A few days ago, I mentioned that I’ve been working on a post about city of Houston employees, and how we differ from the general work force. It’s been through several reworkings, as it’s one of the more difficult I have had to write. After all, this is an analysis that will probably upset many of my co-workers, not to mention I expect most readers will disagree with part or all of it. That’s actually of less concern than is the fundamental problem with the article: I am the author. I’m part of the equation; I’m a city employee trying to diagnose from the inside. For the purpose of this article, I’m trying to step outside of who and what I am, and look at the “big picture.” I’m honest enough to know I may not have succeeded. I’ve spent time in the private sector, and all my social time is spent among non-city employees — but that still doesn’t mean my observations are the gospel–but I don’t see how anyone from the outside could even begin to write this article; they can barely scratch the surface. So reader beware: this may be more insightful than an article in the local newspaper (well, that’s a given!), but it doesn’t mean I’m 100% right.

First off, let me point out that in any work force of 20,000 people, there are going to be all types. There will be gung-ho employees, average workers, people who are pure poison, outstanding employees, and people just punching the clock for a paycheck. You may have heard of the concept of “the five percenter.” That’s the people at the very top and bottom of the quality scale; they are the rudders and anchors of the business ship; when anchors run rampant and aren’t jettisoned, the whole ship gets dragged down. When the rudders don’t do their job, the ship becomes directionless, and less gets accomplished. The vast majority (90%+) of the people in any organization are average workers, or just punching the clock. The city is not really any different from a private business in that regard. The problem comes in with the forces that act to motivate and reward all three groups.

There should be no surprises here for anyone that’s ever worked for a living: They are Rewards, Punishment, Security, and Advancement. You can almost pair the first two and last two with each other as flip sides of the same coins, though Advancment can be a form of Reward.

What do you normally think of as rewards for a job? Pay. Promotion. Praise. Raise. Let’s look at each in turn.

Pay. Well, as noted previously, City of Houston pay is low. And although the City is the worst off, it’s no different in other local governments; when interviewing with Harris County at a job fair back in 2000, I questioned the lack of salary data they were giving, compared to the companies present. The HR people finally admitted, somewhat embarassed, that they couldn’t post it at the job fair because it was only about 2/3 of what the other businesses were offering. The next week, I pulled some city positions and compared to the county. The city was paying about 85-90% of what the county was offering. Intrigued, I pulled a posting for a city IT, a programming position . I noted the requirements, and then started searching through the Chronicle and Monster. The city’s top end of the pay range: $45k. The same qualifications on Monster: $100k. Ok, it was before the tech bust, and in a highly competitive field. But still, I was floored — a 100%+ difference?

Jee-zus. No wonder our computer support sucks ass.

So the City is not going to attract top talent to start with. Certainly fits with the public’s “job program for failures” perception, doesn’t it?

Let’s jump out of the earlier order, and take Raises next. Generally, there aren’t any. The “starting offer” is it. To counter this problem, Directors have been quietly authorized to give 1% pay increases to however many employees they can, but money is not being budgeted specifically for this. At a guess, it’s being scraped up out of savings from unfilled positions. Despite restrictive qualifying criteria, not everyone that qualifies can be given these increases; it also prompts the question: what about next year’s budget? So pay might never increase without an act of City Council and the Mayor. If you’re not in the Police or Fire Departments, there is no such thing as a regular “step” pay increase for being on the job longer. Well, technically, that’s not quite true…. you do get an extra $2 per bi-weekly pay period, to a maximum of 20 years ($40).

No, I didn’t misplace a decimal. One. Dollar. Per. Week.

Don’t run in horror yet, dear reader. We haven’t gotten to the fun parts yet….

