Federal personnel offices: time for change?

The personnel office, in the federal government as elsewhere, is frequently the butt of office jokes and horror stories. The personnel office is an important player in governmental operations and needs to be working well in order to contribute to an effective workforce as well as an effective

merit system. If the personnel office is not working well, it can be a costly obstacle to efficient operation of the whole organization. While much has been written on the subject by researchers and policy-level officials, a recent study by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) gathers the perspectives of the actual personnel staff and their "customers," the managers of the organization. The report of this study, titled "Federal Personnel Offices: Time For Change?", explores why federal personnel offices are held in low esteem by many of the managers they serve, and looks at how personnelists themselves view their work. The report examines perceptions of quality and timeliness of personnel work, especially position classification, recruiting, training, labor relations, and employee relations. This view from the "front lines" is particularly valuable at a time of growing awareness that government must be reinvented.

The research team administered questionnaires and held individual and group interviews with nearly 400 top, middle, and line managers, and personnel officers, specialists, and assistants in four federal agencies. The objective was to capture the perceptions of both personnelists and their customers, the managers, about the delivery of personnel services, across a wide range of organizational environments.

Conflicting Roles

Personnelists believed they were expected to perform two conflicting roles; enforcing rules for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and assisting agency managers with their human resource needs in order to accomplish the mission of the agency. Flowing from this conflict were issues such as the complexity of the rules and procedures, and the capabilities of the personnel staff to effectively administer the system and meet the needs of the managers. Federal managers identified these issues as the most troublesome aspects of the delivery of quality service by their personnel offices. The study found that the system imposed on federal personnel offices and managers is antiquated, huge, unwieldy, rigid, and complex, and in need of drastic change. Top levels of management need to debate roles of the personnel office and resolve this conflict. Also essential is either massive delegation of authority to the managers with a corresponding shrinkage of the rules, or additional people in the personnel office to operate the present system. And in either case, personnelists need to have their professional skills improved, and managers need to have their supervisory skills improved, through more aggressive training.

Performance Indicators

Finding data about delivery of personnel service presented a problem. Efforts to measure the effectiveness of the personnel office traditionally have been compliance-oriented, not service-oriented, although some agencies supplement such efforts with customer satisfaction surveys and other techniques. Compliance-oriented evaluators typically inspect records and review statistics to determine how well the office is performing compared with the norms and regulatory and procedural requirements set forth by the agency and by OPM. And such evaluation methods tend to motivate personnelists to focus on keeping complete and correct records rather than on providing responsive service to managers. As a result, personnel resources may be directed more toward operating administrative processes, enforcing the rules, and completing documents, and less toward helping managers accomplish their agencies' missions.

Delivery of Service to Managers

On our study questionnaire, fewer than two thirds of the managers gave positive responses regarding the quality of personnel services overall. Most gave high marks to the personnel staff for treating them courteously, but only half gave positive responses for timely and efficient service. Fewer than three fourths responded that personnelists gave accurate answers, about the same percentage who responded that personnelists provided a wide scope of personnel service and kept employees informed.

When managers were asked to rate personnel service in specific functional areas, their positive responses dropped substantially. Personnel service in recruiting received the lowest rating, with only about one-third of those surveyed giving it a positive rating. Position classification, training, and employee relations received positive responses from just over half of the managers. Labor relations fared the best, with almost two-thirds of the managers giving positive responses. It is significant that the personnel specialists, when asked to rate their performance in the same five functional areas, believed that their service was much better than the managers believed; positive responses were much higher across the board, ranging from 14 percentage points to 42 percentage points higher than the managers' responses. This difference in perception is consistent with the conflicting beliefs about the proper role of the personnel office, discussed earlier. If personnelists believe their primary role is enforcing the rules and maintaining flawless records for the evaluators, they may very well see themselves as doing an excellent job. But their customers, the managers, are expecting them to perform a different role--i.e., helping managers get their jobs done and achieving agency goals. Because of these differences in expectations, managers view personnel staff much less positively.

Causes of Difficulties

In response to our question posing four possible causes of any difficulties they might experience in getting good personnel service, three-fourths of the managers said that the complexity and rigidity of federal personnel rules is a cause. Over two-thirds said that the personnel staff's excessive concern with compliance and a lack of sufficient staff in the personnel office are causes of difficulties. Over half the managers said the personnel staff lack sufficient skill; i.e, they aren't knowledgeable in the details of the system or are too process-oriented and not mission-oriented. In addition to these four possible causes, managers offered several of their own. One was that the personnelists are preoccupied with giving good service to top managers and can't devote the necessary time and attention to the needs of the line and middle managers. Another was that the managers themselves are not trained sufficiently in their supervisory responsibilities. Also, the leadership of the personnel organization is very uneven in quality, and the burdensome processes of personnel work should be further automated.

