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COMMENTS

• Our group was transitioned over about 2 years ago and there was a huge confusion about the system. An accountant in our department tried to explain it using an example and I am sure they didn’t understand it themselves because according to these calculations we were all getting a 15% increase or more! It all appears like a shell game; you get 2% here but lose 2% there, get 1% here, split 2% there, net zero. We do our own evaluations every year and spend several days writing and rewriting our activities to the specified format. The right key words will get you a rating of 4, poor words get you a 3 rating. The supervisors spend months preparing evaluations. What a waste of time. The panel makes the final decision and has no idea what you do. There is jealousy amongst the other employees if they find out someone got a much higher rating. Mario Posted July 2, 2009 8:51 AM
• NSPS is a great system. I am on all the pay pool panels and get to screw all the employees I dislike. Keep NSPS I get to put the fix on and prosper from the fallout. America is great. JP Posted June 24, 2009 8:00 PM
• I was a GS-14 prior to conversion to NSPS. I am a member of the HQ Pay Pool, and we just completed our mock pay pool for the interim appraisals. In my opinion, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. We all do a great deal of work to rate 3 on a scale of 1 to 5. The Herculean effort required by (i) employees to do self-assessments, (ii) supervisors to do rater assessments, and (iii) pay pools to review and “evaluate” performance of employees they don’t know doing jobs they don’t understand – with an objective of normalizing ratings at the “valued employee” level – is evidence that NSPS should have as its vision statement: “Striving for Mediocrity.” NSPS has morphed into a very complex words and numbers game played successfully (at taxpayer expense) by those who take productive time from doing their jobs to write their own or their employee’s appraisals. As pay pools cannot evaluate performance of people they don’t supervise, they evaluate rater narrative. Some “game” the system by inflating scores and taking the time to write well-articulated narrative. As it’s the writing, and not the performance, that is judged, this approach can be quite successful for some. Was that really the intent of NSPS? NSPS is faltering under the weight of its own bureaucracy and begs for a pragmatic solution. There is a better way, but NSPS isn’t it. Please end this counterproductive system now. db Posted June 18, 2009 2:07 PM