So, how often do these acts of council and mayor happen? Roughly every 2-3 years. Increases are normally in the area of 2-3% against base pay. What that means is that everyone’s pay is bumped by that amount. The only exception is the $2 per pay period, which has not changed in decades. I previously stated (incorrectly) that the pay grades were bumped; this isn’t correct because certain employees are not included: anyone who got a recent promotion or hire (six months) is exempted. Thus starting pay lags even further, unless HR is quietly adjusting it. I believe this to be the case, owing to the odd bracket tops and bottoms often quoted. Raises, with two exceptions, have always been in the nature of “across the board” increases. Although our HR people have promised merit pay increases for years, the only mayors to put money there were Lanier and White; the former did an increase to only the top performers and the latter did a scaled increase based on the most recent evaluation. White’s increase was in 2004, and so far there is not even a rumor of an increase in the 2006 budget. Even if he did another, there is no reason to assume he’d link it to performance again. And, as previously explained, any increase in compensation now means higher pension costs in the future — that’s the millstone keeping employee compensation dragged down, as well as forcing the city to do without adequate personnel. So we can expect neither base increases that will keep up with inflation, nor merit increases based on our performance.

This is no way to motivate employees to work harder.

So what’s left, if pay and raise are missing from the equation? Let’s try praise. Everyone likes being praised, but when it’s all a manager has to fall back on, the effect of the praise has more to do with the employee’s frame of mind than the delivery, or lack thereof. Given that job performance ratings rarely have anything to do with pay, higher ratings are treated with contempt by many employees. “Why should I bother? It’s not going to make me any more money.” But give an employee a sub-standard rating, and watch the fur fly! Such reactions are not entirely without cause, thanks to our insanely litiginous society and the nature of civil service. If an employee has any area, no matter how small, in which their job performance lacks, it has to be documented, because that documentation might be the difference between winning and losing in a contested termination later on.

And of course, there are some managers who simply won’t deliver praise, no matter what. I’ve had middle managers state that no employee should ever be given the top rating, and even order the evaluation of an employee revised, if the supervisor was about to give such a grade. Worse, there are some managers and supervisors (every company’s got them) who go around planting little booby traps so they can later deal with someone out of personal dislike–or worse. Sometimes I wonder whether offices with lots of employees that have negative reviews mean there’s a bunch of hardcases working there, or that the bosses are crooked and fixing it so they can claim any whistleblower is a disgruntled employee. Hell, like Leon Hale (the Houston Post and later, Chronicle columnist) used to say, whoever heard of a gruntled employee? Our city is cleaner than many — Houston has no equivilent of Tammany Hall, nor is the corruption as top-to-bottom as in some northeast cities, but get real–I’m not stupid enough to think it’s squeeky clean.)

Unsurprisingly, this breeds some cynicsm about the rating system, and makes praise a less effective motivator.

It’s not that we’re lazy, it’s that we know we aren’t going to get any more money by working harder. I can bust my butt and never call in sick–and if I’m lucky that might get me a 1% pay increase, provided we didn’t run out of money before my name came up. Or I can say “screw it, I’m calling in today.” You can only get so far on “pride in work” when so many forces are consipring to make your work not matter. White was the first Mayor to put through merit increases instead of just talking about them. But even at their highest, they still didn’t match last year’s low inflation (3.5%, for the local metro area, per the Department of Labor). And as BlogHouston points out, if the mayor wanted to find the money, he could.

Finally, there’s Promotion/Advancement. I cannot speak for other Depatments, or even other Divisions, but within mine, the way it works is not by competitive civil service exam. (Again, Police and Fire are different.) For one thing, most exams were quietly ditched long ago as being “discriminatory.” I dunno about you, but I’d rather be quite discriminating (in the original, non-racial sense) when selecting for promotion. The way it does work is that you get selected by management to “accept some extra job tasks” such as a “lead” position. This is justified under some catchall phrase in the current job description (usually “other duties as assigned”). And the employee doesn’t complain, because he or she knows the score. After a while, more authority and duties are assigned, and lesser ones are removed. Finally, the actual position is posted, and the employee, applies for it. A verbal quiz (all that’s left of the exam system) is a part of the interview, and since the chosen one has already been doing the job for some time, he or she is able to answer the questions better than the other candidates, who are just there for show. A common employee pastime at my workplace is going through the job postings and matching up the posted positions with the people they are for. “Oh look, there’s so-and so’s supervisor position. Hey, who’s the section chief spot for?” At times, such as when there are retirments, the changes in duties can be quite sudden, instead of gradual. When the Great Pension Slaughter of 2004 happened, a lot of people got thrust into new duties, and job postings haven’t caught up in many cases. Like mine. Normally though, this is a very slow and gradual process, with many years between promotions. (In one weird way, you could say that I have not been promoted since 1996. Long story.)

