United States General Accounting Office

GAO Report to the Committee on

Governmental Affairs, U.S. Senate

December 1995 TRANSFORMING THE

CIVIL SERVICE:

Building The Workforce

Of The Future

Results Of A

GAO-Sponsored

Symposium

GAO/GGD-96-35

GAO United States

General Accounting Office

Washington, D.C. 20548

Comptroller General

of the United States

B-260233 

December 20, 1995

The Honorable Ted Stevens

Chairman, Committee on

 Governmental Affairs

United States Senate

The Honorable William V. Roth, Jr.

Former Chairman, Committee on

 Governmental Affairs

United States Senate

On April 12 and 13, 1995, we sponsored a symposium, “Transforming the

Civil Service: Building the Workforce of the Future.” Held in response to a

request from Senator William V. Roth, Jr., then Chairman of the Senate

Governmental Affairs Committee, the event brought together

representatives of leading private sector firms, public sector employers

from both here and abroad, and distinguished former federal officials to

discuss new approaches to managing people. This report distills from their

discussions a set of emerging human resource management (HRM)

principles and points out some of the implications should Congress

consider applying these principles to the federal civil service.

Civil service reform is an enormously complex challenge, and last April’s

discussions provide a perspective, not a prescription for change. Although

the report that follows offers suggestions from a certain viewpoint, it does

not resolve this question: Should new HRM approaches that are based

largely on private sector experience and that, thus far, have been applied

to a relatively limited extent in the public sector now be adapted to the

federal civil service? The answer may hinge on the similarities and

differences between private sector and public sector realities and,

ultimately, on what sort of civil service will best serve the American

people. This is a policy judgment that rightfully belongs to Congress.

As Congress deliberates these policy issues, there are some key concepts

that it may find useful to keep in mind. If Congress wishes to change the

civil service system, it will need to articulate the principles and goals that

form the basis for the changes. It will need to set measurable expectations

by which to evaluate agencies’ adherence to these systemwide principles

and goals. And while it will need to give federal managers the flexibility

necessary to get the job done, it will need to establish effective oversight

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and accountability mechanisms to ensure that agencies are accomplishing

the desired results.

We believe that the April symposium offers a useful backdrop against

which to consider the future of the federal civil service—a system that has

been evolving for more than a century and that, to stay effective, will need

to continue evolving.

Charles A. Bowsher

Comptroller General

of the United States

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Introduction To remain viable in today’s demanding environment, public and private

sector organizations alike must improve their performance while holding

the line on costs. This is nowhere more apparent than among federal

agencies, where pressure is mounting for a government that works better,

costs less, and employs a smaller and more efficient workforce. The

necessity to improve performance in the face of steady or declining

resources has led some organizations, both here and in other countries, to

make radical changes in the way they manage people.

These organizations have begun changing both their traditional

organizational structures and the approaches they have taken to managing

their employees. In place of centralized, hierarchical, rule-based systems,

they are creating decentralized, flatter, more flexible arrangements. And in

place of highly detailed rules to manage their employees, they are relying

increasingly on a well-defined mission, a clearly articulated vision, and a

coherent organizational culture to form the foundation for the key

business systems and processes they use to ensure the successful outcome

of their operations. Recognizing that people are central to any

organization’s success, these organizations give their managers greater

prerogatives to manage and their employees greater opportunities to

participate in the decisions that affect them and their work.

Background: Learning

From Others’

Experiences

Senator William V. Roth, Jr., then Chairman of the Senate Governmental

Affairs Committee, asked GAO to examine the HRM experiences of

successful public and private sector organizations to identify their “lessons

learned” and to analyze the applicability of these lessons to civil service

reform. To respond to this request, on April 12 and 13, 1995, we convened

a 2-day symposium of 32 leaders from public and private sector

organizations who discussed their approaches toward managing

people—the principles they employ, the changes they have made, and the

lessons they have learned. Our focus on “managing people” rather than on

“personnel administration” allowed for discussion of broader and more

innovative management approaches and for accommodating ideas from

such fields as organization theory, public administration, quality

improvement, budgeting, and information resource management.

Twelve of the symposium participants were presenters and 20 were

panelists.1

 The presenters were current or former senior officials from

1

The moderator was Rick Tate, co-founder of the consulting firm Innovative Thinking, Inc. We chose

Tate because of his familiarity with HRM issues and his well-regarded facilitation skills. In addition,

Tate was unencumbered by any vested interest in the organizations represented at the symposium or

in the issue of civil service reform.

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Xerox; Federal Express; GM Powertrain; AT&T’s Workplace of the Future;

IBM’s WorkForce Solutions; Herman Miller, Inc.; the Communications

Workers of America; the City of Hampton, Virginia; the State of Minnesota;

and the governments of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada (see app. II

for the names and affiliations of the presenters). We chose these

organizations because of their reputations, which were often bolstered by

awards for quality or innovative management.2

The 20 panelists—current or former federal officials and

academicians—joined the presenters for the symposium’s group

discussions. We chose the panelists for their civil service experience and

expertise, hoping to gain insights from them into the applicability of the

various lessons learned to the symposium theme, “Transforming the Civil

Service: Building the Workforce of the Future.” (See app. II for the names

and affiliations of the panelists.)

To varying degrees, all of the organizations represented at the symposium

differed in character and size from the federal government. Xerox and

IBM, for example, are corporations. The governments of New Zealand,

Australia, and Canada are parliamentary and much smaller than the

government of the United States. Yet notwithstanding these differences or

the unique challenges facing the U.S. civil service, the symposium

provided a forum in which to explore the experiences of diverse

organizations and to highlight new or alternative approaches toward

managing people.3

This report distills the proceedings of the symposium into a set of basic

principles for managing people that differs from the traditional civil

service model. The report includes our analysis of some of the

implications of these principles for civil service reform, but we express no

opinions or recommendations. Rather, our goal in reporting on the

symposium was to reflect as accurately as possible the common threads

that constituted the participants’ lessons learned and to point out some of

the implications should Congress consider applying these lessons to the

civil service. The participants themselves were not asked to reach

consensus or even to comment on every issue. Nor did they, as a group,

2

The organizations represented at the symposium did not represent a scientific sample; therefore, the

results portrayed here are not generalizable to all organizations.

3

Examples of change and innovation also exist within the federal government. The Office of Personnel

Management(OPM)issued a report on various HRM efforts, entitled Towards Reinvention: A Guide to

HRM Reform, in December 1994. The National Academy of Public Administration’s report, Innovative

Approaches to Human Resources Management, issued in March 1995, highlights the activities of

several federal agencies, as well as those of other public and private organizations.

