The number of DoD civilian employees “who simply aren’t up to the job or refuse to carry their share of the workload” is very small yet even that relative few “can be a drag on the rest of the workforce, and are very difficult to remove,” a Senate hearing has been told, in comments that could apply as well to other agencies.
Peter Levine, a former Obama administration management official at DoD, told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that “a large part of the problem is that few DoD managers believe it is worth the time and effort required to go through a performance improvement process that can take more than a year to complete. And at least in the short run, they are probably right: the overall productivity of a program or office is likely to go down, not up, if the senior manager is required to spend huge quantities of time on an employee who produces a tiny amount of work.”
“The kind of managers we want in the department — the kind of people who are motivated by the mission — would rather spend their time on substantive work, even if it means leaving an unproductive employee on the payroll,” he said.
He suggested that as employees near the end of their probationary periods, management could specifically review their performance with that in mind and “determine deliberately whether or not he or she should be retained as a tenured employee.”
Also, he recommended providing more help to line managers, for example by establishing a cadre of managers specializing in performance improvement. That could “change the managers’ calculus, opening a route for them to remove unproductive employees without sacrificing countless hours of their own time to the effort,” he said.
