Government would work better if federal civil service bosses would fire — or at least provide more effective guidance to — employees performing poorly during their first (probationary) year on the job.
Federal managers have too little incentive to fire employees doing substandard work after their yearlong probationary period because of the lengthy and expensive bureaucratic termination process, according to the Government Accountability Office. That means supervisors in federal departments and agencies must make better use of available tools to improve or dismiss poor performers before their probation year ends.
“The process for dismissing an employee after the probationary period ends can be complex and lengthy,” the accountability office said. “But many of these process challenges can be avoided or mitigated with effective performance management.”
Too often, however, poor performers end their first year in the civil service with little to no input from their superiors about how they can improve their work.
Consequently, federal bosses frequently must decide whether to start the exhaustive process to fire a permanent employee or ignore or work around their poor performance. Too often, their choice is the latter.
In conjunction with the drawn-out process, supervisors face other deterrents from taking action against unsatisfactory employees, including a lack of support from superiors and insufficient time and resources in addition to their other duties.
Also, supervisors rarely are aware of guidance on how to handle poor performers. However, even if they know of it, it’s written so technically they have a difficult time understanding it “if they don’t have time to continuously go to their [human resources] office for assistance,” one official told investigators.
Because government managers are often unaware when an employee’s probation ends, the accountability office recommended that agencies adopt an automated notification system. This would enable bosses to fire more unsatisfactory employees appropriately and quickly.
Additionally, investigators recommended that agencies extend the probationary period, as many supervisors feel they had inadequate time to properly evaluate an employee’s performance.
Federal departments and agencies fired nearly 3,500 employees, or less than one-fifth of 1 percent of the career permanent workforce, for poor performance in 2013. Of those, 70 percent occurred during the probationary period.In fact, the number of firings has been proportionate to the number of probationary employees since 2004.
Termination during the probationary period is a much simpler process, where an employee has almost no appeal rights and the “agency’s only obligation is to notify the individual in writing of its conclusions regarding the individual’s inadequacies and the effective date of the removal,” the accountability office said.
A previous Washington Examiner investigation found that supervisors don’t always take advantage of this rule.
Conversely, it can take more than a year to fire an employee after probation and even longer if they file an appeal.
However, terminations of any kind are sometimes preventable if supervisors provided better guidance to new employees, such as setting performance goals.
A primary reason for the poor leadership is because supervisors face a similar process in dealing with their bosses. Like their subordinates, they too often also receive inadequate guidance from superiors who don’t properly use the probationary period as a vetting process.
Furthermore, such supervisors are often promoted to their roles for their technical skills without regard to their leadership or management skills.
Investigators recommended that departments and agencies could avoid such issues by creating separate career tracks for supervisors and leaders with superior technical skills.
