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Maximizing Flexibility
Change will be a constant in the 21st Century civil service;
to meet this challenge, we must develop and deploy a civil service system
that is flexible, agile and responsive enough to adapt to any circumstance.
This is our second principle of modernization: provide agencies (and those
who lead them) with maximum flexibility…but within the bounds set
by the core values that define our civil service system. Thus,
while those core values serve as our system’s indivisible nucleus,
the way they are operationalized may vary from agency to agency without
necessarily threatening or eroding them. For example, while merit principles
ensure that employees receive “equal pay for work of equal value,”
the means to that end may manifest itself in dozens of different compensation
systems…indeed, that is the case today for a significant portion
of the Federal civil service, and OPM’s vision of the future portends
even more of the same.
The nostalgia for a unitary, uniform civil service system notwithstanding,
that past is long gone. Our system’s standardized rules, once its
strength, have become a weakness; intended to insure fairness and equal
treatment, they have begun to have the opposite effect, fostering rigidity
and sameness and mediocrity…to the point that few distinctions
are made between top performers and those that are merely doing their
time. Designed when bureaucracy was king, its “one size fits all”
paradigm has become dysfunctional, an impediment to agencies whose missions
and workforces have become increasingly diverse and complex. And its emphasis
on process and procedure (as the principal means of assuring merit) increasingly
comes at the expense of accountability and results.
In contrast, our future is a system that is flexible and elastic, one
that can be molded and shaped to fit the unique missions, functions, and
work forces of the agencies and departments that comprise the Federal
Government…but without abandoning the core values that have so
successfully served as our anchor. The establishment of our new Department
of Homeland Security (DHS) provides a model for this delicate balancing
act. Proposed by President Bush to guard against the threat of terrorism,
the Department’s success depends on its ability to field a skilled,
agile, high-performing workforce, and as a result, its enabling legislation
gives the Department, in partnership with OPM, the authority to design
a completely new human resources (HR) system for most of its 180,000 employees…unprecedented
flexibility to literally rewrite the civil service laws and procedural
regulations that would otherwise govern how it classifies, evaluates,
compensates, and terminates its employees.
However, by law, that flexibility remains firmly and unequivocally bounded
by our system’s core values – merit, due process, protection
from reprisal and discrimination, etc. These values cannot be touched
by the Department’s flexibility. Moreover, the authority to exercise
those flexibilities is shared by the Department’s Secretary and
the Director of OPM, the former accountable for the security of our homeland,
the latter for preserving the ideals of the merit system. This same framework
is replicated in the Defense Department’s (DoD) new National Security
Personnel System (NSPS). Covering up to 750,000 DoD employees, NSPS provides
for similar personnel flexibility, but like DHS, it is balanced and bounded
by similar safeguards…including the participation of OPM.
These “designer systems” represent the future of our civil
service, flexible enough to fit an agency’s unique mission and culture,
yet inextricably connected to one another by the civil service values
that serve to bond all Federal employers and employees to the public interest.
It is a future where flexibility and high performance need not (and shall
not) come at the expense of such core principles as merit, veterans’
preference, and equal employment opportunity; indeed, those values and
the high standards of performance and integrity they enable are interdependent
and inextricable.
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