Public Service Confidential looks at how the federal government can root out poor performers while still protecting workers from wrongful termination.
Public Service Confidential is a workplace advice column for federal public servants. The following question has been edited for clarity and length.
Government managers need to extensively document poor performance before being able to discipline or — God forbid — terminate an employee.
The onus is on the manager to do everything to improve poor performance, which in turn affects their own effectiveness as well as the rest of the team.
I understand the need to explore reasons for inadequate work but once it’s been established that it’s due to laziness or incompetence, why should it take months of effort by the manager to terminate someone not performing to level?
The playing field seems unevenly tilted in employees’ favour. Is there anything that can be done to make it more balanced?
Sincerely,
A frustrated manager
That is a great question.
Before getting into the details, let me first be clear that in my experience, the vast majority of public servants are good people, who want to do a good job, and want to be compensated fairly for the work they do. Unfortunately, there are a very small few who under-perform, or worse, abuse the system. Even for those few individuals, however, the bar for termination remains very high to protect employees from potential wrongful dismissal.
Managing the performance of one’s employees is a core managerial duty pursuant to the Treasury Board’s Policy on People Management. This includes making sure to document and demonstrate progressive action to deal with poor performers. Put simply, dealing with employees who are inappropriately milking the system and disrupting the work environment by their lack of performance is one of the most important things for a manager to deal with.
Evening Update
Within this broader context, I think the system is begging for substantive changes for dealing with poor performers. And I wouldn’t limit the needed changes to just poor performers. The federal public service needs to get serious about holding public service executives, managers and employees more accountable for the results they achieve — both negative and positive. Too many revert to a default in which they ask themselves, “Why bother to put in extra effort when the effort isn’t rewarded and there are often zero consequences for laziness, incompetence or worse?”
The challenge is “how” to operationalize the needed changes.
Here are some ideas a new government may wish to explore with Treasury Board officials.
Pay for performance
Extend and expand pay-at-risk arrangements from federal executives to managers and employees. The more you deliver meaningful and measurable results for work done, the more you get paid. Fail to deliver results, and you get paid less.
Make expected results clear
Make executives and managers more accountable for building better, results-driven annual business plans that articulate what work their business unit is going to do and deliver with the taxpayer resources entrusted to them.
Balanced onus
Make the relationship “more balanced” by putting the onus on the manager to negotiate a fair and measurable performance contract with their employees. And put the onus on the employee to deliver results in accordance with their contracts.
Performance reviews
Make annual employee performance reviews a meaningful assessment of their annual performance contract, including work done, objectives delivered, and results achieved, with pay impacted by the outcome.
Change from the top
Amend Treasury Board policies as needed and ensure consequences for pay-at-risk for executives, managers and employees who fail to comply.
Employees who consistently fail to deliver on meaningful performance contracts would initially simply take home less pay. Over time, however, management would have better data to demote or terminate the employee if documented poor performance continued.
And, while it would still take an investment of time by managers to build the case to terminate someone for not performing to level, better incentivizing stronger performance is something many public servants, as well as taxpayers, might even welcome.
— Scott Taymun, Public Service Confidential
Scott Taymun is a former federal executive, who served more than 30 years across seven departments. He served as the chief of staff to the Clerk of the Privy Council and helped design and implement the public sector management reforms that followed the sponsorship scandal in the early 2000s. He retired from the public service in October 2023.
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Public Service Confidential is an advice column, written for the Ottawa Citizen by guest contributors Scott Taymun, Yazmine Laroche, Daniel Quan-Watson, V. C. de la Ronde and Chris Aylward. The information provided in this series is not legal advice and should not be construed as legal advice.
