Library Worklife

Volume 2, No. 9 • September 2005

HR Law

A New Revolution in Civil Service Personnel Practices

By Elyse Schear

Job dissatisfaction and high employee turnover among civil service personnel has policy-makers listening, and we are beginning to see revolutionary changes in the civil service system.

Civil Service, also known as public service or the public sector, refers to civilian workers employed in government agencies. The public sector deals with the delivery of goods and services by and for the government agencies, at the national, regional or local/municipal level. Salaries for civil service workers are funded by taxpayers. Each agency takes care of its own personnel needs, with an historically complex set of rules. Until recently, the majority of civil service jobs were filled under a general system based on merit determined by competitive examination.

Some workers find employment in a Civil Service position to be a good thing because of fairness in hiring and job security, but increasing numbers of public employees claim that public sector personnel systems are cumbersome and bogged down in bureaucracy. Complex job classification and examination systems make hiring, evaluation and promotion take too long.

One civil service personnel practice that slows things down is the hiring of provisional employees. Provisional employees are those who have been appointed on a non-permanent basis while awaiting a competitive examination. Provisional status differs from probation in the private sector, where many employees are given the first three months on a job to prove their capabilities. Probation is generally a straightforward arrangement where, after a specified time, a capable employee is kept on and considered permanent, and a poor performer is simply let go.

After serving for a period of time, a provisional employee’s job is posted for the public to view and the employee must take an exam, competing with other applicants for her/his own job. If the provisional employee passes the exam and is in the top three (or five in some agencies) of eligible applicants, the employer may make the provisional employee permanent. If the provisional employee does not make the top of the list, the employer is forced to interview a minimum number of candidates and must replace the provisional employee with one of them. If one of the high-ranking candidates happens to be a veteran, the veteran automatically must be offered the job.

In many civil service agencies, there is a separate exam for each job title. For example, in 1995 the New York State Department of Civil Service had more than 5,529 provisional employees requiring 85 different exams and an average of 150 days to report exam results.¹ Fortunately, new leadership took over in 1996, and by 1998 had reduced the number of provisional employees by two thirds and shortened the exam report time to 45 days.

Most of the states are working to improve public human resource management with a variety of approaches including reducing the size of the civil service, creating more flexible rules, and eliminating civil service altogether.² The states that appear to be doing the best job at improving their personnel practices have found ways to speed up the hiring process, improve training, and offer real performance incentives.

According to the Government Performance Project, an independent information source for state management performance, the state of Georgia gets the highest marks in improved human resources effectiveness.³ Georgia uses an interactive recruitment Web that enables them to hire new employees faster than the average state. And unlike the merit systems used by most state governments, Georgia evaluates employees through a pay for performance system that includes bonuses for high achievers. As a result, voluntary turnover of classified employees is below average, and the number of employee grievances is low.

Another high-achiever is the state of Washington. The Department of Personnel developed an Internet application process where job applicants can apply, be tested, and get their test results immediately. Within four hours of applying, eligible candidates are placed on a list that is immediately accessible to hiring managers. Seventy-five percent of the state’s workforce has a career plan, and turnover is very low.

States that are not faring as well include Tennessee, which suffers a backlog in the hiring system. Twice the average number of new hires are terminated before their probationary period ends. Not all employees receive performance appraisals, and, although they received cost of living increases, no employee received a performance-based pay increase in 2003. The situation is worse in California, where hiring new employees can take between two and nine months. In addition, twenty percent of the state’s workforce are operating under expired contracts.

The federal government seems to have taken its cue from the states in introducing personnel reform. In 2001, President Bush put forth the President’s Management Agenda, calling for changes to make government “Citizen-centered, not bureaucracy-centered; Results-oriented; Market-based, actively promoting rather than stifling innovation through competition.”⁴

The summer of 2005 marks the fourth anniversary of Bush’s Agenda. Through the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) workforce planning Web site, Federal agencies assist each other in implementing the President’s plan.⁵ In addition, the White House posts a scorecard showing each agency’s progress toward the plan’s initiatives.⁶

The U.S. government is the largest employer in the United States, hiring two percent of the nation's civilian work force. Federal workers can be found in every state and in large metropolitan areas including overseas in over 200 countries.⁷

Last year, the OPM conducted a survey of Federal workers to measure their impressions of how well their agencies are doing implementing the President’s Management Agenda. Survey results indicate that many areas need improvement.⁸ Only about 25% of federal employees surveyed feel that their jobs make good use of their skills and abilities or that they are given real opportunities to improve their job skills. Fewer than 20% of workers feel that the federal workforce has the knowledge and skills necessary to accomplish organizational goals, or that workers have enough information to do their jobs well. Only 10% reported that their particular work unit was able to recruit people with the right skills and that they have sufficient resources—people, materials, and/or budget— to get their jobs done. And fewer than 10% of workers felt that personnel decisions and promotions are based on merit, or that differences in performance are recognized in a meaningful way.

The types of reform briefly discussed here are truly historical in scope, affecting our local and national governments, and the daily experiences of many workers. It is too soon to tell, but it will be interesting to wait and see which of these new plans will qualify as real improvements to civil service.

References

Walters, Jonathan Walters. Untangling Albany. Governing Magazine (December, 1996). http://66.23.131.98/archive/1998/dec/civil.txt.
Selden, et al. ”Human Resource Practices in State Government: Findings from a National Survey. Public Administration Review. 61:5 (September/October 2001).
Government Performance Project. Grading the States 2005. http://results.gpponline.org/
Office of Management and Budget. The President’s Management Agenda, Fiscal Year 2002. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2002/mgmt.pdf
Office of Personnel Management. Who’s Doing What?http://www.opm.gov/workforceplanning/WhosDoingWhat.asp
Office of Personnel Management. The Scorecardhttp://www.whitehouse.gov/results/agenda/scorecard.html
Federal Jobs Net Career Center . The President’s Management Agenda, Fiscal Year 2002. http://federaljobs.net/index.html
Office of Personnel Management. Federal Human Capital Survey 2004.http://www.fhcs2004.opm.gov.

Elyse Schear is a civil service employee, freelance writer, and MLS student in the online program at Texas Woman’s University.

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