Unproductive Federal Public Servants must shape up or get fired Treasury Board President Tony Clement says

Treasury Board President Tony Clement says unproductive federal public
servants must shape up - or get fired.

Clement announced in Ottawa Tuesday the federal government is
introducing sector-wide performance measures for 206,000 public
servants, similar to those that already exist for senior mandarins.

“I’m not going to mince words here - we do not do a good job of
dealing with underperformers,” Clement said in a private speech to the
Association of Professional Executives of the Public Service of Canada,
which was obtained by the Toronto Star.

“I wanted to be crystal clear: either poor performers improve and
become productive employees or we will let them go.”

Clement explained that in the private sector, the dismissal rate for
unsatisfactory performance is between 5 and 10 per cent while it is .06
per cent among federal public sector workers.

“There is simply no way that virtually every single person that the
federal government hires is going to perform to the standard we
expect,” he said in his 18-page speech to middle and senior
managers.

Ottawa spends about $43 billion on public sector salaries and
compensation.

“We owe it to Canadians and we owe it to the vast majority of
committed, hard-working public servants to make sure that everyone is
pulling their weight,” Clement said.

He said a rigorous and mandatory system for rating employee performance
will root out the so-called chronic travellers who jump from department
to department when their work doesn’t measure up.

“There will be no more neglected poor performers who are simply
ignored or tolerated because that’s the easier thing to do.”

Clement noted there would be mandatory written performance objectives
for all employees, a mid-year evaluation, a written performance
assessment at the end of the fiscal year and clear guidelines on how to
improve output.

Reached in Ottawa, Clement said most Canadians would be surprised to
hear these kinds of across-the-board performance measures weren’t
already in place.

“That’s the shocking thing about this,” he said.

In his speech, Clement noted that a disability management system is
also being put in place to keep track of federal public sector workers
who, in some cases, get lost in the system after going on disability.

“Like the current performance management system, tracking of
employees is spotty and haphazard. In some cases, employees get lost in
the system. They go on disability and there’s no follow-up. And no
rehabilitation,” he said.

Clement said later that, as it stands now “people go on long-term
disability and we never hear from them again and they never hear from
us.”

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http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/05/28/tony_clement_to_poor_performers_work_harder_or_youll_be_let_go.html