More agile human resources management needed to reform civil service
The civil service system used in New Orleans city government is decades behind the times, and is in desperate need of an overhaul, according to a report prepared by the George Bush School of Government & Public Service for the Business Council of New Orleans.
That conclusion should come as no surprise to anyone in New Orleans.
More interesting are the solid recommendations to give department heads more flexibility in identifying human resource needs, recruiting from a strong pool of applicants, evaluating performance, and designing career paths. Among the recommendations:
- Improve technology by increasing civil service’s access to the Internet and creating an online job application portal.
- Expand recruitment efforts at colleges and job fairs and create an internship program that would supplement a depleted workforce and identify future employees.
- Make performance reviews count by allowing city departments to create, administer and assess their own evaluations.
- Train employees and managers about the civil service process in an effort to reduce the number of challenges to disciplinary actions as well as the number of appeals overturned by the commission or courts on technical grounds.
- Transition from a highly centralized civil service department, to an entity that serves in a more advisory capacity.
- Allow managers the authority to develop their own advertisements, job descriptions, criteria for employment, and promotion standards.
There’s a new Jennifer Larino article published on the City Business website that documents how challenging it is for the City of New Orleans to attract and retain employees who possess skills that are in high demand. My own position as a civilian Geographic Information Systems developer supporting the New Orleans Police Department’s COMSTAT process in the 1990s was so low paying that I couldn’t afford to keep the job for any longer than three years. To my knowledge, the position was never replaced by anyone with a similar skill set. Ultimately, key technical skills required to keep the NOPD running during the Nagin administration were outsourced, but when the contracts were terminated in the final weeks of Nagin’s term, lower-ranking NOPD officials conceded in private discussions that they couldn’t access their own data.
The civil service recommendations are consistent with the findings in a 2001 book by Robert Behn, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government performance management expert (a link to the review of Rethinking Democratic Accountability is posted on the NolaStat literature page). A serious impediment to improving the performance and responsiveness of public sector agencies is that bureaucracies have been created that value proper procedures more than positive results. Behn argued that government innovations that democratize accountability systems will produce better results than rigid hierarchical bureaucracies:
Not even the most public-spirited government workers can succeed if they are hemmed in on all sides by rules, regulations, and procedures that make it virtually impossible to perform well. The most talented, dedicated, well-compensated, well-trained, and well-led civil servants cannot serve the public well if they are subject to perverse personnel practices that punish innovation, promote mediocrity, and proscribe flexibility.
New Orleans has a highly instructive example on how decentralized government entities can be allowed to respond to problems more creatively, while still being held accountable for positive outcomes. New Orleans Police Department chief Ronal Serpas inaugurated the COMSTAT process during Chief Pennington’s term, giving district commanders resources and flexibility they needed to creatively solve problems and adapt to changing circumstances, but used performance metrics to ensure that positive results were rewarded, but also to ensure that incompetence or bad behavior was discovered and punished. Now that Serpas is back — after refining his performance management ideas — he’s committed once again to re-decentralizing the NOPD, and customizing the delivery of police services to the particular needs and desires of different neighborhoods.
Civil service reform will be a challenging problem for Mayor Landrieu, but getting it done is a key structural change that will be required to create higher-performing, more responsive government.
