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Government Leader home > news stories
02/21/07
How to speed implementation of pay for performance across government
By Bill Leidinger
Special to Government Leader
What will it take to speed successful implementation of pay for performance across federal agencies in the years ahead?
It’s a critical question for government executives to ask, given the number of implementations underway and the Bush administration’s announced objective of implementing performance-based pay throughout government by 2010.
Past efforts to reform the 50-year-old General Schedule system of paying government workers based on seniority — not on job performance — have often failed to get traction inside government, even though efforts to reform the GS system go back as far as the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.
To be sure, there are clear examples of success in implementing pay for performance in federal agencies today, notably at the Government Accountability Office, Federal Aviation Administration and IRS. And currently, under the watchful eye of the Office of Personnel Management, pay-for-performance demonstration projects are underway at 26 federal sites, involving nearly 90,000 government employees.
Still, pay for performance is a relative rarity in government agencies today, and has often failed to take root because of inadequate implementation and the inherent nature of government bureaucracy. So is there a “magic bullet” that will ensure its implementation in government agencies in the future, especially in light of new political leadership on Capitol Hill?
Not quite. But, there are critical things agency leaders can do now to overcome resistance to performance-based pay, regardless of which party is in charge in Congress. - Successful implementation of pay for performance requires strong, committed leadership by both senior political appointees and top government executives. It isn’t something you can delegate to junior-level government executives to implement or to your agency’s HR department.
- You can’t implement pay for performance on the back of existing federal personnel systems. Instead, you must design new performance management systems to support administration of pay-for-performance work practices. Such systems must be able to collect, organize and manipulate many kinds of information in order to evaluate people’s job performance based on specific objective work performance standards, and make reasonable and credible pay distinctions based on this identifiable performance expectation.
- Don’t try to implement pay for performance in your agency unless you first build greater trust between employees and supervisors. To do this, involve employees and supervisors in the design of objective performance management systems. This will help employees and supervisors become personally vested in setting individual and departmental performance goals, creating accurate job descriptions and developing the performance standards by which their own future job performance is judged. OPM has had success doing this with its senior executive corps. GAO and the Homeland Security Department also have involved employees in the design of competency-based performance appraisal systems, often winning converts to performance-based pay in the process.
- Training and communication with employees are critical, not only in building initial employee acceptance of performance standards and pay-for-performance practices, but to ensure employees understand and buy in to pay for performance over time. Time and again it’s been shown that training and communications are key in any kind of organizational transformation because they help drive changes in people’s everyday and longer-term behavior. They also help align people around commonly understood objective performance standards and create clarity around new work priorities and mission goals.
- To show they’re serious about implementing pay for performance, political appointees and policymakers should devote more time to effective public policy implementation and less to public policy creation. By doing so, they will give the employees the help and attention they need and they’ll send the message to federal workers that improving government efficiency and getting results really matters to government leaders and the American public.
What’s the ultimate answer to making pay for performance work? In the last analysis, both senior political appointees and senior-level government executives must care — and care passionately — about effective public policy implementation and about aligning employees’ performance around such efforts.
Why? Because implementing performance management systems and related pay for performance is tough and complex work. Aligning people around common goals to ensure job performance helps support broader mission objectives. It’s tough to do because it requires a change in behavior from everyone inside an agency, from top-level leaders to middle managers to rank-and-file employees.
The good news is that once leaders embark down this path, organizational productivity will increase dramatically and employees themselves become more satisfied with the work they do, knowing that their jobs contribute, in concrete and measurable ways, to the successful completion of their agencies’ public missions … and that their pay rewards them fairly based on their performance.
Bill Leidinger is a senior consultant to the Government Consulting Services practice of Watson Wyatt Worldwide. He’s also a former assistant secretary and chief human capital officer at the Education Department.
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