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offer recommendations for civil service reform. Many of them emphasized

that management approaches that prove effective in some organizations

may not work in others.

We gave the symposium participants an opportunity to comment on the

contents of this report and incorporated their views.

Eight Principles for

Managing People

According to many of the symposium participants, the demand for faster,

cheaper, and better service delivery has led their organizations to develop

new and more flexible ways of managing people. On the basis of the

symposium proceedings, GAO discerned eight interrelated principles

common to these organizations:

1. Value people as assets rather than as costs. Recognize that people

are crucial to organizational success. Establish a clear organizational

mission and treat employees as partners in accomplishing that mission.

Invest in them. Encourage them to contribute ideas and allow them to

make decisions. Expect them to support the organization’s mission and

vision, and reward them for doing so. Treat them with respect and

fairness. Even when downsizing is necessary, emphasize fairness and help

prepare them for a “soft landing.”

2. Emphasize mission, vision, and organizational culture. Articulate

a clear organizational mission to which employees can contribute and a

vision to which they can aspire. Build a strong organizational culture

calling for high standards of performance and personal behavior. Use

mission, vision, and culture as the underpinnings for rational business

systems and processes that ensure the successful outcome of operations.

3. Hold managers responsible for achieving results instead of

imposing rigid, process-oriented rules and standards. Give managers

the authority to manage their people flexibly and innovatively so they can

focus on achieving results rather than doing things “by the book.” Hold

them accountable for outcomes and for furthering the mission and vision

of the organization rather than for adhering to a set of minutely defined

procedures.

4. Choose an organizational structure appropriate to the

organization rather than trying to make “one size fit all.” Design

the organization so that its structure supports its mission and takes into

account its present and future needs. Use different organizational models

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as appropriate. The current trend is toward flat, flexible, team-oriented

organizational structures, but no single design works best for all

organizations.

5. Instead of isolating the “personnel function” organizationally,

integrate HRM into the mission of the organization. Tie the

organization’s HRM functions into its mission, vision, and culture. Make HRM

functions an integral part of the organization’s business activities by

decentralizing and deregulating them.

6. Treat continuous learning as an investment in success rather

than as a cost to be minimized. Invest in training and professional

development to meet changing customer needs, keep skills up to date, and

develop new personal and organizational competencies.

7. Pursue an integrated rather than an ad hoc approach to

information management. Develop the integrated information

management systems that will ensure individual and unit accountability,

open channels for continuous improvement, and encourage and reward

accurate measurements of progress, performance, and customer

satisfaction.

8. Provide sustained leadership that recognizes change as a

permanent condition, not a one-time event. In a continuously

changing environment, effective organizations adapt continuously, not

crisis-by-crisis. Invest the time and resources necessary to accommodate

constant change. Obtain the commitment of everyone involved.

Communicate a coherent set of principles to guide the organization over

time.

These eight principles reflect the symposium participants’ view of how to

manage people in a turbulent and demanding environment. (Related

highlights drawn from the symposium are presented in app. I.) The sense

of the group was that these principles should be treated as a whole. As

several symposium participants noted, their organizations chose to

address their human resource challenges with comprehensive, rather than

piecemeal, approaches. Jenni Colwill of Australia’s Public Service

Commission described a feature common to civil service reform efforts in

her country and New Zealand:

“First, we identified the human resource management issues that were of major concern,

and then pulled them together into an integrated framework that needed to be addressed.”

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It follows, then, that the eight principles emerging from the symposium are

overlapping and interdependent and should be read as a coherent, overall

approach to managing people in high-performance organizations. Some

symposium presenters noted, for example, that valuing people is a central

tenet of their organizations’ mission and vision statements.

Representatives of Xerox, Herman Miller, Federal Express, and AT&T said

that while managers in each of these organizations are expected to

manage for results, “results” involves more than the “bottom line”; their

managers are rewarded no less for how well they support their companies’

values than for how well they help them make money. Some participants

noted that in their organizations, performance management, career

development programs, and pay and promotions standards are all tied to

organizational mission, vision, and culture. In short, these organizations

treat effective HRM and effective business practices as inseparable.

The Eight Principles’

Implications for the

Federal Government

Many of the ideas raised at the symposium are potentially relevant to

transforming the civil service. Indeed, some of the principles emerging at

the symposium are already being applied within specific agencies or

programs. The participants pointed out, however, that some attitudinal or

structural barriers exist within the federal government that could prevent

these principles from being more widely accepted. Assuming these

barriers were overcome, many of the principles could be put into practice

without changing any laws. Other principles, if Congress chose to apply

them, would require a further decentralization of the civil service system

and could require some specific legislative changes, primarily to Title 5,

United States Code (U.S.C.), which governs the civil service system.

Similar Thinking Is Already

Showing Up in the Federal

Government

During panel discussions at the symposium, it became clear that some of

the values that underlie the eight principles have already been recognized

and are being put into effect as part of various agency-based or

governmentwide initiatives. As Margaret Patch of the Internal Revenue

Service (IRS) said:

“Many of the things we’re doing now are right in line with the private sector. But federal

agencies are such large and complex organizations that, in the course of day-to-day

operations, we can lose sight of the fact that we are doing a lot of things right.”

Several participants noted that the goals of the Government Performance

and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA) are consistent with the kind of thinking that

emerged at the symposium, particularly as those goals relate to the

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importance of clarifying agency missions, focusing on results, and aligning

systems to meet performance goals. For example, GPRA requires all federal

agencies, by the end of fiscal year 1997, to develop 5-year strategic plans

that include their missions and goals, as well as their strategies for

achieving those goals through specific activities and management of

people, information, and other resources. GPRA also calls for annual

performance plans and reports that include attention to human resource

needs and utilization.

In addition, the administration’s National Performance Review (NPR) has

identified a number of federal HRM problems and offered 14

recommendations for change, many of them in keeping with the ideas

brought forward at the symposium. Frank Thompson, executive director

of the National Commission on the State and Local Public Service, said, “A

lot of the kinds of reviews that we’ve been talking about here [at the

symposium] have already been done, and there’s a lot of consensus

already out there that has been translated into specific legislative

proposals.”4

In recent years, a number of federal agencies have made substantive

quality improvement efforts, some of which have won the Presidential

Quality Award (the federal sector equivalent of the Malcolm Baldrige

Award for private sector excellence). Other agencies are trying new HRM

approaches while serving as NPR reinvention labs.

