Communicating with employees about their job performance is a skill as important as any in the federal manager’s toolbox, but the Office of Personnel Management doesn’t think supervisors are good enough at it.

“We feel managers are not as skilled as they need to be in performance management,” said Marta-Brito Perez, associate director for human capital leadership and merit system accountability at OPM. “They need to be better at communicating with employees, to hold workers accountable and to achieve results in the way the American public can appreciate.”

OPM has sought to improve its performance management methods for years; the Government Accountability Office in the past has criticized OPM for how federal employees are held accountable for their performance.

OPM this year designed a two-pronged strategic plan to continue improvements in performance management competencies.

Perez said OPM will publish guidelines by Oct. 1 outlining training programs to teach managers to better communicate with employees, and by Jan. 1, OPM hopes to launch a new Web site where employees and managers fill out fields and multiple-choice questions to record performance measurement criteria. Employees and managers can refer to the site to track performance or gauge whether employees are getting better at their work.

The Oct. 1 guidelines will cover several chief competencies, Perez said: how to provide feedback to employees; mastering spoken and written communication; methods for professional development of employees; and problem-solving and customer service. The online assessment tool will measure those attributes of managers and employees, “in essence to provide guidance to becoming competent,” Perez said.

Though the site hasn’t been designed yet, Perez provided a general description of how it might function.

Employees will access the online competency tool at the site and perform a self-assessment by category. For instance, under “Finishes tasks on time,” the employ can click the buttons next to “Always,” “Usually,” or “Sometimes or Never.”

In the presence of the employee, the manager then reviews the employee’s answers, indicating by multiple choice his or her view of the employee’s performance. Where the manager’s opinion differs, the manager can write an explanation in the field, such as “Though employee is good at finishing his work on time, he often has to go back and refine the work to bring it up to compliance with the original order,” or “Employee has good speaking skills but needs more training.”

“We want to create transparency, so [em- ployees] know what is exactly expected of them, and when they do well, reward their achievement,” Perez said. The strategic plan was developed in concert with the Chief Human Capital Officers Council, whose members manage the federal government’s employees.

There’s a sense of urgency to all of this, Perez said. The council and OPM officials say 50 percent of federal managers are going to be eligible to retire in the next few years, and they want to improve and maintain performance management competency.

“The message is we care that managers are trained and well-developed, and we’re providing the tools to do that,” Perez said.