Re: National Security Personnel System (NSPS) and the Problem with Personnel Appraisal Mechanisms"
Topic: NSPS, Pay for Performance30. March 2006 |
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I have read the process which the NSPS will use to rate and reward employees. They recently released the new and improved version.
It retains many of the challenges that you describe in attaining an accurate rating of an employee. Social skills are very important. The employee must sell himself to the supervisor. The supervisor must then sell his version to the pay pool panel. The pay pool panel sells its version to the pay pool manager. If any of the aforementioned persons are poorer or better salesmen than their counterparts then objectivity is lost. In the end it makes no difference if there is nothing in the pay pool or if the pay pool manager does not sell his organization as well as another pay pool manager who competes for the same finite dollars in the pool. Is this more complex than when you were a manager? |
understandinggov.org
Having recently become a victum of the NSPS pay system I can assure you that all of the concerns and fears previuosly expressed by government employees are real.
The NSPS pay system has indeed created invisible barriers called control points within the authorized 2008 pay bands. If you were a standard career group non mananger that was topped out in your 2007 payband you were prohibited from receiving a fair, equal and proportionate base salary increases when compared to the rest of the federal government.
Even with a very high performance rating the contol points resulted in topped out employees incurring the equivilent of a half step demotion when compared to the General Schedule or their NSPS peers who received on averag a 3.4% base salary increase from the NSPS pay pool.
What happen to all of the funds that should have been appplied equally based on performance for this years base salary action? Well the answer is simple, it was provided to other employees especially mangers who did not receive the same control point restriction because they were the only standard career group that had the maximum end of their payband increased in 2007 giving them the room to receive base salay increases that groups of NSPS employees were prohibited from receiving this year.
The system that was sold as a way to attract talent and experience will quickly drive out the majority of seasoned employees who are under the CSRS retirement system by forever limiting the amount of base salary increases that would have counted toward their high three retirement. The control points that prohibited NSPS pay pools from awarding salary increases will have long term irreversible compounding adverse impact to Local Market Supplements, Social Security, retirement contributions, overtime and Life insurance benefits of NSPS employees.
comment at 31. January 2008