Of Human Capital

To ensure that personnel issues are on the table when Cabinet officers draw up strategic plans, Congress in 2002 added a new title to the bureaucracy -- chief human capital officer.

The law creating the CHCO also established a CHCO Council. The idea was to elevate federal personnel chiefs to the C ring in government -- chief financial officer, chief information officer and chief acquisition officer. Much of the CHCO agenda has been shaped by the Bush administration, which has urged agencies to step up their planning for recruitment of a new generation of civil servants to replace retiring baby boomers.

A report on CHCOs released yesterday showed that most agencies have given them a seat at the senior management table but that the CHCOs are still trying to sort out how far and how fast to push personnel and pay changes in the government.

A majority of the federal personnel chiefs, the report said, think the decades-old, government-wide pay system, the General Schedule, should be replaced with something that makes it easier for agencies to pay according to occupation and geography and bases raises on how well the employee meets performance expectations.

Some test projects have shown that "pay bands," or broader salary ranges than those in the 15-grade schedule, make it easier for managers to set more attractive salaries for new hires. Studies also show that employees who score poorly under more rigorous job evaluation systems are more likely to leave their agencies voluntarily.

Still, the report said, most personnel chiefs cautioned that any pay system changes should be slow and deliberate, in part because of opposition from unions and some in Congress to efforts to revamp pay systems at the departments of Defense and Homeland Security and for federal executives. These initiatives, the report said, "have been controversial, creating reluctance among some CHCOs to fully embrace the idea."

The report was released yesterday by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that championed the CHCO concept, and Grant Thornton, an auditing and management consulting firm. It included data from a survey of 55 federal personnel officials at 28 large agencies and more than a dozen small agencies.

To explore key aspects of the report, the two organizations hosted a panel discussion yesterday featuring Ronald P. Sanders, CHCO for the intelligence community; Marta Perez, CHCO at the Department of Homeland Security, and Michele Pilipovich, human resources director at Pension Benefit Guaranty.

Asked if they favored abolishing the General Schedule, which dates to 1949, the panelists suggested that agencies may not have any other choice. Although the schedule determines the pay of 80 percent of full-time federal employees, the panelists noted that a number of agencies have abandoned it to provide their employees with opportunities for higher pay through new systems or pilot projects.

Younger employees and those in high-demand occupations, such as scientists and engineers, will seek out agencies with more generous pay systems, the panelists predicted. Pilipovich said Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which once lost employees to the private sector, now loses them to other federal agencies with higher pay scales.

Sanders and Perez, though, signaled that they will not be rushing their agencies to adopt different pay practices. Sanders said the 16 agencies that make up the intelligence community will undergo "pay modernization" in phases. Perez indicated that agencies should spend time first on training managers and employees and refining job evaluation standards before linking pay raises to more rigorous job performance ratings.

But Pilipovich said agencies may not be able to move slowly, given the competition for talent. "I don't know if we can really wait until we get it perfect," she said.

Union Election Set at GAO

A union election will be held at the Government Accountability Office on Sept. 19, the GAO and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers announced.

About 1,800 GAO analysts will be eligible to vote on whether to form a union. According to the joint statement, permanent and probationary employees in bands I, IIA and IIB will be able to vote. GAO, a congressional agency, sets salaries based on the bands.

The push for unionization at GAO began after numerous analysts complained about the fairness of a 2005-06 restructuring of compensation practices. The union filed a petition in May at GAO calling for the representation election.

Talk Show

David Wennergren, deputy assistant secretary for information management and technology at the Defense Department, will be the guest on the IBM "Business of Government Hour" at 9 a.m. Saturday on WJFK radio (106.7 FM).

Stephen Barr's e-mail address is barrs@washpost.com