By Stephen Barr
Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Federal executives are less satisfied with their pay than they were two years ago, and many don't understand how their raises and bonuses are linked to job performance ratings.

Those were two of the key findings of a survey of the Senior Executive Service, the government's senior leaders who oversee the day-to-day operations of the government, released yesterday by the Office of Personnel Management.

Congress and the Bush administration placed the SES in a pay-for-performance system four years ago to emphasize the importance of job performance and to provide higher salaries for executives. Under the system, executives are not guaranteed annual raises and are not entitled to the locality pay adjustments that go to most other white-collar federal employees.

The system got off to a shaky start, in part because it was poorly explained or poorly implemented in a number of agencies. Members of Congress, including Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio), have urged the administration to do a better job of administering the system to instill confidence that performance-based pay can work in the government.

Yesterday, two OPM officials who oversaw the survey, Nancy H. Kichak and Nancy E. Randa, said they were disappointed by the responses on how well agencies had briefed and trained executives on their pay system.

Sixty-one percent of the survey respondents said they had not been given a summary of how their agency had rated executives and how bonuses and pay raises were distributed among executives. More than a third said they had not received a briefing or training on their agency's performance management system.

"We believe communication should be quick," Kichak said. "People like to have feedback on how things went very shortly after the ratings cycle."

Carol A. Bonosaro, president of the Senior Executives Association, said: "This is not rocket science, to give all these people a copy of the agency's executive compensation plan, their SES performance management plan and the summary data with regard to ratings, bonus awards and pay adjustments. Why some agencies are doing a reasonably good job and others are not is a really interesting question."

In the survey, 61 percent of the respondents said they were satisfied with their pay, down from 73 percent in 2006.

The survey does not explain the drop off, but Kichak said that some executives have hit the maximum they may receive under the law and that some agencies impose other limits on executive pay. Recent increases in SES pay have lagged behind those for other white-collar federal employees, another possible cause of dissatisfaction.

More than a quarter of the executives said they did not understand how their most recent raise or bonus was determined at their agency.

There are about 7,000 federal executives in the government; the majority are career employees, but the SES ranks include political appointees and experts brought in on term appointments. The survey drew responses from 4,386 executives, and the survey's margin of error was less than 1 percent, the OPM said.

A nonprofit group has started briefing departments and agencies on the importance of properly "onboarding" new employees, after releasing a report showing that the government and new employees could benefit from well-run orientations.

The Partnership for Public Service report found that orientation programs typically concentrate on administrative matters such as filling out paperwork. What's needed, it said, is a more comprehensive approach that involves teaching new employees about the agency's mission and culture, including how employees relate to each other and to outside groups, how collaborative the workplace is and how performance is rewarded.

Studies of private-sector employers, plus anecdotal evidence from agencies, show that good onboarding programs improve retention and get new workers up to full performance levels sooner, said Max Stier, president of the partnership. "There's some set of folks that are leaving because it was not a good fit, but you can also infer that there are some who are leaving because they were not effectively engaged by their employer."

The report, produced in conjunction with the Booz Allen Hamilton consulting firm, recommends that new employees be assigned a sponsor who can help integrate them into the organization, and that senior leadership, managers and supervisors become personally involved in the transition and not leave the task to the human resources office.

Diary associate Eric Yoder contributed to this column.