Barriers Exist to Putting

Some of These Principles

Into Practice

Some symposium participants agreed that in the federal government, a

number of barriers do exist to the sort of thinking embodied in the eight

principles for managing people. Some of these barriers arise out of

long-standing attitudes about the limitations that have been placed on

agency officials’ HRM prerogatives or about the basic ways in which people

ought to be managed. Other barriers, they said, arise out of the difficulty

federal agencies commonly experience in arriving at a consensus on their

missions or in sustaining the committed, long-term leadership needed to

accomplish them.

One attitudinal barrier, according to some participants, stems from agency

officials’ belief in their own powerlessness—from a sense, as Marilyn Hay,

director of labor relations at the Treasury Board of Canada, portrayed it,

that they are at the mercy of those who created or oversee the system and

4

The administration has developed a civil service reform package, but its legislative proposal had not

been submitted to Congress at the time of the symposium. Nor had the proposal been introduced as of

publication of this report.

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cannot hope to change it. The agencies themselves can be the source of

this belief. Former U.S. Forest Service chief Dale Robertson cited a pilot

study that found 70 percent of the performance barriers that workers

identified involved agency policies and practices. “It wasn’t Congress,”

Robertson said the report concluded. “It wasn’t OPM. It wasn’t anybody else

but us at the Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service.”

Margaret Patch of IRS described how IRS’ reengineering efforts have helped

identify self-imposed constraints:

“[We found that] it takes us, on average, 70 days to fill a job vacancy, and that the process

involves 94 separate steps. Through reengineering, we’re taking that down to 15 days, and

we’re doing so by cutting out all kinds of things including ones we were never required to

do in the first place.”

Patch recalled another incident in which agency officials learned that

constraints on their prerogatives were not so extensive as they had

thought—a meeting between reengineering teams from IRS and

representatives from OPM and the General Services Administration:

“We were brought up short repeatedly when our teams started talking about the constraints

they were facing—the things they assumed OPM would never let us do. And the OPM people

said, ‘That is not a requirement of OPM. You do not have to continue doing that’.”

Other attitudinal barriers to change, according to some of the symposium

participants, stem from some traditional assumptions about the way

employees should be managed. Canada’s Marilyn Hay said that her

organization had to begin its change efforts by challenging

“the assumptions on which all of our systems were built: that managers need to be

controlled, that none of them have any judgment, that managers and employees alike will

cheat the system if you let them. The traditional attitude is that the organization could be

run a lot better if you could do it without any people at all. So very naturally, what grew up

were a lot of rules to constrain and control people, and what we’re trying to do now is free

them up, turn that around.”

Although several of the participants pointed out that successful

organizations define their missions clearly and coherently, participants

also noted that the task of doing so is a different one for federal agencies

than for private companies. Companies define their own lines of business,

adjusting as appropriate for the sake of efficiency and profitability; set

their own goals in such areas as quality, service delivery, and profit; and

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are accountable to shareholders. Federal agencies, on the other hand, are

shaped by a more political environment in which missions, measures of

success, and layers of accountability are frequently ambiguous. Reaching

political consensus on agency goals or on the means of achieving them is

often difficult and may include rationales that would not be followed in

the business world. As Cato Institute Chairman William Niskanen said, the

goal of achieving efficiency in federal agencies may be “an insufficiently

broad concept” when so many other factors come into play.

The participants also noted the long-standing problem federal agencies

have had in garnering effective, long-term leadership. Ronald Sanders,

director of the Center for Advanced Public Management at Syracuse

University, said:

“One of the common themes we have heard at this symposium is that organizations that

have undergone change successfully have done so under sustained, committed, visionary

leadership. It’s not that you can’t get that from political appointees, but their half life is

relatively short. In the Australian experience, and in Canada’s as well, one of the marked

differences has been that career civil servants can rise to levels as high as those of

policymakers. They can deal effectively and over sustained periods with issues that aren’t

necessarily policy issues, but service delivery issues. Here in the United States, the political

appointees have to handle both.”

Some of the Eight

Principles Could Be

Applied Without Changing

Current Law

Several participants said that many of the eight principles and related

ideas and practices discussed at the symposium could be implemented in

the federal civil service, and that this could be done without changing

current law.

Our analysis suggests this is largely true. For example, current law does

not prohibit agencies from creating mission or vision statements, from

developing strategic planning and performance measurement processes,

or from aligning most human resource activities with their organizational

missions and core values. Agencies are not prohibited from setting up

performance management systems that assess and reward employee

performance in light of organizational goals and values. Agency managers

are free to make continuous learning a guiding principle, and they have a

variety of formal and informal actions at their disposal to establish trust,

respect, and fairness in the workplace.

Dale Robertson observed:

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“Ninety percent of what private firms are doing could be done in the federal government

today—and be done within existing laws and regulations. The only problem is it’s

tougher—it’s a bureaucratic battle. It takes persistence. You have to do it in the face of a lot

of interference and a lot of second-guessing.”

Further Implementing the

Eight Principles Would

Require Further

Decentralizing the Civil

Service System

One of the eight principles for managing people that emerged from the

symposium was that eliminating the “one-size-fits-all” approach is a key to

creating structures and practices best suited to specific organizations and

their missions. Within the context of civil service reform, this would

require further decentralizing a system in which the “single employer”

model now holds true for slightly more than half of the government’s

employees.5

 The rationales behind the single employer model are

threefold: achieving pay equity across the government, reducing

competition among agencies for employees, and gaining efficiency and

savings through economies of scale. But some symposium participants

considered this approach a barrier to the creation of high-performance

organizations for three reasons: it puts constraints on innovation and

flexibility; it transfers the real responsibility for managing people from

agency managers to agency personnel staff and OPM; and it ignores the

differences among federal agencies in their missions, cultures, sizes, and

other characteristics.

But while some participants felt that the federal government should

eschew the single employer model to the extent that it requires the

imposition of standardized rules and procedures on dissimilar federal

entities, they also felt that the government should have an overarching set

of core values involving merit, fairness, and integrity.6

 The challenge

would be to provide vision and direction without imposing overly

restrictive rules of implementation—to develop mechanisms that ensure

accountability, yet are neither costly nor rooted in a fundamental mistrust

of civil servants. Jenni Colwill described some of the principles advanced

in Australia’s effort to reform its public service:

“Basically, the principles and values were that we should have an apolitical public service,

that we should continue to have merit-based staffing, that we should maintain high

standards of honesty and integrity among public servants, that there should be a very

strong focus on efficiency and results, and that [the public service] should continue to be

5

The federal government does not follow the single employer model to the extent that is often

assumed. Just less than half of today’s federal workers are employed under a variety of alternative

personnel systems lying outside of OPM’s jurisdiction.

