Uncle Sam wants you to join and succeed in the Federal Government?
by Jorge E. Ponce, NewsTaco
Federal employees are in a state of confusion lately. Their pay has been frozen for three years, and going to a fourth. The Office of Management and Budget has imposed a moratorium on performance awards for FY 2013 – thus making performance appraisals nothing more than paper-shuffling exercises. They are being asked to perform work with fewer resources and without getting extra compensation. There is no money left to attend training to learn the new tasks that these employees are being asked to perform. And managers are not allowed to replace employees who leave to get other jobs. Something has to give. Something will give if there is not a quick intervention.
And yet, affinity groups continue to offer conferences to sell Uncle Sam to applicants. They offer workshops on successful interview techniques, on how to prepare the perfect résumé, and on how to address the executive core qualifications (ECQ’s) for senior executive jobs. The questions that should be covered at these workshops are those that address why anyone would want to join the federal workforce in its current state. But, the majority of these affinity groups continue to use these conferences to replenish their annual coffers. Some think that answering the right questions would diminish attendance at these conferences.
And, management is being asked to come with metrics to measure every minute component of every job. You may laugh, but my prediction is that they will come up with a metric to measure how often employees take rest-room breaks, which rest-room they use more frequently, how long they take for each rest-room break, and who do they go to the rest-room with. Sounds Orwellian, doesn’t it?
Well, when the going gets this complicated, it’s useful to determine which management model is being followed lately.
I think that they are following the management theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, which later became known as “scientific management.” According to Taylor, the only way to achieve the production goals of the Industrial Revolution was by having employees surrender all claims to autonomy or discretion in their work. The key component of his methodology was the time-and-motion study – a technique to measure how fast a job could be performed by eliminating all inefficient and time-wasting practices. Its end product was an instruction sheet specifying the exact sequence of operations that were needed in doing any job, and the exact time, measured to the second, in which each operation could be completed. According to Taylor, employees “must do what they are told promptly and without asking questions or making suggestions. … It is absolutely necessary for every man in an organization to become one of a train of gear wheels.” While Taylor’s practices resulted in productivity gains, they were best suited for assembly-line operations. And even so, many employees criticized them severely by labeling them as nothing more than an attempt to turn men into machines.
While Taylor’s scientific management practices worked fairly well with uneducated workers, they were unsuitable for highly educated federal employees of the 21st century. The ideal management model to follow in the 21st century was not the one devised by Taylor, but the one developed by Dr. W. Edwards Deming.
Among the indisputable management principles that Dr. Deming recommended to establish a more efficient workplace, higher profits, and increased productivity were: 1) drive out fear; create trust; 2) strive to reduce intradepartmental conflicts; 3) eliminate exhortations for the work force; instead, focus on the system and morale — (a) eliminate work standard quotas for production. Substitute leadership methods for improvement; (b) avoid numerical goals. Alternatively, learn the capabilities of processes, and how to improve them; 4) remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship; 5) educate with self-improvement programs; and, 6) include everyone in the company to accomplish the transformation.
Taylor’s management principles belong to the past. Highly successful managers nowadays are fully aware that all employees have intimate knowledge of job conditions, and, consequently, are able to make useful contributions to increase productivity and efficiency. Rather than dehumanizing the work by breaking down each job into smaller and smaller units, modern managers rely on teamwork in which all employees may contribute. In the end, this type of management increases morale, provides a sense of ownership, and improves labor-management relations.
So, why are most managers in the Federal Government embracing Taylor’s management principles and ignoring those from Deming?
I have my own theories to explain this anomaly. First, there are some managers in high positions who are young and inexperienced but think that they have all the answers. While they are highly educated, their arrogance is not substitute for their lack of on-the-job experience. Rather than relying on the expertise of career civil servants who do have the knowledge of what has and has not worked in the past, they don’t trust their judgments because they are not political appointees. And, second, I believe that there is a master plan in place to make the working conditions so unbearable that there will be a mass exodus of baby boomers from the federal payroll. Once a magic number is reached for the right size of the federal workforce, past and new perks will be re-introduced.
But, the retirement tsunami of baby boomers is already in place. Morale is at a very low level. With experienced employees leaving in hordes, there is a drain of institutional knowledge. With a less generous pension plan offered to new hires, these employees jump ship to other federal agencies or the private sector at the drop of a hat.
What is direly needed to save the federal enterprise is not managers who are bent on creating the illusion of progress by relying heavily on metrics. What is needed are managers who firmly believe that employees are the biggest asset of any organization and create the right environment for creative thinking, loyalty, excellence, and trust. The latter is what leadership is all about!
Jorge E. Ponce is a Civil Rights Champion who has worked for the Federal Government for over 30 years.
