a more manageable number (I suggest no more than 100), we could achieve most of the objectives of GAO’s eight attributes of a modern classification system. Even some of the apparently conflicting attributes can be addressed. For example, on the surface it appears we cannot have a system that includes both rank-in-person and rank-in-position attributes. But we can. Take a look at the Research Grade Evaluation Guide (RGEG) published by OPM. The RGEG includes 4 classification factors:

  1. Research Assignment
  2. Supervisory Controls
  3. Guidelines and Originality, and
  4. Contributions, Impact, and Stature

The RGEG recognizes that “Work commonly expands commensurate with the researcher’s motivation, capability, and creativity.” Evaluation of factor 4 is based upon the researcher’s accomplishments rather than a rigid standard based upon the job itself. The RGEG recognizes that it is difficult to separate the person from the work the person does. OPM could use a similar approach to incorporate both rank-in-person and rank-in-position into new classification standards. The RGEG also covers research in many fields – there is not an RGEG for Physics, one for Chemistry, one for medicine, etc. OPM could use a similar approach with multi-series standards to dramatically reduce the number of classification standards it has to write and maintain. For example, a STEM Grade Evaluation Guide could cover many STEM positions. An Administrative Grade Evaluation Guide could cover financial management, human resources, procurement and other administrative positions.

Benefits of Administrative Reform

Administrative reform is faster, more achievable, and less likely to veer off into Fed bashing than a statutory solution might be. It maintains stability in the legal framework of the Civil Service, yet addresses the Adaptability feature in GAO’s 8 attributes. It achieves Simplicity, adopts both Rank-in-Person and Rank-in-Position attributes, and should also improve Internal Equity. It certainly demonstrates Flexibility as well. While we may not be able to get to a completely modern classification system without Congressional action, we can certainly improve on what we have today. By pursuing an administrative rather than statutory solution, OPM can begin to rapidly address many of the shortcomings of the existing system. The points of view of key stakeholders, such as unions and the Senior Executives Association, can be taken into account, as can those of good government advocates such as the Partnership for Public Service and the National Academy of Public Administration. The CHCO Council can drive the process, ensuring the resulting changes are implementable and consistent with accomplishing agency missions. Rather than waiting for the day when Civil Service reform might be achievable in Congress, we can act now. Why wait??