6

Today’s civil service core values are embodied in 5 U.S.C. 2301 as the merit system principles.

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accountable to the government of the day while it maintains the capacity to provide it with

high quality advice.”

If Congress should decide to comprehensively decentralize the civil

service, it could do so by revising Title 5 to articulate guiding values and

principles but omit detailed rules of implementation. Each agency might

then be allowed to determine how best to implement the guiding values

and principles while doing so in the context of its own mission and

circumstances. The variety of HRM approaches that might then emerge

across government could be reviewed periodically by the various agencies’

congressional oversight committees, by the Senate Committee on

Governmental Affairs and the House Committee on Government Reform

and Oversight, and/or by the central personnel entities. Several symposium

participants made the point that this approach would be in keeping with

the intent of GPRA—that in consultation with Congress, each agency could

determine the best means of linking its HRM practices to its performance

and results.

The Applicability Issue In considering the various HRM approaches raised at the symposium and

elsewhere, Congress will be dealing with complex policy issues that are

fundamental to the current civil service system. One of the core issues is

whether the government wants to view its employees in the same manner

as private sector organizations do theirs. Should the government, for

example, move away from the concept of guaranteed job security? It is

clear that in addressing issues such as these, Congress would need to

consider the principles distilled from the symposium within the overall

context of a basic, unified policy vision, rather than on an ad hoc basis. It

is equally clear that any fundamental reversal of traditional concepts

would inevitably require political and value judgments from Congress.

These judgments will require consideration of the fundamental differences

that exist between private and public sector entities—differences that go

beyond the simple question of whether one or the other does or does not

operate for profit. There is, for example, a basic difference in roles, the

government taking on duties (such as defense) that are prescribed by the

Constitution, and taking actions in the public interest that the private

sector is neither empowered nor equipped to take (such as securities

regulation, environmental protection, and food and drug safety assurance).

There are differences in the nature of accountability as well: private sector

firms are disciplined by the marketplace and must meet the fundamental

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test of financial viability. Government, on the other hand, must meet

social, political, or even moral expectations that may or may not coincide

with economic efficiencies. Further, a company can choose the business it

wishes to pursue and then answer to its stockholders for the choices

made, but government is accountable to varied constituencies and often

must retain programs because they have strong support from one interest

or another.

In addition, those who run private sector organizations often can

deliberate in private and reach decisions quickly. Government

decisionmakers operate in a fishbowl, often with legal requirements for

open deliberations and public involvement that make the decisionmaking

process lengthy and inevitably subject to compromise. The

decisionmakers themselves—within or across branches of

government—are often numerous and at odds with one another. And

because the leadership of executive agencies changes frequently,

succession planning of the sort frequently found in the private sector is

rare in government.

From our many years of work on civil service and management issues, we

have identified certain key criteria that would be useful in helping

Congress consider its policy judgments within a basic, unified vision,

rather than on an ad hoc basis. For example, a proper balance must be

struck between flexibility—both at the agency and individual levels—and

accountability for actions and outcomes. An integrated approach is

necessary, including systemwide principles and goals and measurable

expectations by which to evaluate agency and individual adherence to

these principles and goals. Rational, mission-based systems and processes

must be included to help people work effectively, and information systems

must be put in place to give managers the information necessary to track

progress and make informed decisions. Effective leadership within the

agencies and continuing oversight from Congress will be needed to help

determine if new approaches to managing the federal workforce are, in

fact, improvements over the old.

While the symposium participants did not offer a set of recommendations

for civil service reform, many of them agreed with the concept discussed

above, that any effort toward substantive change requires a basic unifying

vision. As mentioned earlier, several of the organizations represented at

the symposium stressed comprehensive, rather than piecemeal,

approaches toward creating high-performance workforces. Syracuse

University’s Ronald Sanders said this:

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“Civil service reform is not an end in itself. It’s the means to an end. Eventually, you’re

going to need to say, ‘Here are the characteristics that a high-performing organization,

public or private, needs to embody if it is to accomplish the mission that has been set out

for it. And here’s the kind of civil service that contributes to that model. As the

organizations represented here have done, you’re going to need to look 10 or 15 years

downstream, and then begin to sketch out a framework that will work best in the federal

workplace today and in the years to come’.”

Transforming the Civil

Service Will Be a

Major Challenge

Making and maintaining the necessary workforce investments will pose a

considerable challenge to civil service reformers, particularly in a period

of fiscal constraint and government downsizing. Several symposium

participants spoke of the substantial investments in time and money that

their organizations found were necessary to change the way people are

managed, and they noted as well that changes did not come fast, easy, or

cheap.

Some participants said that while the need to reduce costs is a driving

force for change in the civil service, any changes must be made with an

eye toward the future. Canada’s Marilyn Hay suggested that current

downsizing efforts in government, if mishandled, could lead to a

“traumatized and cynical workforce that will eventually leave, and we

won’t find the people to replace them.”

In 1988, even before current pressures on the civil service had emerged,

we stressed the importance of determining how the federal government

“can attract, motivate, and retain committed people—people at all levels

who can come up with new ideas and innovative approaches and see them

through to effective implementation.”7

 Our symposium highlighted various

organizations’ efforts to respond to similar challenges—and under the

added pressure of steadying or declining resources. By their accounts,

radical changes made in response to adversity have had positive results.

These changes entailed discomfort and even occasional failure, but some

participants said that taking risks was necessary to the process, and that in

a turbulent and demanding environment, public and private sector

organizations such as theirs have had no other choice.

7

The Public Service, GAO/OCG-89-2TR, November 1988, p. 4.

