Performance management in Australian Public Service workplaces is unfair, inconsistent and lets dud bureaucrats off the hook, rank-and-file staff says.
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An academic study of attitudes to performance management in the public service has found workers believe the systems are so badly managed they have become a waste of time.
Public servants told the University of Western Australia that performance management efforts allowed underperformers to be "put in a corner" and left alone after achieving soft benchmarks, while discouraging high performers to work hard.
Some officials said the system's failings meant the reward for doing good work was more work.
Associate Professor Jeannette Taylor, of the University of Western Australia, questioned 116 public servants in four unnamed agencies about their attitudes to their bosses' efforts to improve workplace performance.
Her findings, to be published in the forthcoming issue of The Australian Journal of Public Administration, will make sober reading in the upper echelons of the public service, which has been trying for more than a century to get its poorer performers to lift their game.
In one of his last contributions before leaving office in late 2014, former public service commissioner Stephen Sedgwick described underperformance as one of the "seemingly intractable" problems facing the service.
Professor Taylor's key findings were that respondents did not believe their work behaviour had significantly changed much as a result of performance management.
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Public servants were unimpressed with the system used to measure their efforts in the workplace, said it was applied inconsistently and it was not worthwhile being a high performer.
Most respondents said they strongly supported the existence of a performance management regime, but they wanted it to work properly.
One public servant said a boss – at director level – openly told her staff no one would get a higher performance rating than she did, regardless of the quality of their work.
"She openly advised everybody that if she only gets a satisfactory rating from her supervisor, then nobody she supervises will get a rating any higher than satisfactory," the respondent said.
Other bureaucrats said "easy" benchmarking allowed duds in their departments to achieve "satisfactory" ratings and even get performance-linked pay rises.
"In many ways, the organisation's performance management system rewards people who are barely making it over the line," one middle manager told the university.
"People who do not perform well are put into a corner and rated satisfactory, regardless of their ineptitude, which renders the whole system useless," said another.
Public servants who considered themselves high performers said the system did not reward extra effort and, in some cases, actively discouraged it.
"We operate on the increment system," an executive level 1 respondent said.
"You can only receive incremental pay for satisfactory performance. Once you hit the cap, there is no benefit.
"In addition, the reward for doing good work is more work."
"The findings of this study suggest a disconnect between the rhetoric of performance management as a means to improve employee performance and the reality among a group of APS employees," Professor Taylor said.
