New civilian personnel system to add efficiency, satisfaction

  • Published
  • By Donna Miles
  • American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON (AFPN) --  The new National Security Personnel System will improve the working environment within the Defense Department while creating a more satisfied, more productive work force, Navy Secretary Gordon England said July 7.

"That's what this is about: great job satisfaction," Secretary England said. "We want everybody to go home every night and brag about the great job they accomplished that day. That is what we are trying to accomplish."

Congress authorized the new personnel system as part of the fiscal 2004 National Defense Authorization Act. It will introduce sweeping changes to the way the department hires, pays, promotes, disciplines and fires its 700,000 civilian workers, doing away with antiquated practices Secretary England said have bogged down the department for decades.

For example, it will consolidate nine separate personnel systems that now govern DOD civilian workers. Streamlining these systems into one "will make it easier to manage and certainly (will be) better for our employees," Secretary England said.

The system will include faster procedures for hiring new workers, pay based on performance rather than tenure and "pay bands" to replace the current general-service pay scale, he said.

Details are still being worked out, said Secretary England, who was tapped by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to put NSPS into place. He said valuable input has come from a variety of pilot projects, which he called "learning exercises to make sure we've got it right before we start."

By the year's end, Secretary England said he expects to publish in the Federal Register proposed regulations for the new civilian human resources, labor-management relations and employee appeals and grievance systems.

The first DOD civilians are expected to come under the new system in summer 2005, and DOD will phase in the system through late 2008, Secretary England said.

Despite these projected timetables, Secretary England said the implementation will be "event-driven, not time-driven. When we are ready we will do it, and not before.”

In the meantime, officials are seeking input from people throughout DOD to make sure they come up with the best civilian personnel system possible, Secretary England said.

"It's a collaborative process; it's not negotiating to an answer," he said. "It is getting input from literally thousands of people around the country and around the world so we can understand their views."

Putting the new system into place while continuing DOD's mission will be a bit of a challenge, the secretary said.

"It's a little like maintaining an airplane while it's flying," he said. "The process has to be thoughtful and reasonably measured."

The new system, when fully in place, will benefit employees while making the department better able to respond to the challenges ahead, including the terrorism threat, Secretary England said.

"The whole premise is to have a highly effective work force ... that dearly loves to work for the Department of Defense, is well-trained and highly competitive," he said. The result, he said, will be "a system that best represents our most valuable asset: our people."