Summary and Recommendations

Managers and personnelists were often in agreement that the delivery of personnel service is not as good as desired, but personnelists held a much more positive view than the managers. Causes of problems were: (1) the federal personnel system of rules and procedures is far too huge, complex, prescriptive, and rigid; (2) personnelists are expected to be skilled, knowledgeable, and helpful but often are not; and (3) some managers have not accepted responsibility for personnel management of the employees under their supervision and are not highly skilled at it. All three parts of this equation are interdependent and must be addressed together in order for the personnel office to improve its service to managers and to become more valuable in accomplishing the mission of the organization.

MSPB made eight recommendations for improving the situation for both managers and personnelists:

1. OPM and the Congress should drastically reduce and simplify federal personnel laws and regulations and delegate substantial personnel authority to managers.

2. Agency heads should likewise reduce their agencies' personnel policies and procedures.

3. In reducing the personnel system, OPM and agency heads should preserve the essential elements of the merit system and centralized record keeping.

4. OPM and agency heads should reorient their evaluations of personnel offices so that accountability for compliance with personnel laws and rules rests more with agency managers and less with the personnel office, and the focus of evaluations is more on service to managers and contribution to agency missions.

5. As a follow-on to reorienting evaluations, OPM and agency heads should resolve the conflict concerning the perceived roles of the personnel office--assuring compliance with the rules while providing personnel advice and service to managers.

6. OPM and agency heads should reexamine screening and selection methods for personnel officers and specialists to assure high-quality staff in personnel offices.

7. Agency heads should review the training provided to the personnel staff to assure the development of highly skilled personnelists with broad perspectives.

8. Agency heads, with assistance from OPM, should assure comprehensive training for their managers in effective and responsible management of their human resources, commensurate with substantial increases in their delegated authority.

Implementing Change

While it is easy to make sweeping recommendations, bringing about real change in these areas will be difficult. Implementing some of these recommendations will require a sea change in the human resources management culture that could take a generation to complete. Also, there is very little precedent for what needs to be done and no proven road maps on the shelf to make the going easier. Even so, any beginning is better than preserving the status quo, and the following ideas may prove helpful in stimulating creative actions for implementing these recommendations. Note that these suggestions are those of the author and not of the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.

1. Slowing the Flow of Laws From Congress and Regulations From the Office of Personnel Management

A recent report from the Brookings Institution recommends that Congress write management impact statements for new legislation.(1) This has enormous appeal as a means of moving Congress to thoughtfully analyze the likely effects of proposed civil service legislation on agencies, including all costs in dollars and time. OPM could write similar impact statements before issuing new regulations. Impact statements would help fix accountability for good or bad government on Congress and OPM. Such accountability, which Congress has largely escaped, would inhibit legislation that serves private agenda at the expense of good government.

OPM, as the author of personnel regulations, will face a daunting task in reducing its regulations and its implementing instructions in the federal Personnel Manual. The task could be greatly simplified if the material were sorted into two categories, process areas and judgment areas. All material relating to administration of pay and benefits, for example, could be analyzed and redesigned for maximum efficiency. The remainder could then be downgraded from required adherence to helpful guidance, so that a manager could simply depart from the guidance for good cause shown when circumstances warranted. This downgrading would free government immediately from the present strictures without waiting for a laborious rewriting of all the material.

However, as laws and regulations are eliminated and more authority is delegated to agency managers, some negative side effects will appear. As detailed and prescriptive procedures are withdrawn, managers will inevitably find themselves with more power and decision-making discretion with fewer controls like records, reviews, approvals, and reports to keep them honest. Such controls were increasingly necessary as social values of honor, integrity, and responsibility eroded and were replaced with values of micromanagement without responsibility or accountability. Relaxing such institutional controls over managers will leave the government vulnerable to abuses by some unscrupulous managers unless it is accompanied by a restoration of honor and integrity as essential traits of all government managers. As lawyers are held to a higher standard of behavior than others because they are officers of the court, so also should federal managers be held to a higher standard in upholding the spirit of the law.

The key to integrity for agency managers, of course, is the top layer--the political appointees who provide the leadership and set the example. These presidential appointees wield enormous power and are confronted daily with the potential for abuse. We have witnessed many violations of law by some of those in the highest positions of public trust. Presidential appointees by and large pursue the agenda set for them by their boss, the president. Yet in the setting of presidential agendas, we have seen apparent neglect in articulating values of honor, integrity, and high expectations of exemplary behavior. If this is to change, each president must personally charge each appointee with responsibility and accountability for good faith adherence to the spirit of the law with promise of harsh reprisal in case of abuse. In this way, the federal government can take the moral high ground and move swiftly and creatively to effective human resources management, without the micromanagement now imposed by institutional controls.

