Editor's Notebook

What's missing is the human factor. What makes people work hard and effectively? The answer is both simple and complex. In the public sector especially, intangibles are important: a desire to serve the public, the satisfaction of earning respect among one's peers, the intrinsic interest of unique challenges and occupations. It's a safe bet that among these motivations one cannot often include the desire to excel at activity-based costing or to satisfy some new edict from Congress for "results."

People like to be rewarded for a job well done. In government, precious few rewards are rendered. A handful of awards programs, including two run by Government Executive, provide non-monetary recognition. But the big raise, or the big bonus, is as rare as a man without self-pity (to lift a phrase from Stephen Vincent Benet). Nor is compensation linked to organizational performance.

Government lags far behind the private sector in its approach to pay. The subject is simply not raised when Congress and the White House make their frequent forays into corporate management faddism. There are, to be sure, a few pay demonstration projects, including two recently announced by the Defense and Commerce departments. But there's precious little thinking about large-scale reform.

One reason is that pay reform would have to go hand in hand with other changes in the civil service system. The rigid, bureaucratic, job-by-job, step-by-step system embodied in the General Schedule would have to change. The hierarchies implicit in this system might have to be dismantled--a goal of the National Performance Review that's much easier to advocate than to achieve. Flexibility would have to replace rigidity in personnel systems, so that organizational achievement could be systematically rewarded.

The days of the wage-slave are numbered in the private sector, writes Howard Risher in our cover story this month. That's because new patterns of work are demanding new forms of compensation. Our readers will recognize Risher's description of these new work patterns, because some of them are filtering into the federal sector. Can new pay practices be far behind?

Risher is well-qualified to raise such questions. He served as a consultant to the Office of Personnel Management on federal pay reform and also was a member of a National Academy of Public Administration task force that studied the concept of pay banding. He is the principal author of a new book from Jossey-Bass titled New Strategies for Public Pay. This month's article is the first of two. In September, Risher will take a closer look at broad-banding and other compensation strategies that have been attempted in parts of the government.