North Carolina government wasted approximately 224,000 labor hours and $5.3 million by failing to implement and dutifully employ a proper performance management system. A report released by State Auditor Beth Wood in August 2010 criticizes the Departments of Health and Human Services, Transportation and Correction, as well as the Office of Personnel for poorly monitoring employee performance or not monitoring performance at all. Read the report here. Performance reports are designed to provide metrics for the purpose of assessing which employees deserve pay increases and which workers need to increase their productivity.
Further, the General Assembly grants across the board pay increases for state employees without regard for performance reports. Thus the performance reports, even if properly completed, are useless because performance is not rewarded with pay; there is not a proper correlation. Auditor Wood’s report notes that legislators did not even read a 2008 performance management report because “they did not have time to read them.” The 2008 report indicated that, in some cases, there was an inverse relationship between pay and performance. As stated in the report: “in some state agencies and universities… less effective employees receive larger increases than effective employees.”
Because the performance reports are routinely ignored and the General Assembly grants across the board pay increases anyway, government employees rightly assume that performance management reports are useless and do not take them seriously.
This sort of government incompetence is unacceptable; the bureaucracy appears to be little more than an uncontrollable entity failing to reward workers based on their merit. Instead, the General Assembly, without even reading reports and failing to fulfill its oversight responsibilities, rewards productive and unproductive workers alike. The electorate should keep this incompetence in mind on Election Day and hold its elected officials accountable.
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