Hurdles to hiring
“Held Back” points to a main focus of the ruckus: Agency HR folks blame OPM for not doing everything they fail to do—work closely with hiring managers and get rid of poorly written vacancy announcements. The FEVS and GBC surveys mentioned have the identical and inherent problem: “I didn’t get hired, therefore the system is rigged against me and for (fill in the blank, usually veterans are blamed).” That’s the GBC version. The FEVS version is: “I’m so much more valuable than everyone else, but they didn’t get in trouble and probably got the same performance evaluation rating as me. It’s not fair. I’m the best.” And back to square one.
JTQ
More on staffing struggles
My office has had acting managers for five of the seven years I’ve been here. The managers below micromanage to the point where we don’t even bother being proactive, we cater to our branch chiefs, who cater to the division directors. Real work is rare, to the point where everyone in our office is seeking details or lateral positions. Some have even taken leaves of absence and gotten additional degrees in hopes of moving out from under our managers. Real reform would allow employees to give performance assessments to their managers, which would allow poorly performing managers to be retrained, demoted or let go.
lesserlesserwashington
Leadership failures and corruption must be addressed before the workforce can be corrected. My agency shuffles and hides management and leaders who are friends, while humiliating the staff.
PenelopeP
Fired up over poor performers
I am sick and tired of managers afraid to confront nonperforming and problematic employees who do not work or have nothing else better to do than gossip, complain and start drama. Why punish good working employees? Bad employees are toxic for everyone in the workplace.
Fedupfedd4
Private industry can fire for no reason at all. They can fire you because they don’t like your color, sex, race, religion, or disability as long as they don’t directly say that to your face. Some government managers have the same secret desire to hire people of the same race, interests, etc. and fire those who are different, but are stopped by laws enacted for fairness. There is a system of due process. Most good managers understand this.
Lucius Dark
Give OPM real independence from other agencies and real power to force them to demote, transfer or fire bad apples, especially bad managers. If the quality of managers were improved, the rest of the workforce would swiftly improve, too.
Western_Sage
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