Illustrating the Federal Employee Performance Management Journey  

With hundreds of agencies and millions of employees operating daily around the world, the federal government faces a monumental challenge to manage employee performance. Federal performance management processes are notoriously complex, confusing and frustrating for all involved. The Office of Personnel Management has issued a suite of guidance in the past year to overhaul parts of the system, but transformative performance management reform requires looking at it holistically.

Real reform starts with understanding the system, and the current system is not well understood. To illustrate the current process and its pain points, the Partnership for Public Service created three journey maps, a visual tool that displays how different types of federal civil servants — supervisors, employees and human resources staff — experience the performance management cycle from start to finish. These maps help us analyze root causes and identify opportunities that offer the most potential for impactful reform.

How does the government define performance management?

By OPM’s definition, federal employee performance management is the process by which agencies align their workforces with organizational goals and assess employee performance.

However, performance management can serve many purposes for different individuals and in different organizations. It may be the process by which employees are held accountable for completing their work, a tool for supporting employee growth, or a mechanism for distributing performance-based awards. In practice, the current performance management system attempts to do all of these and more.

Performance management includes five standard stages: planning, monitoring, developing*, rating and rewarding. Our journey maps explore the root causes of the challenges that federal employees experience at each of these stages while seeking to avoid the all-too-common trend of adding more steps to an already convoluted system, which contributes to greater complexity and administrative burden. By highlighting current pain points and areas that work well, the maps enable us to design more effective reform solutions to the federal performance management process.

To create these maps, we interviewed more than 15 current and former federal employees, supervisors, managers and HR employees. We then created three user profiles and mapped their experience throughout the performance management stages. Each employee profile represents the composite experience of a career civil servant. Additional complicating factors—such as the experience of political appointees in the performance management process and the adverse action process—will be explored in future work.

What have we learned so far from our journey maps?

Planning stage

Duration: one to two months

The annual performance management journey kicks off each year with goal setting. Supervisors should work with their direct reports to write actionable goals and ensure that team goals feed into the organization’s mission objectives.

Monitoring stage

Duration: seven to 10 months

Throughout the year, supervisors and employees should maintain an ongoing conversation about the employee’s performance and progress through regular check-ins and discussions. At minimum, supervisors and employees should meet at midyear to informally touch base about the employee’s goal progress and share feedback. Supervisors and employees should modify goals as needed.

Rating stage

Duration: one to two months

Toward the end of the year, supervisors must rate and review their direct reports. Exact structures vary, but employees will generally be scored numerically on whether they met, exceeded or fell short of annual goals. Supervisors may request self-evaluations from employees to support this process.

Rewarding stage

Duration: one to two months

Once ratings are calibrated across units and officially recorded, leadership and HR calibrate the awards available for employees and distribute them to staff.

Conclusion

The annual performance management cycle in the federal government can be frustrating and cumbersome for all involved. A few key causes of this frustration appear throughout employees’ journeys:

• Uncertainty on how to align individual goals with organizational priorities and how to adjust those goals as circumstances change throughout the year
• Lack of focus on employee growth and development, leading employees to view performance management not as a learning opportunity, but as a process to be dreaded*

• Supervisors lack the bandwidth to fully support and manage individual employees due to having multiple direct reports or competing work priorities
• Training does not effectively prepare supervisors to deliver meaningful feedback, particularly when it is negative or critical
• HR is clear on process and compliance rules but lacks the resources and clearly delegated authority to constructively help supervisors with performance management challenges

• Excessive administrative burden, especially during planning and reviewing, due to red tape and outdated technology
• Fear of the consequences of missteps or accidental noncompliance with numerous regulations from agencies and unions discourages supervisors from addressing legitimate problems, allowing underperformance to continue

The federal performance management system is trying to do too many things at once and doing none of them well. Is performance management a tool to ensure employees meet baseline job expectations? Is it meant to align employee goals to organizational priorities? Is its primary aim to develop employee skills to fulfill organizational needs? All these goals are worth pursuing, but designing a single performance management system to achieve all of them simultaneously is an impossible ask.

Performance management in government needs holistic reform that begins with a clear and widely understood definition of its purpose. Tweaking around the edges to change the way that poor performers are removed or ratings are distributed are band-aid solutions that will not fix an overly complex system.

Over the coming months, we will work with practitioners and experts to propose reforms that span statutory, regulatory, practice-based and cultural changes. Our proposals will focus on meaningful changes that address root causes rather than creating more work-arounds.

*Due to the lack of current focus on employee development in the performance management process, we did not include it as a phase in the journey map visualization.

Stay Connected

Learn more about the Government for a New Era initiative, our effort to develop reforms for a more effective, responsive and accountable government.

If you are a current or former federal employee interested in sharing your experiences and contributing to our reform proposals, please complete our Federal Community Intake Form and indicate your expertise or interest in performance management.