2. Reducing Agency Personnel Policies, Procedures, and Controls.

This recommendation, also made by the Vice President's National Performance Review, is easier said than done. Like the laws and regulations discussed above, agency procedures must also be replaced with delegated authority, in a new environment of trust, honor, and integrity--not a feat to be achieved overnight. However, federal employees have consistently demonstrated that they will faithfully follow the leadership and example (good or bad) of their agencies' political appointees. Therefore, success in reducing agency personnel policies and procedures will flow directly from success in reducing laws and regulations, as discussed above.

3. Preserving the Essential Elements of the System

While no one likes red tape, order is better than chaos. The National Performance Review, in recommending ". . . phasing out the 10,000 page Federal Personnel Manual and all agency implementing directives . . . ," prudently cautioned against throwing everything out. Their report went on to say that OPM should ". . . work with agencies to determine which FPM chapters, provisions, or supplements are essential, which are useful, and which are unnecessary."(2) That is the hard part. We can presume that every written directive, procedure, or policy served some useful purpose, at least for somebody. The hard part is to determine whether that purpose and that person are helping to accomplish the agency's mission, or simply continuing to exist for their own sake according to Parkinson's Law. The key to success is the participation of agency managers in the process so those decisions are not made in a vacuum by OPM or Congress.

Pay and benefits, for example, account for huge portions of federal personnel laws and regulations, implementing instructions in the FPM, and agency personnel policy directives. Clearly, these can't be abolished out of hand. But they are vastly more complicated than they ought to be, and need to be greatly simplified and reduced, a task which would be much easier if real decision-making authority were delegated to supervisors. The sad truth is that detailed and prescriptive instructions have replaced judgmental discretion, and the resulting legalistic hair-splitting produces more detailed and more prescriptive instructions.

Another problem area is record keeping. The public will always expect the government to be a steward of their tax dollars, and this means that the government must always be prepared to account for the use of its resources. This in turn requires an audit trail to all expenditures, and properly so. But it is not cost-effective or efficient to spend billions of dollars in controls and records just to assure that every penny will be accounted for. Small losses or thefts of money and property, for example, or mere accounting anomalies, are absorbed daily by the private sector as a cost of doing business. But those same losses in government will make tomorrow's headlines because people hold government to an unreasonable standard of perfection and are very unforgiving when that standard is not met. A new standard needs to be developed and accepted by the people, a reasonable standard of, say, 98 percent instead of 100 percent; a standard that would enable government employees to focus on accomplishing the mission instead of on counting pennies and creating records.

Cutting back on detailed and prescriptive directives will require a concomitant shift to a new management culture that rewards individual judgment and risk-taking while permitting mistakes. We are a long way from such a culture. Many rules and procedures are expanded year by year because of unusual incidents that don't fit the original language. Because managers don't have authority to create their own solutions in such unusual situations, the rule or procedure must be expanded to prescribe solutions in case those situations ever recur or, in many cases, to ensure that those situations will never recur. These expansions are driven by top managers' distrust of lower level managers and the need to avoid risks at all costs because the public do not permit mistakes in judgment. Top managers' distrust, in turn, is stimulated by distrust of themselves by the public, the media, and their own agency employees. The challenge will be to bring all participants out of a defensive posture and into a secure and cooperative partnership.

4. Reorienting the Evaluation of Personnel Offices Toward Outcomes Like Customer Service and Agency Mission Accomplishment Instead of Enforcement of Rules and Procedural Requirements.

Some agencies have developed measures of personnel office effectiveness that are complementary to the traditional evaluations for compliance, especially customer satisfaction surveys for managers and employees. These survey questionnaires could be obtained and adjusted for use by all agencies. Results of such surveys could easily be built into the evaluation of personnel offices' performance and given weight at least as much as the compliance aspects of evaluation. In addition to serving as the basis for rating the personnel organization, survey results could be used to rate the performance of individual personnel officers. Recently, the President ordered all executive departments and agencies that provide services directly to the public to undertake similar customer surveys as a measure of agencies' performance against specific customer service standards.(3)

Evaluating the degree to which a given personnel office is involved in accomplishing the organization's mission is much more nebulous. Conceivably, questions on this could be included in a customer satisfaction survey questionnaire, but there wasn't much of this effort in evidence as our study of federal personnel offices unfolded. Agencies need consciousness-raising in this area and survey questions might help achieve a heightened awareness, on the part of both managers and personnelists.

