By Alan Ehrenhalt

After 15 years or so, I’ve grown a little tired of listening to Garrison Keillor recite the same line each week about all the children in Lake Wobegon being above average. It was funny for awhile. It’s a cliché now.

Or so I thought until the other day, when I read about the new employee performance appraisal in Fairfax County, Virginia. The managers there don’t seem to realize that Keillor is joking. In fact, they are trying to outdo him. On their workforce, just about everybody makes the all-star team.

I’m not kidding. Of 2,276 employees assessed in Fairfax last year, 80 percent were judged to be either “superior” or “exceptional.” I’ve met a few Fairfax employees in my time, and nearly all of them seem to be decent people. But if four-fifths of the workforce is at the top of the chart, then there’s something funny about the chart. Exceptional ability is, by nature, exceptional. It can’t be the baseline.

The irony is that Fairfax went to its new performance appraisals last summer in an effort to move beyond its traditional practice of giving salary increases to every worker every year, regardless of merit. The idea was that those who deserve raises would get them, and those who didn’t would receive a pretty clear message.

In a way, that happened. As a result of the appraisal, 2,275 employees were granted raises of 3, 5 or 7 percent. One unidentified employee got nothing. That’s right — just one. Can you imagine being that single hapless worker? His bosses have essentially written him a note saying, “You are not only incompetent, you are in a class by yourself.”

I have no doubt that the message will get through, and that the Lone Slacker will soon be leaving the county payroll. But this is an expensive and cumbersome way to remove one rotten apple from the barrel.

To their credit, county leaders concede that the pay-for-performance system needs a little tweaking. As it currently stands, the four possible ratings are “exceptional,” “superior,” “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory.” County executive Anthony H. Griffin wants to add “fully proficient,” a category that would award only a modest raise of 2-3 percent but would avoid insulting the employee. Griffin hopes managers would be more inclined to use it.

Ultimately, though, Fairfax County’s experience serves as a reminder that civil service reform requires an assault not only on tradition, but on human managerial instinct. Bosses prefer to deliver good news. As long as they aren’t restricted in the number of gold stars they can give out, they are going to give out a generous supply of them. If a government really wants a tough merit appraisal process, it probably has to grade on a curve. A small percentage of the workforce gets the top grade; the rest have to settle for something less laudatory — and less lucrative.

That can be a brutal process. I’m not sure many of America’s governments are ready for it, any more than Lake Wobegon is.

Alan Ehrenhalt is executive editor of Governing.

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Reader Responses:

THE NEED TO BE SMARTER

When I was a young second lieutenant in the U.S. Army (1970-’72) we were all rated annually on an “Officer Efficiency Report” with a 0-100 quantitative scale. It was well known that officers rated outside the top 5 percent faced an early end to their careers. It was also the norm that the truly excellent were rated in the top 1 percent. The result: over 80 percent were in the top 5 percent.

Those raters who used the scale as it was intended to be used were swimming upstream, and hurting subordinates badly. The more malevolent used the scale “right” in a selective way, to injure targeted individuals.

Lessons:

1. We need to be smarter about measuring.

2. An evaluation device may be useable, but with different criteria than those originally intended.

Jerry Benjamin
Dean
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
State University of New York
New Paltz

GROWING MUSHROOMS IN SUNLIGHT

“Too Much Excellence” is a good airing of one local government’s attempt to introduce performance into its employee assessment process. That is extremely hard to do, and the results experienced in Fairfax County aren’t uncommon. And, unfortunately, hard to report without making fun of.

Interestly, Fairfax County’s attempt was one with an unusually solid foundation. There was substantial thought given to the approach to be used, significant employee training as part of the process (both raters and employees), and unusual effort to create a rich process using multiple raters. Too bad the result wasn’t managed.

There is one huge barrier to effectively implementing performance-based pay that deserves much more attention that it’s received: the publicness of public employee compensation. After working with many public-sector attempts to introduce performance as the determining factor in pay, I’m convinced that only absent publicly visible pay is it possible to effectively do pay for performance.

Ever try to grow mushrooms in broad sunlight? That’s what we’re trying to do with pay for performance in the public eye. Show me a public agency where it is working and I’ll show you one in which there is little or no media attention to public agency salaries. And besides, most who claim success in doing pay for performance are at best guilty of puffery.

Jerry Newfarmer
Chairman & CEO
Management Partners Inc.
Cincinnati

The writer is former city manager of Cincinnati, San Jose and Fresno.

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