19 Comments

Having just completed the process to terminate a civil service employee, it's bewilderingly complicated and I'm not really sure it even benefits employees, some of whom stay in a role where they are clearly unhappy or unqualified, long after it was time to move on, because of this perceived sense of "safety".

When you pair this with how hard it is to do a merit-based increase or promotion, you have a system where there is no carrot or stick. It's hard.

Expand full comment

You get to tell your high performers that in recognition for their hard work they get rewarded with...extra work. Under-performers get "bubble wrap" or "safety cones" to steer work around them, which resonates with exactly the kind of employee that needs to separate. It's like battery acid to morale. I'm sorry you had to deal with that.

As you've experienced, the civil service termination process is a full-blown (extra) project for the manager, with snares and setbacks at every step. I've heard HR professionals complain that their performance improvement program (or whatever risk averse termination process your entity uses) is just a "check the box" exercise, because the manager has already made up their mind. That's correct. Managers are under tremendous strain, and knowing what it takes to terminate a civil service employee can convince them to put up with some shockingly inept or lazy behavior. By the time a manager is "there" with an employee, they're usually staying there.

Expand full comment

When an organization doesn’t fire underperformers the culture slowly spoils over time. Let’s say every year, 1% of the employees would be fired in the public sector, but aren’t. Each year the amount of underperformers increases. Some teams just fill up with these people. The best employees don’t want to work with these coworkers, and leave. Good managers get frustrated because they can’t build a good team. Good workers get frustrated when they’re paid less than the guy who does nothing.

It feels like you are being “the nice guy” when you keep around someone who’s bad at their job, but you are also being unfair to their hard working teammates.

Expand full comment

I think the BLS JOLTS data (Job Openings and Labor Turnover) is the more current data you're looking for, and it confirms what you've written in the post. Other than an outlier in 2020, private layoff/discharge rate ranges from 1.1%-1.3%, with federal government ranging from 0.2-0.4% and state government ranging from 0.3%-0.5%.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/jolts_03062024.pdf (Table 24, p. 35)

Expand full comment

Oooh thank you!

Expand full comment

Funny coincidence, I was just chatting to a colleague about underperforming and less skilled juniors this morning. Implicit in our entire conversation is that we work with the employees we have and not the ones we want or even need. Both of us also actually preferred working with a less skilled but more enthusiastic employee over a skilled but unwilling employee, because the default is to train up what we needed.

One idea I've had but haven't fleshed out or researched is to model internal employment like independent contractors where employees use agency or federal-wide job boards to connect to organizations. My idea is that if every employee "contracts" with their organization (while still being full employees), then organizations who don't want that employee can just let their contract lapse, and the employee must sign on to another office in their agency. If the employee cannot find a position because not a single office considers them skilled enough, then after a certain number of months they are excessed and employment comes to an end. I think this is much more passive and palatable way to fire employees because the assumption is if they were actually skilled enough, it would not be hard at all to find *some* office that could utilize them.

We use exempted COMSEL in my DoD organization so internal mobility is fairly high but we have issues with not just underperformers who don't want to budge, but also we're unable to easily re-align skills when priorities change. I suspect reorganizations happen mostly to try shaking loose unwanted employees, both high and low skilled, to the detriment of all. Our organizations also struggle with internally retaining talent to positions that require stability. My parent organization floated the idea of increasing the time before anyone can re-apply through COMSEL from one year to two, which caused significant outcry. A contract approach may help both probation and retention needs.

Expand full comment

"My idea is that if every employee "contracts" with their organization (while still being full employees), then organizations who don't want that employee can just let their contract lapse, and the employee must sign on to another office in their agency."

Clara, I work in a MD state agency, and this is basically how we hire everyone below manager level. It is expensive: we pay $200K/year to get an employee paid $85K/year. However, we are much more flexible in hiring and firing.

Expand full comment

Thanks Robert, to be clear I am not advocating actually converting employees to contractors. I'm no stranger to exorbitant defence staffing contracts. I am thinking more along the lines of regular GOV employees creating time-based agreements with their gaining office, while their overall employment is with the parent agency. If this is the model your agency uses, I'd be very curious what is driving up that cost since the point of the idea is to keep GOV employees in-house.

