Survey From Federal Employee Group Reveals Dissatisfaction With Pay for Performance

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By MyFederalRetirement
Posted: 01-16-2010



January 8, 2010

Federally Employed Women (FEW) released the results of a survey taken of its members about pay-for-performance personnel systems. Respondents were also asked to provide solutions to the many problems associated with these systems and they are also included in the organization's position paper (see link below)

"The vast majority of our survey respondents believed that current pay-for-performance systems have a lot of problems," announced Sue Webster, FEW National President, upon the release of the survey results. "But we firmly believe that just pointing out problems does not help so we are also offering solutions on how to fix these problems including more training, safeguards, data collection and required action plans to name a few," she added.

While in theory the organization's members asserted that there were benefits to a pay-for-performance system, by virtually a two-to-one ratio respondents expressed a lot of concern about how they are implemented which is the crux of the problem. This in turn could lead to adverse impacts on women employed in the federal workforce in areas such as job security, career progression and the future of Equal Employment Opportunity laws and diversity programs. Among the problem areas cited by the survey respondents were:

* Too much discretion given to untrained managers
* No written or standardized guidelines
* Pay pool panels do not know the workers they are rating
* System relies too much on writing skills and high profile projects
* Pay pools under-funded leading to competition among team members
* Pay bands too limiting

"We hope to present these findings, as well as discuss our proposed solutions, with high level Administration officials at the Office of Personnel Management," stated Cecelia Davis, FEW's National Vice President for Congressional Relations. "We will also be offering to help implement these changes if needed," Davis concluded.

Janet Kopenhaver, FEW's Washington Representative, will also present this position paper to several legislators and their staffs. "Obviously we would like Hill leaders on the House and Senate Federal Workforce Subcommittees to know about these survey results as well as our suggested solutions," Kopenhaver advised. "Once Congress returns for the second session of the 111th Congress, I will start meeting with them to discuss these results," she added.

The FEW position paper is available at:
http://few.org/docs/PayforPerformancePositionPaper.pdf

Posted with Permission from: MyFederalRetirement.com