Details emerge on Pentagon performance management system

The Pentagon is beginning to release information on the nuts and bolts of its new performance management plan, a variation of which may become familiar to all federal employees if the Bush administration has its way.

Last week, Defense officials posted a new user guide for the National Security Personnel System's automated performance evaluation system on the NSPS Web site. NSPS is the Defense Department's answer to what officials see as an outmoded General Schedule pay system. The Homeland Security Department is adopting a similar system, and there is an effort to adopt the concept in all federal agencies.

Job goals, self-evaluations, interim evaluations and final evaluations, as well as the pay raise Defense employees will receive as a result of the evaluations, all will be entered into the NSPS automated system.

The first 11,000 employees who entered NSPS in April are the only ones with real access to the program, but Pentagon officials are providing Web tutorials to give the remaining 690,000 or so civilian employees who eventually are scheduled to work under NSPS a taste.

According to the documents, supervisors will develop a performance plan for each employee. Plans must include between three and five job objectives on which employees will be rated at the end of the year.

The objectives should be about a paragraph long each. Here's an example offered by the Pentagon:

"Promotes safety/health in the workplace through awareness and compliance with safety rules and regulations to include Occupations, Safety and Health guidelines. Assists management in the effort to reduce mishaps by 5 percent per year with ultimate goal being zero mishaps. Exhibits safe and responsible behavior in the workplace taking positive action to report or eliminate potential hazards. Complies with requirement to use and wear PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) for protections and control of identified hazards. One failure to report unsafe acts or conditions or comply with safety rules and regulations during rating period is allowed."

Every goal has to be accompanied by one to three "contributing factors." The potential factors are: technical proficiency, critical thinking, cooperation and teamwork, communication, customer focus, resource management and leadership.

At the end of the yearlong evaluation cycle, supervisors must rate each employee first on the completion of their job objective, using a one to five scale. Then, the supervisor is to decide if contributing factors helped or hurt the goal, and can subtract or add one point, or keep the rating the same. This adjusted rating is what supervisors will then use to allocate pieces of the pay raise pie among employees.

Finally, supervisors can choose to weigh some job objectives more than others. Each goal must be worth at least 10 percent of the total score. All of the goals must add up to 100 percent and must be weighted in 5 percent increments.

After a supervisor creates the initial performance plan, employees can recommend changes. Supervisors must meet with their employees at least once during the year to talk about progress, and employees can keep track of accomplishments in the system to boost their chance of receiving a high rating.