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Contents

Letter 1

Appendix I 

Highlights From the

Symposium

18

Principle 1: Value People as Assets Rather Than as Costs 18

Principle 2: Emphasize Mission, Vision, and Organizational

Culture

19

Principle 3: Hold Managers Responsible for Achieving Results

Instead Of

Imposing Rigid, Process-Oriented Rules and Standards

20

Principle 4: Choose an Organizational Structure Appropriate to

the Organization, Rather Than Trying to Make “One Size Fit All”

21

Principle 5: Instead of Isolating the “Personnel Function”

Organizationally, Integrate HRM Into the Mission of the

Organization

22

Principle 6: Treat Continuous Learning as an Investment in

Success Rather Than as a Cost to Be Minimized

23

Principle 7: Pursue an Integrated Rather Than an Ad Hoc

Approach to Information Management

24

Principle 8: Provide Sustained Leadership That Recognizes

Change as a Permanent Condition, Not a One-Time Event

25

Appendix II 

Presenters and

Panelists of the GAO

Symposium on the

Workforce of the

Future

27

Appendix III 

GAO Contacts and

Staff

Acknowledgments

30

Bibliography 31

Nongovernment Publications 31

Government Publications 32

Page 16 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Contents

Related GAO Products 34

Abbreviations

CEO chief executive officer

FTE full-time equivalent

GPRA Government Performance and Results Act

HRM human resource management

IRS Internal Revenue Service

NPR National Performance Review

OPM Office of Personnel Management

Page 17 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Appendix I 

Highlights From the Symposium

The 32 symposium participants provided a wealth of insights into the

subject of managing people. From the proceedings, we distilled the eight

principles for managing people listed earlier in this report. In this

appendix, we list the eight principles again and follow each with an

example or illustrative highlight drawn from the symposium or from

materials provided by the participants. These highlights are not intended

to fully define the principles; rather, they reflect some aspects of the

discussions surrounding them. As a whole, the highlights have been

selected to convey a sense of the variety of ideas brought forward during

the 2 days of presentations and discussions.

Principle 1: Value

People as Assets

Rather Than as Costs

According to several participants, this principle is based in large part on

the idea that people have an inherent desire to contribute to their

organizations and to produce good work.

William F. Buehler, Senior Vice President and Chief Staff Officer, Xerox

Corporation, related the following anecdote:

“In the early 1980s, Xerox was in deep trouble. Our patents had run out and

competition was fierce. In 1982, David Kearns, who had just become chairman,

was giving a speech in a tent outside our Webster manufacturing facility in

Rochester, New York. Next to the tent they’d lined up 54 trailer trucks full of

defective equipment that had been returned by Xerox customers. Mr. Kearns was

trying to get the message across about quality. People kept looking at the trucks

and mulling this over. Finally, one of the people from the manufacturing line—a

fellow named Frank Enos— said, ‘Sorry, Mr. Chairman, but why didn’t you ask us

about all this? We knew we were making faulty equipment, but you guys were in

such a rush to bring in a buck, you sent it out anyway. If you had only asked us, we

would have told you’.”

“The chairman, to his credit, called Frank Enos back the next day. Soon we began

to hold employee round tables—began to truly engage the union and the

employees in the quality process. The rest is history.”

“Before long we’d trained 100,000 people in the quality process, and by 1989 we

won the Baldrige Award. And the minute David Kearns found out that we’d won

the Baldrige Award, the first person he called was Frank Enos.”

“By now we’re certain that motivated, liberated employees will satisfy customers

better than unmotivated, unliberated ones. We absolutely believe that involving

and capitalizing on our employees is the key to our success, and, in fact, is what

Page 18 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Appendix I 

Highlights From the Symposium

turned the company around. Involvement has led to huge increases in

productivity, soaring morale, and great results.”

Principle 2:

Emphasize Mission,

Vision, and

Organizational

Culture

This principle includes the idea that an organization should articulate its

mission explicitly, have a clear vision for itself, and work to create a

strong organizational culture to achieve results and guide behavior.

Australia’s Public Service Commission, for example, is developing

legislation that would reflect this principle. The commission’s Jenni

Colwill told the symposium that the challenge facing the steering

committee that is now developing the legislation is “to create a culture

which doesn’t rely on rules.” The committee’s philosophy, she said, is that

“the Federal Public Service Act should provide a framework built on

principles and values, rather than on detailed prescription.”

Colwill said the framework of principles that the steering committee will

include in its forthcoming legislative proposal will probably be similar to

the one advanced by Australia’s Management Advisory Board in its

June 1993 report entitled Building a Better Public Service:

“Responsiveness to governments:

• serving Ministers and the government loyally and impartially; and

• providing frank, honest, and comprehensive advice.

A close focus on results:

• pursuing efficiency and effectiveness at all levels; and

• delivering services to clients conscientiously and courteously.

Merit as the basis for staffing:

• ensuring equality of opportunity; and

• providing fair and reasonable rewards as an incentive to high

performance.

The highest standards of probity, integrity, and conduct:

• acting in accordance with the letter and spirit of the law;

• dealing equitably, honestly, and responsively with the public; and

• avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.

Page 19 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Appendix I 

Highlights From the Symposium

A strong commitment to accountability:

• contributing fully to the accountability of the agency to the Government,

of the Government to the Parliament, and of the Parliament to the people;

• fully supporting the administrative and legal measures established to

enhance accountability; and

• recognizing that those delegating responsibility for performance do not

abuse responsibility and may be called to account.

Continuous improvement through teams and individuals:

• striving for creativity and innovation; and

• making individual and team performance count.”

Principle 3: Hold

Managers Responsible

for Achieving Results

Instead Of

Imposing Rigid,

Process-Oriented

Rules and Standards

Where this principle has been implemented, line managers are held

accountable for performance rather than for compliance with rules and

procedures. In some instances, line managers, rather than central

personnel staff, now have the authority to hire, fire, promote, evaluate,

develop, and reward employees.

New Zealand has installed chief executive officers (CEOs) in its

departments, each with full responsibility for managing the agency. A CEO

reports to a Minister in Cabinet, who makes policy decisions. A CEO,

engaged under a fixed-term, performance-based contract, manages the

staff and the work. New Zealand’s CEOs are given fixed budgets under

which to operate, with relatively few restrictions on how they spend the

money so long as they do so within broad guiding principles and achieve

the results specified in their contracts.

Roger Blakeley, Chief Executive, Department of Internal Affairs, New

Zealand, reflected on the role of CEOs in his government:

“Whereas we had been ‘permanent’ heads of our departments, we were now

‘impermanent’ heads, called ‘Chief executives.’ And rather than being given

lifetime tenure, we were put on fixed-end, 5-year contracts with

performance-based criteria. If we did not perform, we could be sacked. So now I

have a performance agreement with my minister, one that lays out what I’m going

to deliver—or what the department is going to deliver—according to specific

standards of quality, timeliness, and cost.”

Page 20 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Appendix I 

Highlights From the Symposium

“As chief executives, we became accountable for employing the staff. This was

another radical change. Instead of having everything controlled from the center

through the public service agency, we chief executives became the employers of

our staff. We were now responsible for all things related to the staff, including

recruitment and selection, systems of pay and remuneration, and hiring and firing

people.”

