Performance Issues

Tony wants accountability:

Treasury Board President Tony Clement is warning federal civil servants to start looking over their shoulders if they consistently under-perform.

Clement says that only 0.06% of civil servants are ever fired in Canada, far lower than in Australia or the United States.

[...]

"This will include mandatory performance objectives for all employees, a mid-year evaluation of each employee, annual written employee performance assessments at the end of each fiscal year and an action plan to support and guide employees to improve performance within established and clear timelines," he said.

You mean they don't do this already?

Performance reviews, and other HR mandated wastepaper, have been a staple of corporate life for decades. Their actual value added is somewhere between nil and negative. If you can't figure out if you're doing a good job, you're probably not a good employee. If your manager doesn't have the wit and intelligence to explain when you've screwed up, and give you some tips on how to shape up, then they're probably not a good manager. Creating an elaborate paper trail simply justifies the salaries of HR drones. 

What we can expect from Tony's initiative is the following:

a) a new layer of administration to implement and manage this program

b) fat contracts for consultants to advise on how to implement this program

c) in a few years time about .07% of civil servants will get the axe for screwing up

Tony's scheme rests on the assumption that the public sector should work like the private sector. It can't. Not anymore than a morbidly obese man can win a marathon.

You cannot run a government like a business. The goal of a business is ultimately profit. The goal of government is to govern. Private sector metrics are often a hash of objective measures and subjective guesswork, but at the end of the day there are clients and there are cash flows.

Governments do not have clients, though they occasionally humour citizens by calling them so. Instead they have supplicants, petitioners and inmates. The state seizes our income and may, at its discretion, deny us our life and liberty. Even the most sinister of modern large corporations does not wield that power over its clients. If I don't like what one souless corporation is doing, I can do business with another. The Canada Revenue Agency is not so open minded. The taxman is a jealous fellow.

With guaranteed revenues and a coerced "client" base, what possible rational metric could government use? I have to get my driver's license renewed. I have to go to a government run hospital. I probably have to send my kids to a government run school. Without choice there is no real way to tell whether someone is doing a good or a bad job. How could you tell? If ten hour wait times to see a nurse are the norm, then who's to say you're getting crappy service by waiting nine and a half?

This also leads us to an awkward question: Do we really want government to be competent?

On the one hand having an incompetent enforcer of bad laws is a great benefit, it renders the bad laws a dead letter and allows productive people to get on their way.

On the other hand having an incompetent enforcer of good laws is a terrible draw back. A slow witted slob failing to enforce an obscure quota is likely a good thing. A slow witted fat slob failing to make sure murderous thugs stay behind bars is a bad thing.

The government which governs least governs best, yet even in those happy circumstances it still needs to govern. There isn't really a metric for that.

 

 

Comments

[Cytotoxic]

Tony's scheme's sole point is to allow the Tories to dodge making tough decisions. That's basically what every action the Tories take boils down to: avoid real action/meaningful while blowing smoke for their gullible shallow base.

[Jimmy Levendia]

I agree, HR folderol is of questionable value in the private sector; if applied to the public sector it would look like Jim Hacker's Ministry for Administrative Affairs...and thus promptly become part of the snowballing problem. I sometimes think if we forced civil servants and their ministerial charges to view the "Yes Minister" and "Yes Prime Minister" series, or make them read "Parkinson's Law", they might have complete meltdowns. Humankind cannot bear very much reality.