Expand full comment

I see. That is not the model we use. In essence, employees are like consultants to sub-agencies employed by parent agencies?

Expand full comment

Yes, exactly, so for example, a software developer is hired on to ACME agency, they are considered a GOV employee of that agency for benefits and legal purposes. Inside ACME Agency, there's 10 divisions. Our software engineer could "contract" to any one of those 10 divisions, and if for any reason that division decides they no longer want that specific developer, they just have to let the "contract" lapse. In that situation, the developer needs to find an open position in one of the other 9 divisions. If, after some period of time, they cannot find a single job, ACME eventually terminates the overall employment agreement.

We actually do a model like this for intern, co-op, and development programs, where the employee is formally inside their educational program's office, and they do tours with production offices. I have yet to see a situation where nobody wants to take on a program graduate or the student refuses to graduate, but many of these programs do have eviction-like stipulations if they don't find a full-time placement.

Expand full comment

I worked at an agency where some vocations were contract based, and the employee's contract would lapse if not renewed. In that case, the notification and appeals processes were at least as bad as terminating a regular salaried employee, but there is no reason that it would always have to go down that way.

Expand full comment

I know of at least one part of a federal agency that uses "matrixed" employees - where the (GS-scheduled) employee does work for one unit while being officially managed by another unit; basically, jobbed out from the hiring unit to the working unit.

(It mildly complicates a bunch of things, but only mildly)

Expand full comment

I think what I experienced as a government worker is that they often use temporary hire contracts to "test" an employee before doing a permanent hire.

I was able to work for the Mayor's Office after my time at Code for America but after a year they said my position wasn't needed anymore so I was let go. (Still on good terms with them, it wasn't personal.)

I've moved on since and don't really have an issue of how things went down (I enjoyed my time there and got along with my co-workers pretty well), but sometimes I do wonder what would've happened if they took the time to make another position available for me instead of letting me go. The gist of it was that they weren't willing to train me on the skills they felt I needed so they decided to go with someone else.

Course, this doesn't do anything about underperforming employees who are already in the system who are basically impossible to get rid of - I worked at a place once where someone was *deliberately sabotaging* the work going on there - and it wasn't subtle. It still took them 3 years to finally get rid of him, which ended in him actually quitting after being "transferred" from department to department before doing so.

Expand full comment

Government's unwillingness, or sometimes unfortunate constraints, about training and investing in people are another huge problem.

Expand full comment

In my experience working in multiple state and local governments, the issue with low performers is really an issue with managerial competence and HR processes. For example, I have never worked in an environment where staff had clearly written job descriptions, and where those JDs were used as the basis for a meaningful performance management process. I have never worked in an environment where the institution set high-level objectives, and where individual performance was managed to those objectives. Without these sorts of institutional processes, it is very difficult to manage low performers.

Expand full comment

I agree that those conditions are pre-requisites for managing performance. How sad that you've never had that environment. It does exist in government, though!

Expand full comment

When I was the Leader of a large organization in DOD, I had a fairly robust Acquisition/Contracting shop. At least half of the incumbents, including the senior manager, were placed there through a variety of issue settlements, and RIF placements. Most had minimal training in the domain, having been expunged from some other functional org.

That senior manager was overwhelmed with subordinate complaints, subordinate performance issues, as well as his own relative lack of expertise. I was able to find him a position in another org that would leverage his considerable expertise in pricing and costing. This was a better solution for all, despite the higher HQ Acquisition SES attempting to direct me to summarily fire the manager. My solution achieved the desired effect much quicker than an attempt to fire him.

As others have observed, the rules, regs, and practices will bewilder you. I successfully proposed removal of a GS-15, 14, and several 13's. It was onerous but necessary.

Expand full comment

Yep, I'm a former fed, and back in 2015 I calculated that only .15% of feds were fired: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine/1136281/the-common-perception-is-true/.

Expand full comment

You confuse the federal rate for disciplinary terminations (removals for misconduct) with the private sector rate for both layoffs and firings. Your core data assertion is flawed. A layoff has nothing to do with misconduct or poor performance, at least the employee's performance. It is due to the boss screwing up and not having work for all of the employees he hired.

Expand full comment