“There were worries at the start that this would lead to some sort of blow-out of

basic salaries, as the independent agencies somehow competed against each other

and revved up the price they would be willing to pay for people’s labor. But it

hasn’t worked that way, and I think that’s partly because, although the centralized

control has been removed, we chief executives still have strong incentives to

make sure we control our budgets. We actually now tend to work in a more

cooperative way with other government departments than we might have done in

the past. I think it has created far better incentives for good management and

organization. Almost universally, I think, people would say it’s been a success.”

Principle 4: Choose an

Organizational

Structure Appropriate

to the Organization,

Rather Than Trying to

Make “One Size Fit

All”

Several presenters explained that their organizations have designed new

structures to fit their particular missions and circumstances. Some of the

reasons, they said, for moving to more flexible and adaptive organizational

structures have been to (1) reduce the time it takes to get a product or

service to the customer; (2) respond more quickly to changes in the

environment, including new technology; (3) cut costs; (4) improve

communication and information flow; and (5) make better use of

employees’ skills, ideas, and creativity.

Tharon Greene, Director of Human Resources for the City of Hampton,

Virginia, discussed the restructuring of the city’s Department of Human

Resources, where, as elsewhere in the city, the classification system has

been eliminated and the shift has been made to cross-functional and

self-directed teams:

“Our department used to be structured along the same specialized lines as

traditional personnel offices, with branches of recruitment, placement, employee

relations, training, and so forth, with branch chiefs and technicians and

secretaries assigned to those branches. That system served us well enough, but

over the years we found we had to make it more flexible. So we took out a level of

supervision—the branch chief level—and we collapsed the organization into two

self-directed work teams. The professional teams are fully cross-trained in all

human resource functions and offer one-stop shopping to a set of customers. All

Page 21 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Appendix I 

Highlights From the Symposium

the work comes into one place, the team members decide how it will get done, and

the team manages its resources to see the job through.”

“We had 18 people in our office when we started this transformation 10 years ago,

and now we do just as much work—probably a lot more work and more

effectively—with 9 people. We attribute that to the reengineering of work, the

elimination of the mid-manager level of supervision, and the reduction of

hand-offs from one branch to another. We’ve eliminated the overhead costs

associated with the extra layer of supervision and shortened cycle time by

eliminating hand-offs.”

“Elsewhere in the city government, we have gone more and more to self-directed

work teams, organizing work around the customer and omitting layers of

supervision. We have about 200 employees now in various teams. We came up with

a pay philosophy that was adopted by our city council, which provides for an array

of awards and incentives that pay high performers above market. For people in

self-directed teams, we have a model for pay based on results, demonstrated

skills, what the group accomplishes collectively, customer satisfaction ratings, and

budget performance.”

Principle 5: Instead of

Isolating the

“Personnel Function”

Organizationally,

Integrate HRM Into

the Mission of the

Organization

Where this principle has been implemented, HRM practices are aligned with

organizational goals and objectives and are designed to reinforce

organizational culture and enhance change efforts. In some cases, to

achieve this integration of people management with business goals, new

roles and responsibilities have been established for human resource

professionals and line managers alike. Some presenters portrayed the new

role of human resource professionals in their organizations as more

consultative and collaborative than in the past. Among the companies

represented at the symposium, vice presidents for human resources have

become part of the senior management teams, ensuring that “people

management” is linked to corporate goals and objectives.

T. Larry Cabler, Director of Business Development for IBM’s WorkForce

Solutions, explained how his organization’s human resources unit was

made a business partner within the company—smaller, entrepreneurial,

applying information technology to deliver services effectively:

“In 1991, facing adverse economic conditions, IBM looked to Human Resources to

help reduce costs. At first, cutting costs was seen primarily as a head-count

equation. However, we soon realized that what we really needed was to deliver

satisfactory services to the company at a fair price, so that human resources

Page 22 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Appendix I 

Highlights From the Symposium

would not be seen as a burden on the cost of doing business. To do this, we

needed to develop a new model for delivering human resources services.”

“This new model, WorkForce Solutions (WFS), was created in May 1992. WFS

developed a marketplace perspective, establishing a customer-driven focus in

which services are based on business needs and performance is measured by

customer satisfaction. It uses technology and work process reengineering to

deliver quality services at low prices. We organized ourselves around processes,

not functions, and have developed customer-oriented services.

Technology-enabled service centers provide technology interface, human resource

expert systems, case management, work flow management, and customer

satisfaction assessment. Employees and managers have access to human resource

information through an on-line voice-response system and smart computers.”

“Initially, 450 Human Resources staff remained in the line organizations to serve

in a strategic ‘advise and counsel’ capacity. The remaining 1,700 Human Resources

staff members were transferred into WFS.”

“This has not been an easy journey so far. WFS is now down to about 900 people.

But all along, reducing the size of the staff was something that had to be done.

The system now in operation efficiently serves a customer base of over 700,000

IBM employees, dependents, and retirees (down less than 10 percent from 1992

levels). Despite the fact that more than 28,000 calls are received each month, the

average caller waits less than 30 seconds for service. Customer satisfaction is

currently at over 89 percent.”

Principle 6: Treat

Continuous Learning

as an Investment in

Success Rather Than

as a Cost to Be

Minimized

The participants gave several reasons why their organizations invest in

continuous learning for employees, among them: (1) developing the new

skills needed for managing change; (2) developing the skills and modes of

behavior needed in flatter, more participatory, customer-focused,

results-oriented work environments; (3) maintaining marketable skills; and

(4) teaching new skills to employees who are likely to leave due to

downsizing, as well as to those who remain.

One approach to continuous learning has involved giving employees more

responsibility for assessing their skills and preferences and charting their

careers. Mary G. Jenkins, former Director of Human Resources Planning

and Development, Powertrain Division, General Motors, explained her

reasons for encouraging this approach:

Page 23 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Appendix I 

Highlights From the Symposium

“When it comes to employee development, I think that many businesses have

traditionally trained their people to be fairly passive. There is a learned response

at work here: Employees believe that if they simply work hard, the system will

take care of them. Someone will tap you on the shoulder, tell you what skills you

need to develop, and promote you to the next level. I think we need to encourage

people to play a far more active role in their own professional development.”

“At GM Powertrain, the system encourages people to take greater responsibility

for their own learning. It’s a system that was intentionally organized into

components, so that employees could opt for whatever components made sense

for them. The model is built around a feedback system that puts the employee at

the center of the process. The employees determine their sources of feedback and

are given a number of support mechanisms through which they can gather that

information and do something with it. The employees themselves drive the

process in terms of timing and need.”

