TOPICS
TOPICS
OPM moves to standardize pay and benefits rules
The Office of Personnel Management wants to standardize many of the pay, leave and hours of work rules to help agencies migrate to the standardized governmentwide e-Payroll system.
Proposed rules published by OPM in the Federal Register on Jan. 5 include policies for standardizing minimum leave charges, military leave, teleworkers' locality pay, compensatory time for religious observances, time limits on the use of compensatory time, elimination of hybrid work schedules, annual and sick leave, and temporary workers.
OPM will accept comments on the proposed rules until March 7. Agency officials said Wednesday they believe the policies should be finalized within a year.
Donald Winstead, deputy associate director of OPM's Center for Pay and Performance Policy, said the proposed policies are not that dramatic and, for the most part, standardize existing policies that many of the agencies already follow.
"The idea here is to take a look at our regulations and to see what changes we can make to standardize our policies in pay and leave so that the people who process the paychecks and leave and earning statements will have an easier time of doing that," Winstead said.
The proposed rules would require workers not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act to use earned compensatory time within 26 pay periods. Agencies would retain the discretionary authority to provide payment for compensatory time or require its forfeiture. Workers covered by FLSA would receive payment for overtime.
Winstead said the proposal likely to have the most effect on employees would standardize charges for minimum leave time to increments of 6 minutes or 15 minutes. OPM wrote that limiting the charge to two methods will simplify time and attendance recording, and will permit further flexibility in work scheduling for agencies and workers.
The proposed rule also would require workers who take compensatory time off for religious observances to provide documentation for proof of legitimacy. According to Joann Perrini, manager of OPM's Pay and Leave Administration group, agencies will be given the freedom to develop their own policies on how to prove the legitimacy of religious compensatory time off.
Reinforcing a policy that already exists in most agencies, OPM's proposal would allow teleworkers to receive locality pay if they work in a different area than the official work location. A worker scheduled to report at least once a week to a regular work site would not receive this benefit unless the agency made an exception.
Hybrid work schedules, which combine elements of flexible and compressed work schedules, would be eliminated under the rule. According to OPM, employees were trying to pick and choose the benefits they liked under the two programs, which is not allowed by law. Under the new regulation, overtime hours under a flexible work schedule officially must be ordered in advance.
Workers on unpaid military leave will no longer be able to use sick leave under the new rule. Currently, workers on military leave are allowed to use sick leave along with annual leave.
The proposed rule would make Nov. 15 the last day a worker could request leave for the year. Workers would no longer have to maintain 80 hours of sick leave in order to use sick leave. OPM said this would eliminate the need for complicated record-keeping.
COMMENTS
- I read the Fed Govt Consultant remarks with awe, inspired by being told time after time how great these people are. Each is a legend in their own mind. If we spent less money funding consultants and more on people (the real experts) that have real on the job experience and perform the required work/job (on a daily basis) we would be far better off. Another mind numbing thought is listen to the ideas of personnel working in the specific areas, what a concept. Even though management thinks consultants are the best thing since sliced bread, in real life that is not the case. I have heard it said; if you can not dazzle them with your brillance, baffle them with your bull hockey. When the consultants throw enough words, paragraphs, numbers together no one can understand what has been said and it can only be bad for the employees. In short I need to agee with the VA contracting officer consultants are full of it. One more little note, figures do not lie, but figures can be made to say what you want them to say. Budget Analyst Posted January 25, 2005 8:23 AM
- To Fed Gov Consultant: Your remarks are crap. Information workers are not bound by face time. Positions that require manning a post or 24 hour coverage are already exempt from flexible scheduling. The private sector has used flexible scheduling for decades now, to assist employees with balancing work and family responsibilities and to increase employee satisfaction. As a former benefits manager, I never heard of any firm laying off people because flexible scheduling revealed they were overstaffed! This is preposterous. Without flexible scheduling, I would leave the Government for sure. The Government is old-fashioned in many other ways, but in this respect we are comparable with those on the outside. And it had best stay that way, the input of uninformed consultants notwithstanding. VA CONTRACTING OFICER Posted January 21, 2005 3:20 PM
- Dean, Sorry, but what the CWS does is show that the agency, office, etc. can do with approximately 25% fewer employees and still get the work done. Break it down this way (using 4 employees in a generic office, all on CWS): There are 252 work days in the standard year. However, every normal Monday and Friday they are guaranteed to be down one employee due to AWS. (Slips for a Monday/Friday holiday to ensure the employee is properly compensated for the time worked - and proper to do so on that schedule.) This means that on 102 days of that 252 this office only has 3 people working. Let's use 15 days vacation/year as an average for the employees. (With the current averages, this is quite low but works as a reasonable estimate for illustration purposes.) That's another 60 days/year where the office would be at 75% staffing (only 50% on the days where another employee was on their RDO). Although the average civil service employee would NEVER take a sick day, I'll add another 2/employee because it's a possibility. That's another 8. Without accounting for any job-directed time away from the office, that leaves 170 days/year when they do NOT need a full staff to accomplish the office tasks. Doing the standard conversion, that is 1260 hours. An A-76 work year is only 1776 hours (approximately 70% of an FTE). The usual "Yeah, but..." is that the extra hour per day worked for 8 of the 10 work day cycle makes up for it. In the time/process studies that I've worked on, there is a dramatic reduction of outside-directed work accomplished in that extra time. The vast majority of work that gets done is discretionary work that the employee desires to get done rather than office priority work that is required. This is not always the case - some folks are scrambling to catch up because they need the staff they are assigned, but the work is now late because of the AWS removing the individual from the workplace for an extra day. I leave it up to you to determine the conclusions from the above facts for your own office/circumstances. From an outsider's standpoint, it looks like offices that use this scheduling tool are approximately 25% overstaffed. Fed'l Gov't Consultant Posted January 18, 2005 2:02 PM