OPM should lead the effort in this regard, because its staff members are responsible for evaluating federal personnel offices. It would appear to require little more than a break with tradition and a policy shift for OPM to redirect its efforts along lines that are more attuned to the changing landscape of federal human resources management.

5. Resolving the Conflicting Roles of the Personnel Office--Service Provider or Law Enforcer?

Delegation of substantial personnel management authority to managers will go a long way toward resolving the conflicting perceptions of the personnel office's role, provided that the accountability for compliance with the law is also fixed on managers instead of the personnel office. Reorienting OPM's and agencies' personnel management evaluation efforts, as discussed above, will also help relieve the pressure on the personnel office to perform conflicting roles. Decentralization of OPM's role in areas such as the competitive examination process will also help agency personnel offices to diminish their image as an extension of OPM.

6. Reexamining Screening and Selection Methods For Personnelists to Assure High Quality

Under the present qualification standards, personnel clerks and technicians can "graduate" to positions of personnel specialist. Such promotions are used frequently by agencies as a means, sometimes the predominant means, of filling vacancies in their personnel offices. It has served well in providing the opportunity for clerks to move up into higher paying grades without the need for a college education. This method has been particularly fruitful for those without college, especially minorities, who find it difficult to advance to the "professional" ranks of other occupations, such as engineers, accountants, and lawyers, which have specific education requirements. But managers believe that the personnel office staff is not of uniform quality and often doesn't perform as well as needed. This suggests that bringing people up from the clerical ranks into personnelist positions may not be working as well as it should. One problem may be that a personnel officer typically has only a small number of internal candidates for selection for any given vacancy, and may feel obligated to select one out of loyalty to the staff even if none has demonstrated good potential for growth. Pressure to select an internal candidate may be even greater if past practice has built such expectations into the culture of the office.

Agencies need to do more to better assess the potential of candidates for personnelist positions. OPM can assist by identifying attributes of a potentially successful personnelist, and by developing effective screening techniques that agencies can use to assure the desired quality of its future personnelists. Agencies can broaden the pool of candidates to assure a good supply of well-qualified candidates from which to select. One technique would be to add candidates with higher levels of education, but such candidates should also be carefully screened because a college education does not guarantee that the holder possesses the attributes of a successful personnelist.

7. Training Personnel Staff

Agency heads should review the training provided to the personnel staff to assure the development of highly skilled personnelists with broad perspectives. Managers believe that some personnelists, especially those without college education, are too narrowly focused; they don't have the "big picture." Such personnelists are unable to view their jobs in the context of helping the agency accomplish its mission and are therefore not very helpful to the managers. This problem is sometimes related to the personnelists' orientation toward compliance instead of service, or to the need for better intake screening, as discussed above. In any event, the presumption is that the right orientation can be achieved through effective training.

Agencies differ rather widely in their attention to development of their personnelists. Some are aggressive; some focus very little attention on such training. But as the projected changes of decentralization and delegation materialize, as recommended by the National Performance Review, a highly skilled human resources staff in every agency will become even more essential, and planning should begin now.

8. Training the Managers

MSPB's study found that many federal managers were not prepared to accept responsibility for managing their human resources under the present scheme, much less under future visions of increased delegation of personnel authority to supervisors. In addition to having little interest in participating fully in the human resource management equation, these managers were resistant to being trained in supervisory skills. As with the personnel office staff, it is essential that all managers be highly skilled in managing people effectively, especially if they are to carry a greater share of the burden under future delegations. Agency heads, with leadership from OPM, should in turn provide much more aggressive leadership to their managers to assure development of adequate managerial skills. Such development will require substantial effort in many agencies and planning should begin now.

To obtain a copy of the report, contact Frederick L. Foley, U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, 1120 Vermont Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20419

Notes

1 J. DiIulio, Jr., G. Garvey, and D. Kettl, Improving Government Performance--An Owner's Manual. (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1993), p. 23.

2 U.S., National Performance Review, Creating A Government That Works Better & Costs Less (Washington, DC, Government Printing Office, Sept. 7, 1993)

3 U.S., President, Executive Order 12862, "Setting Customer Service Standards," Federal Register vol. 58, No. 176 (Washington, DC, Government Printing Office, Sept. 14, 1993): p. 48257.

Frederick L. Foley is assistant director for special studies of the Office of Policy and Evaluation, U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. A graduate of George Washington University in economics, he served as a personnel specialist with several agencies, then as a personnel officer for the Labor Department and personnel director for MSPB.