“Employees are given a whole day for self-assessment, with the idea of tooling

them up to represent themselves, instead of having the organization make

assumptions about them regarding their needs for growth and development.

Again, employees drive the process, because they know their values, their

interests, their skills, and what turns them on at work.”

“The aim is to put people into jobs that are aligned with what they love to do.

This, too, is a different model from that of traditional systems. Traditional

systems conjure up a ledger in our minds of what we do well and what we don’t do

well, then put all the development efforts into what we don’t do well. The return

on investment is very small.”

“This new system, on the other hand, is based on what you do well, how we can

take better advantage of that, and how we can give you more of that in your

working life so you will love what you’re doing and also be more productive.

Clearly, there’s a different set of assumptions being applied here than in

traditional models.”

Principle 7: Pursue an

Integrated Rather

Than an Ad Hoc

Approach to

Information

Management

Several participants emphasized how crucial measurement is to

results-oriented organizations. More things must be measured, they said,

than the “bottom line.” They said results-oriented organizations must also

track performance against mission-related goals in such areas as product

quality, service delivery, and customer satisfaction.

Page 24 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Appendix I 

Highlights From the Symposium

Stephen Rutherford, Manager of Human Resource Analysis, Federal

Express Corporation, explained how his firm has tied information

management to business goals:

“If you remember two things from what I say, it will probably be technology and

measurement. We have a strategy. We have a mission. But what keeps us focused

and working on those issues of importance to us? Our corporate goals and our

measurement thereof.”

“In 1988, our corporate goals came out, consisting of only three numbers. On the

people side, we had our leadership average—a measure of how well our employees

say the management of Federal Express was providing leadership for the

organization. There was one number. Then we had our service quality index—a

measure of the ten things our customers thought were most important. That was

another number. And finally, there was our profit number, based on global pre-tax

income. What was really exciting was the news that we had to reach our corporate

goals for all three of these numbers, or there would not be a cent of incentive

compensation for anyone in the company.”

“One strength of our information management system is that, with the exception

of the leadership average—which is an annual measure—you can track these

corporate goals in real time. You can measure your service at Federal Express on

a daily basis. You can measure it companywide or you can measure it at any

location in the company. You can measure how your profits are doing, you can

track profit and loss, you can track against the budget. And you can tie all this to

every management level in the company, to every employee. Our

management-by-objective system aligns us with these goals, and it’s tied as well to

the incentive compensation system for our managers.”

Principle 8: Provide

Sustained Leadership

That Recognizes

Change as a

Permanent Condition,

Not a One-Time Event

One recurrent theme at the symposium was that change appears to be a

permanent condition, and the successful organizations will be the ones

that deal with it best. Some participants said that in a continuously

changing environment, organizations must strike a balance between

adhering to their visions and remaining flexible enough to adapt to new

and demanding conditions. Two qualities were mentioned most often as

crucial for organizations hoping to deal successfully with change:

sustained, committed leadership and a long-term, strategic approach.

Marilyn Hay, Director of Labor Relations at the Treasury Board of Canada,

offered these observations on the challenges involved in dealing with

change:

Page 25 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Appendix I 

Highlights From the Symposium

“Listening at this symposium to these discussions about congressional and agency

issues, I can assure you that we have had similar debates in Canada. Just as you

have been, we are looking at how to become more effective and more efficient.

And we, too, have a complex government agenda. We don’t have any clear bottom

lines by which to measure our success. We lack a political focus on public service

renewal. We have a crisis orientation—a lot of it driven by the media. We have this

great sense of urgency, but we also have no money. We hear a lot of rhetoric about

devolution, delegation, empowerment, and innovation, but we haven’t removed

the structural or systemic barriers to these things. And we have a high level of

risk aversion.”

“Not long ago, the directors of personnel in Canada—as a community—finally

decided that somebody had to lead, that it wasn’t good enough just to wait around

for permission to act. Since we believed fundamentally in those core statements

about people being essential to success, and that we simply have to pay greater

attention to the business of managing them, we decided that we would have to be

the ones to move the agenda forward as best we could. This was an interesting

thing for us to try, because if ever there was a powerless group in the Canadian

Government, it was the directors of personnel.”

“From our perspective, we see the issue of people management as twofold. It’s a

matter of the interactive leadership issues—the human dynamic, if you will—and

the structural, systemic issues—how the business is done. Both ends have to be

driven by core values and principles, with a focus on mission

achievement—mission being the business of a given department or agency. That

mission has to be achieved affordably, and in a way that is resilient in the face of

change.”

“You have to invest if you want to respond in new ways to change. It doesn’t

happen by accident, it doesn’t happen on somebody else’s agenda, and it doesn’t

happen for nothing. That means spending training dollars, supporting champions,

getting barriers out of the way, and driving coherently toward a resilient

organization that copes with change as a permanent reality. It’s unreasonable, of

course, to think that it’s going to happen overnight. You’re in for the long haul,

and you need boundless patience and persistence.”

Page 26 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Appendix II 

Presenters and Panelists of the GAO

Symposium on the Workforce of the Future

Presenters Roger Blakeley, Chief Executive

Department of Internal Affairs

Government of New Zealand

William F. Buehler

Senior Vice President and Chief Staff Officer

Xerox Corporation

T. Larry Cabler, Director

Human Resource Services

ISSC, IBM

J. Kermit Campbell, former President and CEO

Herman Miller, Inc.

Jenni Colwill, Assistant Commissioner

Senior Executive Service Career Management Branch

Australian Public Service Commission

Tharon Greene

Director of Human Resources

City of Hampton, Virginia

Sandra J. Hale, President

Enterprise Management, International

Marilyn Hay, Director

Labor Relations

Labor Relations and Classification Division

Treasury Board of Canada

James E. Irvine

Vice President of Communications and Technologies

Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO

Mary G. Jenkins, Principal

Emergent Systems

Stephen Rutherford, Manager of Human Resource Analysis

Federal Express Corporation

Page 27 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Appendix II 

Presenters and Panelists of the GAO

Symposium on the Workforce of the Future

Kenneth L. Smith, District Manager

Workplace of the Future Initiatives

AT&T Company

Panelists Ty Ayers, National Director

Strategic Planning Division

Internal Revenue Service

Carolyn Ban, Associate Professor of Public Administration

Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy

State University of New York at Albany

Theresa A. Brelsford

Deputy Associate Commissioner for Quality Services and Administration

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Alan K. Campbell, former Director

