The Coalition for Effective Change and its 30 or so
executive, professional and managerial associations have
come out in favor of pay for performance in the federal
government, and the stated intention of current reforms
underway including a possible further departure from the
general schedule system.
It reached a consensus over a mercifully short paper that
Chair Roz Kleeman says, “demonstrates that federal managers
and other professionals are quite willing to be held
accountable for their performance and are committed to
improving government operations.”
The paper qualifies many of the Coalition’s views on design
and implementation and agrees with a recent report from the
Government Accountability Office stating that the importance
of timing and methodology to success of such a system. It
also notes that pay should not be the sole focus of employee
and organizational performance.
“Other factors that drive performance, in some cases more
than pay, include the strong public service motivation of
most government employees, good management and leadership,
the importance of the work, the opportunity to have
responsibility and to make good use of one’s skills and
ability, the prospects for personal growth and career
development, the support of superiors and co-workers, and
the nature of the work environment,” said the report.
The Coalition also said it favors recent statutory
requirements related to the need to train and retrain
supervisors, managers and employees in the implementation
of a pay for performance system and outlined what it called
essential design elements including a flexibility in the
amount and distribution of awards to be controlled by budget
allocations rather than arbitrary quotas and forced
distributions.
Other design elements it considers essential would establish
a means for ratings officials to exercise reasonable
judgment, provide for third party review and a rational
and reasonable process for the appeal of actions materially
affecting employees, and a minimum cost of living annual
pay increase for employees deemed satisfactory.
A copy of the report can be accessed at effective-change.org
