Civil servants are dismayed by Francis Maude’s call to make the current performance management system in the civil service even more punitive.
The Cabinet Office minister says he wants to move from a system where managers categorise staff as performing well, acceptably and poorly to one where employees are individually ranked, allegedly to prevent gaming of the system.
Under the current civil service model, which was introduced in April 2013, managers are pressurised to rank a proportion – normally 10% – of their staff as poor performers, 65% as middling and 25% as performing well. Further divisions are already taking place: one Ministry of Defence organisation has revised its marking system for 2014-15 to create a new “highest-performing” group. Others are sub-dividing “poor performers” and employees with “development needs”.
Every day I hear members – managers and staff alike – report that the system leads to unfair treatment and exacerbates discrimination against minority groups.
Prospect first revealed evidence of institutional discrimination against minorities in November last year. Figures from this April show the pattern continuing, with disabled and older people and those from ethnic minorities more likely to be placed in the bottom category and less likely to be in the top group.
The system is damaging to staff given poor markings – who in the worst cases face “managed exits”. But it also puts managers in an impossible position. One manager who sat on two moderation panels this year told us: “In one panel we were ‘lucky’ in that there were a few low-performing staff in the pool and so our 5% requirement was met without issue.
“In the other panel the staff concerned were consistently high performers and it was heart-breaking and more than a little depressing having to decide who should be unfairly penalised.”
Even people who perform well and achieve all their objectives can find themselves in the bottom group through forced distribution, simply because somebody has to be. As for Maude’s accusation of managers gaming the system, that’s the fault of a flawed system, not the individuals made to implement it. Managers must meet unreasonable targets, even when they feel nobody deserves to be in the bottom category. They see their only option as to share out the burden among staff by operating a rota.
Ranking individuals rather than groups, as Maude suggests, would reinforce not solve this problem. If a manager has 20 staff and is required to rank them from 1-20, that is even more artificial, misleading and demoralising, as well as reinforcing potential bias from personal preferences and prejudices. Measuring everything in such a granular way can only increase the bureaucratic burden and also pits one person against another at the expense of the team, undermining collaboration and escalating potential conflict, stress levels and work-related ill health.
The present system is not transparent or consistent: people often face being compared with, or marked against, others who do a different job or even report to different people. Individual ranking would make this even more likely. Another manager told us: “Staff who don’t like confrontation and are less assertive often get marked down as it is easier for managers”.
Many of our members are specialists in their field, hired for their expertise in environmental science, defence procurement, meteorology or nuclear science, to name a few. But these specialist skills are largely disregarded in the performance management scheme. One manager said: “Specialists are not given the credibility they deserve due to basic ignorance of task complexity.”
Prospect is advising line managers not to “go with the flow” with a system that results in loss of staff engagement, poor morale and, ultimately, declining operational capability. We encourage them to call for greater transparency, keep records of any concerns and challenge proposals from moderators and others to change performance markings if they don’t feel the evidence justifies this. We are also supporting members who want to challenge their marking.
Are such systems really a good use of scarce government funding? Instead of making things worse, as Maude is proposing, the next government should rethink the whole system.
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