We must change how we rate our civil servants

A performance management and development system was introduced into the civil service in 2000. Annual assessments were based on a five-point rating scale for each of the 36,000 members of staff.

A written answer to a parliamentary question on October 9, 2013, stated that: “Although there has been some movement towards greater alignment with the expected statistical distribution, there remain relatively high levels of awards of the higher categories of ratings overall and very low levels of ratings in respect of underperformance.”

Forcing the distribution of ratings to fit a pre-specified statistical model is not the same as finding a statistical model to fit the distribution of observed ratings.

The expectation that the observations would follow a symmetrical distribution was flawed. A doubly truncated normal distribution fits the actual data much better.

In his book published in 1992, Performance Appraisal in the Public Sector, Dennis M Daley wrote: “Forced distributions assume that employee performance fits some external model or distribution, usually envisioned along the lines of something like a normally distributed, bell-shaped curve. Forgotten is that the normal distribution is itself an artificial creation chosen… for its convenient mathematical properties.”

Organisations do not randomly select their workers; there are elaborate selection processes designed to choose individuals who are primed to succeed.

Yet, the myth of normality causes managers to question appraisal distributions that indicate that the vast bulk of their employees are actually doing the jobs for which they were hired.

In fact, one should expect performance appraisal to produce results toward the high end of the scale.

A more recent written answer to another parliamentary question on October 1, 2015, stated that it is now planned to introduce a two-point rating system in which performance will be assessed to be either acceptable or not acceptable.

The analytical nature of civil service work has been steadily changing from literacy to numeracy. Traditional pen-pushing is fast giving way to the latest developments in computerisation. The civil service is standing on the threshold of a giant leap from passive documentation to active creativity.

Michael Mernagh

Raheens

Carrigaline

Co Cork