| Comment Number: | OL-10507458 |
| Received: | 3/14/2005 11:18:28 AM |
| Subject: | Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Request for Comment |
| Title: | National Security Personnel System |
| CFR Citation: | 5 CFR Chapter XCIX and Part 9901 |
| Attachment: | NSPSAll.pdf Download Adobe Reader |
Comments:
2005.03.14 The Congress gave the DoD authority to develop a new personnel system in collaboration with the various stakeholders that was to be modeled on the successful features of the "Lab - Demo" programs. The Lab Demos use "pay" as one of many tools to experiment with ways to increase the value that their Personnel Systems add in support of their inherently high-performing employees and managers. "Pay" pre se is used more or less as it is in the much deprecated Civil Service / General Schedule system with less friction from the procedural checks and balances that were accreted over the years to counter perceived abuses. Higher performance folks, now as then, advance more rapidly than others but not so fast that they have no place to go except to the private sector once they reached the ceiling or so fast that the others who are also part of the team are discouraged. But pay is almost incidental -- the stones in the soup -- to such other features as extended probationary periods, more flexible starting salaries and more open collaboration between groups in setting the distributions of the fixed Pay Pool amongst all of the employees. Only rarely does an employee miss a minimum Cost Of Living equivalent or negotiate a movement to a less demanding assignment at a lower pay rate because everyone is part of a family with a shared sense of purpose and everyone knows the damage that could be done to the intangible bonds if a Darwinian struggle for pay or retention displaced the collegial spirit. The present NSPS proposal focuses on pay and streamlined firing procedures without any evidence of insight into the potential unintended consequences or any awareness of how such a model might produce a system that is less effective than the current GS/CS model by reducing DoD employment to a short-term "shape-up" for piece work with neither continuity or cooperative spirit. Please send these NSPS re-inventors back to the drawing board or/and find a better informed group of Organizational Development Psychologists who have advanced beyond the "Scientific Management" of the last century and can build on the measurable advantages of the Lab-Demo experiments. More detailed comments are provided in the attachment.