Travis Sinquefield at Disorganizational Behavior examines this Washington Post article on new parts of an annual survey given to government workers.
Among the new statements the employees were asked to evaluate was this: “Pay raises depend on how well employees perform their jobs.” Only 22 percent of the respondents agreed with this statement, while 45 percent disagreed (25 percent were neutral).
John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said that a performance-based system of rewards would not work in the federal system, in part because “most federal workers don’t trust a system by which they would be compensated or receive raises based on how they are judged on their performance by their managers.”
As Travis observes, it says something bad about “a workplace and its management if the employees don’t trust their managers to give honest, objective performance reviews.”
Your tax dollars are at work to ensure, to use the words of Clay Johnson III, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, that “every employee, from unsatisfactory to outstanding, gets the same annual raise.”