Feds Reward Poor Performance, Survey Says

Think of a company whose strategy is to reward poor performance -- giving raises to nearly everybody across the board. Sound crazy? Nope, it's just your federal government at work.

At least that's what federal workers seem to think. The Office of Personnel Management routinely polls federal workers about their jobs, their workplaces, and their supervisors. And last year, less than half of the employees of the numerous departments and agencies that responded thought promotions were based on merit, that pay raises were connected with job performance, or that steps were taken to deal with poor performers.

What's the odds that a federal worker will get a raise, regardless of performance? Pretty good. According to data OPM provided to the Federal Times, only six one hundredths of one percent -- 737 out of more than 1.2 million -- were denied raises in 2009 for poor performance.

Results from the 2011 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey will be released in the next few months. But no one is expecting any major change in attitudes about the burdens of poor performers in the federal workplace, including Stewart Liff.

Liff is the former manager of the Veterans Benefits Administration regional office in Los Angeles and author of The Complete Guide to Hiring and Firing Government Employees. In a post on OhMyGov.comM Liff notes:

Whenever I teach a class to government supervisors, I always pose the following question to the group: "What does the government do with a problem employee?" Invariably, the entire audience answers as one, "They move him."

What a sad commentary on the state of human resources management in government. The people who are responsible for managing the government's employees believe that the way to deal with problem employees is in essence, to not deal with them.

The net result of this commonly held belief is that almost everyone is unhappy -- certainly the general public is displeased because it feels its civil servants are virtually invulnerable; many members of Congress are upset because they think government employees are not being held accountable; government managers are frustrated because they believe they are powerless to properly deal with non-performing subordinates; and the top 90% or so of the government's workforce is also less than happy because they don't appreciate working so hard while seeing a co-worker who does not pull his weight receive the same salary, bonus, etc.

Just this week, a woman from Indianapolis brought a three-inch knife past federal employees at airport security checkpoints -- not once, but twice. Scary? Perhaps. Surprising? Not really: The Transportation Security Administration apparently has about 2,500 security breaches at US airports every year.

No one knows whether the TSA screeners are incompetent or just lazy. But unlike the air traffic controllers, at least they seem to be sober. Earlier this month, Federal Aviation Administration officials had to send home a Colorado air traffic controller six hours into his eight-hour shift because he was drunk on the job. And even he was awake.

Back in April, for the third time in less than two months, another air traffic controller was caught sleeping on the job, making it impossible for a plane carrying a critically ill patient to land.

And in March, a former inspector at the Homeland Security Department's Customs and Border Protection bureau pled guilty to cocaine trafficking and alien smuggling and admitted he belonged to a drug trafficking organization.

Kind of makes the two New York City Census managers who used everything from Google to the White Pages to fabricate answers on up to 10,000 Census 2010 forms last summer to meet agency imposed deadlines look like model workers.