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Return to Article: FEATURES Building A Better Carrot

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  The Key to any of the plans in this story are managers with strong management skills, who are, above all FAIR, and who are able to separate their personal feeling about an employee from their work evaluation. All too often, even though an employee is a good worker, they are not rewarded, because someone in the chain of command does not like them personally.This dislike is always conveyed from manager to manager, so that each manager's perception of the employee is tainted from the start. At my agency, the employees that are pulled into management are those that excel at their initial job, ie: Collection officer, revenue agent. In our line of work, many of the people that choose the profession are not people-oriented. They are used to working on their own and not particularly comfortable socializing. We are supposed to be independent, and because we work alone, most interpret that to mean they have to remain cold toward other employees and taxpayers. An example is a recent survey that asked "do you have a best friend at work?" 90% of employees were offended by that question. It essentially is asking how much you enjoy your job and the place where we spend most of our waking hours 5 days a week. When you have loners put into managment positons they are not good managers. All employees want to be rewared, and most want to do a good job.ALL have some degree of interst in the job, just by showing up for work each day; we are not FORCED to work here. Part of motivating an employee is finding what that employee does well, and then rewarding that behavior. A lot of what goes on here is contantly pointing out what was done wrong-even if it is using an incorrect form-and holding that against the employee;by including that in case reviews/ratings, instead of ignoring that small error and looking at the overall achievement.IRS managers tend to be mono-vision; they do not recognize that employees have different strengths and need to be given different tasks, that they personally can excel at doing. Matthew Ferrero said what needs to happen here at the IRS; I sincerely hope he, and others like him, are heard, and managers are actually exposed and held accountable for ideas such as his. I sure have not seen antyhing like his ideas at the Field level. And, that my dears, is where the rubber hits and road, and true production counts!

  GovExec.com reader Posted April 29, 2007 11:43 AM