| Comment Number: | OL-10505776 |
| Received: | 3/11/2005 8:10:43 AM |
| Subject: | Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Request for Comment |
| Title: | National Security Personnel System |
| CFR Citation: | 5 CFR Chapter XCIX and Part 9901 |
| No Attachments |
Comments:
Page 7562 – Monitoring Performance and Providing Feedback There is a lot of talk about performance based raises and bonuses. The impression that some would like to convey is that given the same circumstances everyone has a “level playing field” and can compete for raises and bonuses. The fact is, that is not true now and will not be true in the new system. We are all slaves to the “system” we are working in. In any system (and there are scores we are required to use every day) there is variation. Given a job that is suppose to take 5 days, sometimes it will take 4, sometimes it will take 6 and sometimes it will take 2 weeks, and it is possible that none of the time that it takes is under the control of the person doing the work. W. Edwards Deming, the statistician and consultant, is famous for something he called the “Red Bead Experiment”. In his demonstration (which he did for hundreds of audiences throughout the World) he selected people from the audience and put them to work in his fictitious factory making beads. The employees soon learned that given the equipment and processes they were required to use, they were at the mercy of the “system”. Try as they might, there was inherent variation in the system, and no amount of additional effort, or desire to excel would help. We all work in systems and we too are at the mercy of those systems. It could be a computer system we must use to do our job that is unreliable and has a lot of down time. It might be that our efforts are in the middle of a process and are dependent on others at the start or beyond our input that are holding up the total process. To try to put this message into some kind of perspective let’s look at the efforts of the people that will be evaluating these inputs to the NSPS for merit. They are tied to the process and system designed to evaluate these inputs. Try as they might to be efficient and effective in their evaluations, they are not going to be working independently of the system. All of the people of the team are linked together to determine output. Given what I understand of how the new NSPS system will work, all of them – the evaluators – would be evaluated according to how well they perform within the system they are working in – namely the “evaluation system”. Further, I understand that all of them would be somehow ranked according to how well they did. This means some would be exceptional and be considered for an increase and some, perhaps through no fault of their own, would have to be ranked lower and therefore not qualify for an increase. And this is not only going too be true of this group of people, but every small group throughout all areas covered by NSPS. The supervisor will be forced to somehow rank people on how well they did their jobs, when in fact much of how they performed is controlled by the system they work in. I would like you to consider that to evaluate and promote or give salary increases solely based on performance is unfair because of inherent variation in the systems we must use. The systems we use to do our jobs are a management responsibility.