Pay for performance is in the news a great deal these days, but did you know that the federal government also has a pay for performance program? Career senior executive service personnel are eligible for a bonus based on the previous year’s performance of 5% to 20% of base pay.
Of course, there is inherently nothing wrong with such a system, good performance should be rewarded especially in government service. Too bad we can’t annually evaluate members of Congress.
On the other hand consider this; nearly 50% of the employees eligible for awards receive the highest possible performance rating each year. In other words, they are “outstanding.”
Here is some detail:
2005 = 43.4% highest rating
2006 = 43.4%
2007 = 47%
2008 = 48.2%
Office of Personnel Management Annual Report
The normal distribution for such an outstanding rating would be 10% or less, some companies, knowing the tendency for generous performance evaluations, even limit the number of possible top rating to no more than 10% or less.
In a normal organization, one would expect that the majority of workers would be in the average range. Apparently, we have one heck of an exceptional group of government workers (or one lousy bureaucratic performance evaluation system).
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 