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Proposals to reform the federal government's personnel policies and processes are springing up like May flowers. Many of the suggestions for change are good ones that should have been implemented long ago. But something about the discussion and the way it is being framed is troublesome. There's an assumption at work that what we need to do is take the old civil service system, tear it apart, rethink it, replace some of the parts, put it back together in creative ways, then issue a new civil service system that each agency will roll out smartly and administer.

But this kind of thinking is what caused the problem in the first place. The federal government doesn't need one new personnel system, but hundreds of new personnel systems.

In the not so recent past, human resource offices existed to administer a set of rules designed to keep the organization out of trouble. That was especially true in the public sector but was also true to a lesser extent in the private sector. Over the past 10 years, an HR revolution has occurred that completely redefined its role. The role is no longer to make sure the rules are followed; it's to give the organization a strategic advantage.

Organizations have come to realize that a key ingredient in their success - the key ingredient, some will argue - is the quality of their workforce. If the workforce, more than finances or facilities or marketing or information technology, determines an organization's success, then nothing the organization does has more strategic importance or must be tailored more carefully to its strategic goals than HR.

The federal government is huge. It is also incredibly diverse functionally and organizationally. Does the business of regulating financial institutions call for the same strategy as the business of conducting scientific research or running a supply service or gathering military intelligence or processing Social Security claims? If these different lines of business call for dramatically different business strategies, then they also call for dramatically different HR strategies.

There are a lot of HR success stories in the federal government now, but they all share a common characteristic: they were each tailored to meet the specific business requirements of a relatively small organization with a discrete line of business. To continue with the clothing analogy, they were designed to be one size for one person and to fit that person very well.

Here are some examples: the Navy's China Lake facility in California came up with pay-banding back in the 1980s as a way to respond to specific business requirements it had to attract, retain and motivate a scientific and engineering workforce; the National Imagery and Mapping Agency abandoned the Office of Personnel Management occupational series and completely redesigned its HR processes to better position itself to respond to technological and marketplace changes in its business (which earned it the President's Quality Award for strategic management of human capital). In the Defense Department laboratory community, eight different personnel demonstration projects are now under way at eight different laboratories. These aren't cookie-cutter demonstration projects; each is different, tailored to the particular business requirements of the particular lab.

The examples I point to above are frequently cited as HR best practices, but what really defines them and distinguishes them is not the particular HR features they have adopted; it is the fact that they were free to tailor HR to meet the specific needs of their organization. They came up with an HR wardrobe that fit.

What's disturbing today is an apparent countermovement against the HR renegades. The Defense Department published a draft notice in the Federal Register on April 2 that would force the many different demonstration projects in Defense labs to be replaced by a one-size-fits-all demonstration project that was not developed by the labs either individually or collectively and seems to have no purpose except to try and prove that a one-size-fits-all HR process can be imposed externally.

Meanwhile, Defense has introduced legislation that would allow it to export this one-size-fits-all model to the rest of the department. At the same time, I hear talk that the Homeland Security Department's new HR system will serve as a model that can be endorsed by OPM and exported across the government. (The proposed Defense legislation is very closely aligned with Homeland Security's HR statute).

What's sad about this turn of events is that everyone seems to understand and acknowledge that trying to create one personnel system for all types of agencies and operations is a bad idea. The President's Management Agenda characterizes the HR problem as: "Federal personnel policies and compensation tend to take the same 'one-size-fits-all' approach they took in 1945." Then it defines the solution as: "Human capital strategies will be linked to organizational mission, vision, core values, goals and objectives." My point exactly. So why is anyone talking about one HR system for Defense?

Part of the problem, I think, is the way we talk about HR reform. While we clearly need hundreds of carefully tailored, strategically focused HR policies, programs and processes, we also need one very broad - and very brief - HR framework, big enough to encompass all the different strategies needed out there, while defining a few very basic values, such as merit principles, regarding the way federal employees should be treated. That's really the only discussion that should be going on at the political level, at OPM or the Office of Management and Budget, or at the agency level.

We shouldn't begin to talk about whether we need pay-banding or what techniques work best for measuring performance or how to pay supervisors, until we get way down in the organization. We need to follow the lead of those wonderful success stories out there: hats off to the China Lakes, the NIMAs, the Defense Department labs. HR works when it happens on the ground - and when it fits to a tee.

COMMENTS

• If incompetents have moved up the food chain, it's because those in managerial positions within the AF have allowed it. So what does this say about the caliber of AF management? I cannot honestly believe that these managers could adequately determine superior performance in a pay-banding situation, given, as you say, the types of individuals promoted in the last decade. If the AF wants reform, then let's get at the root of the problem and dump the existing management system ... that would certainly be the first target of any CEO in the private sector, not the workers. GovExec.com reader Posted May 5, 2003 6:20 PM
• Mr. Barnhart got it exactly right—what DoD and the others are trying to do is not innovative. Instead, they're squelching innovation in order to establish central control over HR in DoD from the Pentagon. They're replacing the numbing consistency OPM has been accused of imposing over the years with their own brand of the same thing. That's a shame, because starting with China Lake and continuing down to the present with the lab demo experiments, the various components of DoD has been the government's best source of innovative HR practices that really work. GovExec.com reader Posted May 5, 2003 11:16 AM
• Any uniform model is contrary to the concept of “demo” programs which maximize local flexibility to optimize outcomes peculiar to individual organizations, such as recruitment and retention of premium quality staff, increased agility and responsiveness. “Pay-for-performance” is not the only tool available to attract and retain premium quality researchers for our in-house government laboratories as these folks are often more motivated by a creative, collegial, appreciative, well-equipped environment than by mere “pay”. Their self-actualized performance is difficult to increase beyond its innate creative drive and curiosity, but it is easily discouraged by inept attempts to tailorize their tasks or by allowing their organizations to become “Dilbertized” as have most industrial models. Laboratories, as opposed to Pentagon bureaucracies, are highly dependent on participatory leadership and Japanese-style cooperation to maintain maximum effectiveness and the minutia of pay band structures, scoring methodologies or their uniformity across all “laboratories” (or DoD) is of concern only to folks who oversee the process. The things that help are the agility and responsiveness that the individual “demos” have been given which allow starting pay to be matched to the instantaneous market and offers to be made while the candidate is still interested. Further centralization, uniformity or control would destroy the gains made to date. The idea that research performance could be defined in measurable terms a year in advance is goofy at best—any outcome that could be predicted in the form of an obtainable objective is probably not worthy of a research investment or, at least, is not “reaching” far enough. The focus on predictable rewards for predictable results is better suited for training circus animals than for leading researchers who are expected to “go where no one has gone before.” R. A. LeFande Posted May 5, 2003 10:42 AM