arontius | Civil Service. (Reply)

.....Yesterday was a rather long day in training. It was our brainwashing session of how wonderful the new Civil Service personnel system will be and how it is going to make our lives better. National Security Personnel System, NSPS, developed by our good friends Dick Chenney and Donald Rumsfeld (who CERTAINLY have our best interests at heart).

.....The system is rather complicated, but is supposedly geared towards rewarding those who work hard and well, and punishing those who cost the agency in terms of money, schedule, injuries, etc. Essentially it works by combining the normal increases in wages that one would see in the course of a year (Cost of Living, Step Increases within Grade, Special Incentive Awards, etc.) and combines them into a pool of money. That pool is divided amongst a group of people in the form of 'shares' as either wage increases or outright cash bonuses. The number of shares you receive based on your ratings for the year.

.....On the surface it sounds nice, but I am troubled by how easy it is to abuse the system. For one thing your ratings now become incredibly important. Those ratings are now based on a complicated system of self-assessment, supervisor assessment, group assessment and administrator agreement. The self-assessment has to be filled with objectives agreed upon by yourself and your superior and aligned with the overall 'goals' of the shipyard. They are not easy to write, and full of land minds. If you write objectives for yourself that you quickly realize are difficult at best to achieve, you are proverbially screwed at the end of the year.

.....I worry most about those with little to no writing skills as well. I spent a year or so in the Training Department at the Shipyard. There were a rather large number of people whose reading comprehension level was negligible at best. There were even a few where we had to call them up into the office separate and basically read the material to them, their reading skills being that minimal. Some of these people were absolutely fantastic supervisors and managers, getting the job done and taking good care of their employees. But when they have to sit down and start writing self-assessments, hmmmm...

.....The rewards system also strikes me as a giant pyramid scheme. For those performers who excel, someone has to fail so that those good performers get those bonuses paid to them out of the pool. Now this seems on the surface to not be a bad thing (those who do good should be rewarded, those who do bad should not), but I could quite easily see a time where it would make management look good to start implementing a quota system. You have this many star employees, this many goods, this many marginals, etc. But, of course, the minute that happens, SOMEONE has to start receiving those undesirable marks. Which means no increases in salary for them. But what is worse is that under NSPS rules, the ability to terminate negatively performing workers becomes easier. Which sounds wonderful on the surface, but with quotas, not so much. See my worry? Why go through the stress and bother of a RIF when you could quota your way out of a couple of hundred workers just by giving them negative ratings.

.....I didn't leave class at the end of the day with a good feeling, which was made worse by the phone call I received as I was leaving gate. Seems the Big Boss had pulled some strings and had my office moved downstairs closer to his. This was something that was in the works for a while, but I had been dragging my feet a little. They waited until I was gone and WHAM, made the move happen. Next week is going to be interesting.

.....O.K., it's out of my system now. I'll stop whining for a while. :-)

.....Aaron / Arontius.