U.S. Office of Personnel Management

Frank P. Cipolla, Director

Center for Human Resources Management

National Academy of Public Administration

Curt Dierdorff, Assistant Project Director for

 Human Resources Management

National Academy of Public Administration

John T. Dunlop

Lamont University Professor, Emeritus

Harvard University

Albert C. Hyde, Staff Consultant

Center for Public Policy Education

The Brookings Institution

Constance Horner, Guest Scholar in Governmental Studies

The Brookings Institution

Joyce R. Jarrett, Chairman and CEO

JarrettThor International

Page 28 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Appendix II 

Presenters and Panelists of the GAO

Symposium on the Workforce of the Future

Thomas S. McFee

Assistant Secretary for Personnel Administration

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Howard M. Messner, Executive Vice President and

 Chief Operating Officer

American Consulting Engineers Council

William A. Niskanen, Chairman

Cato Institute

Margaret Patch, Dean

School of Professional Development, Corporate Education

Internal Revenue Service

James Perry, Professor

School of Public and Environmental Affairs

Indiana University

Roberta K. Peters, Director

Office of Civilian Personnel Management

U.S. Department of the Navy

Elsa A. Porter, Vice President

Research and Development

The Maccoby Group

F. Dale Robertson, former Chief

U.S. Forest Service

Ronald P. Sanders, Director

Center for Advanced Public Management

The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs

Syracuse University

Frank J. Thompson, Executive Director

National Commission on the State and Local Public Service

Page 29 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Appendix III 

GAO Contacts and Staff Acknowledgments

GAO Contacts Timothy P. Bowling, Associate Director

Federal Management and Workforce Issues

(202) 512-3511

Stephen Altman, Assistant Director

Federal Management and Workforce Issues

(202) 512-3712

Acknowledgments The following individuals were responsible for this report:

Evaluator-in-Charge Gail Johnson, Senior Evaluator Michael J. O’Donnell,

and Evaluator Annette Hartenstein planned and produced the symposium

and analyzed the symposium results; Assistant General Counsel Alan

Belkin provided legal advice and comments on the draft; Donna Leiss

edited the draft; Barbara I. Keller reviewed the draft for consistency with

GAO policies and standards; Senior Evaluator Gary V. Lawson and

Evaluator Brenda J. Lindsey prepared the final text for publication. Intern

Abby Clapp helped plan and produce the symposium. Ernestine Burt and

Darlene Shelton provided administrative support during the symposium

and during preparation of the report.

Page 30 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
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Page 33 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Related GAO Products

Civil Service Reform: Changing Times Demand New Approaches

(GAO/T-GGD-96-31, October 12, 1995).

Schools and Workplaces: An Overview of Successful and Unsuccessful

Practices (GAO/PEMD-95-28, August 31, 1995).

Managing for Results: Status of GPRA (GAO/T-GGD-95-193, June 27, 1995).

Managing For Results: Critical Actions for Measuring Performance

(GAO/T-GGD/AIMD-95-187, June 20, 1995).

Federal Hiring: Reconciling Managerial Flexibility with Veterans’

Preference (GAO/GGD-95-102, June 16, 1995).

Government Restructuring: Identifying Potential Duplication in Federal

Missions and Approaches (GAO/T-AIMD-95-161, June 7, 1995).

Government Reorganization: Issues and Principles (GAO/T-GGD/AIMD-95-166,

May 17, 1995).

Managing for Results: Steps for Strengthening Federal Management

(GAO/T-GGD/AIMD-95-158, May 9, 1995).

Managing for Results: Experiences Abroad Suggest Insights for Federal

Management Reforms (GAO/GGD-95-120, May 2, 1995).

Best Practices Methodology: A New Approach for Improving Government

Operations (GAO/NSIAD-95-154, May 1995).

Federal Quality Management: Strategies for Involving Employees

(GAO/GGD-95-79, April 18, 1995).

Workforce Reductions: Downsizing Strategies Used in Selected

Organizations (GAO/GGD-95-54, March 13, 1995).

Federal Downsizing: The Administration’s Management of Workforce

Reductions (GAO/T-GGD-95-108, March 2, 1995).

Management Reform: Implementation of the National Performance

Review’s Recommendations (GAO/OCG-95-1, December 5, 1994).

Page 34 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Related GAO Products

Managing for Results: State Experiences Provide Insights for Federal

Management Reforms (GAO/GGD-95-22, December 1994).

Reengineering Organizations: Results of a GAO Symposium (GAO/NSIAD-95-34,

December 1994).

Government Contractors: Contracting Out Implications of Streamlining

Agency Operations (GAO/T-GGD-95-4, October 5, 1994).

Executive Guide: Improving Mission Performance Through Strategic

Information Management and Technology (GAO/AIMD-94-115, May 1994).

Improving Government: Measuring Performance and Acting on Proposals

for Change (GAO/T-GGD-93-14, March 23, 1993).

Management of VA: Improved Human Resource Planning Needed to

Achieve Strategic Goals (GAO/HRD-93-10, March 18, 1993).

Improving Government: Need To Reexamine Organization and

Performance (GAO/T-GGD-93-9, March 11, 1993).

Federal Performance Management: Agencies Need Greater Flexibility in

Designing Their Systems (GAO/GGD-93-57, February 24, 1993).

Federal Personnel Management: OPM Reliance on Agency Oversight of

Personnel System Not Fully Justified (GAO/GGD-93-24, December 8, 1992).

The Public Service (GAO/OCG-93-7TR, December 1992).

Government Management Issues (GAO/OCG-93-3TR, December 1992).

Quality Management: Survey of Federal Organizations (GAO/GGD-93-9BR,

October 1, 1992).

Organizational Culture: Techniques Companies Use to Perpetuate or

Change Beliefs and Values (GAO/NSIAD-92-105, February 1992).

Meeting the Government’s Technology Challenge: Results of A GAO

Symposium (GAO/IMTEC-90-23, February 1990).

Managing Human Resources: Greater OPM Leadership Needed to Address

Critical Challenges (GAO/GGD-89-19, January 19, 1989).

Page 35 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
Related GAO Products

The Public Service (GAO/OCG-89-2TR, November 1988).

Civil Service Reform: Development of 1978 Civil Service Reform

Proposals, (GAO/GGD-89-18, November 1988).

Description of Selected Systems for Classifying Federal Civilian Positions

and Personnel (GAO/GGD-84-90, July 13, 1984).

Improving the Credibility and Management of the Federal Work Force

Through Better Planning and Budgetary Controls (GAO/FPCD-81-54, July 17,

1981).

(966634) Page 36 GAO/GGD-96-35 Transforming the Civil Service
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