Use GE as the Model for Government Efficiency? Workers Would Be Axed

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Doubtless you have stood in line for hours at the post office or Department of Motor Vehicles while the employees move without a sense of vitality. We’ve all been promptly placed on hold, then inadvertently hung up on while trying to contact a government office. Have you ever had more trash distributed around the front of your curb than was actually collected for disposal?


The unifying thread that holds these experiences together is ineffective government bureaucracy. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it this way: “The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it’s so rare.”


In the case of politicians, the public is protected from ineptitude and apathy through term limits. Unfortunately for John Q. Citizen, the vast majority of government bureaucrats exist in an environment devoid of responsibility or accountability.


The negligent, unqualified and indifferent workers that fill millions of government positions do so with the assurance that they will never be fired for their transgressions.


A recent study by the Daily News concluded that only six out of 37,000 Los Angeles city government employees had been fired for poor performance. On the national level, the Federal Times reported that none of the workers in eight Cabinet-level departments were fired for poor performance from June 1993 to June 1998.


The public must ask themselves whether local and federal governments have collected the finest group of individuals capable of error-free work, or if there are inadequate systems in place that are unable to address the rampant poor performance of government workers.


The outrageous misappropriation and waste of taxpayer dollars provides another contributing step in what’s sometimes called the “Lemon Dance.” Consider a recent example where two Los Angeles sanitation workers made over $8,000 of unauthorized calls on city-issued cell phones. After several warnings, and continued misuse of their cell phones, the city workers were not terminated while management lamented that they did not have an adequate policy explaining to their employees that it is wrong to use city cell phones for personal business.


The inability of superiors to adequately discipline employees is the modern-day Achilles’ heel of government. Entrusted with running society’s most important institutions, government finds itself in a position where it can neither terminate its least qualified employee, nor reward exemplary standouts.


Instead, government bosses tend to look the other way when faced with the poor performance of their subordinates. The lack of accountability has, in turn, created a culture of apathy where workers have no motivation to perform at even adequate levels.


Former General Electric Chairman Jack Welch’s strategy for improving employee performance deserves consideration. Concluding that it was better to release an ineffective employee immediately rather than allowing them 25 years of wages and retirement benefits, Welch regularly fired the bottom 10 percent of his employees, based on performance evaluations. This type of approach could do wonders for local, state and national government.


Termination sends a clear message throughout the organization that incompetence will not be tolerated.


Albert Einstein suggested, “bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.” The current state of government employment certainly supports his assertion. However, government must begin to clean house.



*Michael Levine is the founder of public relations firm Levine Communications and the author of 16 books.

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