GovernmentExecutive.com

Employees in the Defense Department will have to demonstrate results to receive pay raises, according to a summary of recent changes to the human resources portion of the department's new personnel system.

"The modified design emphasizes employee results that contribute to the accomplishment of the department's national security mission," a statement posted on the National Security Personnel System Web site Monday said.

According to the statement, job objectives for each employee will be more focused on results that contribute to organizational goals than the original design called for. Results-based objectives "will serve as the primary basis for employee performance ratings," the update said.

Employees' ratings will determine their share of the annual pay raise pool.

The department made the decision to place a great emphasis on results during a self-imposed delay on training employees on NSPS because officials said the rating system was too confusing. The old rating system rested on whether employees reached benchmarks such as "valued performance" on factors such as "technical proficiency."

Benchmarks and performance factors still "may influence the final rating" in this new system, Monday's announcement stated.

Details of the new job objectives will be released by the end of February, the update said, and are still subject to input from unions. NSPS training is now scheduled to pick back up in March, and the first group to enter the system, downsized to 11,000 employees, will enter April 30.

NSPS is the department's congressionally authorized personnel reform, designed to modernize management by scrapping automatic raises in favor of pay for performance and replacing the General Schedule pay ladder with broad paybands.

The system has come under heavy fire from unions, who fear the performance-based raises will encourage cronyism and that pay pools will become targets for budget cuts. A group of unions sued the department over the system's rules on collective bargaining rights. A judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is scheduled to render his decision in that case by March 1.

COMMENTS

• Instead of discussing if NSPS will work or not, let’s get together as employees and help write good objectives/goals that we can all use to make the system work for us. I worked for the Army and we were under the pay banding demonstration plan, similar to NSPS and several of us got together and wrote our objectives and helped write our accomplishments at the end of the year. We all benefited from it greatly. As long as we argue about it, we’re the only losers. Sherry Posted April 18, 2006 11:36 AM
• NSPS is supposed to change what? There is no base line for acceptable performance so how can you have a realistic incentive based system. The current system is flawed because appraisals are over inflated, annual performance awards are evenly divided among everyone rather than being an award for individual performance. Is any of that going to change, no. Same game, same rules. Performance does not get recognized in the end nor does team performance. Looking into my crystal ball I see this limp along for a couple of more years, until the blind visionaries that came up with the plot are promoted for their incompetence, leave the program and it dies a grateful long overdue death. required4what Posted February 28, 2006 9:14 AM
• Good point, Phil. The major reason for opposition to NSPS is DoD's refusal to communicate with employees in a meaningful way. What little information they put out is incomprehensible, and no one is willing to answer questions or address concerns. I can see three possible explanations for this: 1. The people in charge of NSPS are so stupid they can't understand that the lack of communication is part of the problem. If this is the case, they are also too stupid to design a personnel system. 2. The people in charge of NSPS know there are such grievous flaws in the system that the opposition would be even worse if the truth got out (in which case, NSPS definitely should not proceed in its present flawed state). 3. There is no logical reason to hide the true nature of NSPS, but the people in charge are reflexively and senselessly secretive. This would seem to indicate mental illness of some kind, which is a sign of unreliability, and would also make me wary of what other irrational behavior went into the design of NSPS. I can see no explanation of this silence that has good implications for employees. Can anyone? Perry Noid Posted February 24, 2006 3:30 PM