Overall, this subverting of the system may not be a problem; it’s the civil service workplace mimicking the private workplace. It’s all in how the managers handle it: are they promoting quality or yes-people? Over my nearly 20 years in the City, I have seen it cycle from one to the other and back again. Right now, we seem to be in a quality cycle; the Pension Slaughter cleared a lot of yes-people out, much to my cheers. Unfortunately, we’re subject to a common headache: downsizing. Overall, the city has been trying to shed jobs for the last ten years. This means that if a managerial or supervisor position comes open, upper management may try to do without it as long as possible, either by leaving the position unfilled, or just giving the job to someone without the pay or title. The same goes for front-line positions; if a Senior Goombah retires, the budgetary position may go unfilled, but the same job is now done by a Junior Goombah. In extreme cases, even an Apprentice Goombah gets tapped, but it’s more likely that someone’s workload just doubled. Now that the city has quietly emplaced In a previous article, I noted that the “promotion raise” was a tactic employed to get around the lack of real raises. This runs directly counter to a downsizing strategy, and it has a lot to do with the hole I’ve been trapped in for the last several years. On a personal note; if I want more pay, it’s been made clear I have to go up the managerial tree because the admin positions arent’ there in the budget. However, after some thought, I have decided my talents are not managerial, they’re analytical. If I can’t get the pay here, I’ll just have to find another City (or county/state) department that will offer it. Sigh.

One problem with the promotion raise is that it partially subverts the idea of advancement; the job duties come first, then the promotion to go with them. On the other hand, it’s the most effective counter to the Peter Principle I can think of. (First stated in the 1970’s, this is the premise that a person will be promoted as long as they do a good job. Eventually they will be promoted to a job they cannot do well because it’s over their ability. Thus, “A person will rise to the level of their incompetence.”)

None of this is to pretend that disparity and problems don’t exist in the private sector too. Comparing notes with friends, I’ve been told of cases of temps being paid $11/hr. with no benefits, doing the same job as (and alongside) $60/hr. employees. There are no such insane things in civil service — but that’s because the $60/hr. jobs don’t exist in the city — unless you’re a contractor for a specific IT project. In which case you keep your mouth shut over how much more you’re earning than the person next to you.

So with Rewards being crippled as a workforce motivator, and Advancment normally being glacial, let’s look at the “negative motivator” of Punishment. Public perception is that most bureaucracies don’t do this very well. For once, the public is spot on. First, with such lousy rewards, cracking the whip is difficult. People will put up with a lot for hefty paycheck: two-hour commutes, alpha bosses, stress, ruthless competition, a certain amount of insecurity. When the rewards suck, bringing the hammer down just lowers morale further and causes people to walk off. Such attitudes had a lot to do with the aforementioned Pension Massacre. But pay is not the only reason for this; our society has become far more interested in its rights than in its responsibilities. Civil Service raises this to the Nth degree, because it’s full of rules, rules, rules. Despite constant tinkering and training to improve supervisor knowledge, it’s almost inevitible that a supervisor trying to get rid of a seriously underperforming employee (one of the lower 5%) will be tripped up, should the employee chose to fight. Several years ago, my division had an employee who was a known drug dealer. He had to be fired four times before it stuck. He kept appealing and showing that he’d been dealt with “outside the rules.” They couldn’t even get him arrested; the rules for criminal evidence are, of course, stricter.

The various departments have had wide lattitude in how they handled discipline and appeals below the Civil Service level, but the increasing difficulties have led them to talk to each other more, and several have moved to standardize around the same set of proceedures. I regard this as a good thing, but the fact that every major revision has been designed to simplify the system and make it easier to fire problem cases isn’t lost on the employees. But as long as the carrot is whithered and dry, use of the stick must remain sparing. It’s just too easy to tip an employee over the edge from slightly below average to a hardcase with a major-league attitude and serious issues. Often, it all depends on how much that employee trusts his/her managers.

All the above being said, it’s no wonder the city has morale problems, and some readers are probably wondering why in the name of all that’s holy, would anyone work for a company that screwed up? After all, an employee must be defective to work in such a bleak, future-less environment! Well, unsurprisingly, I don’t think so. It just takes a type of person/mentality that values something else above all of that. The fourth category in the list: Security.

Most importantly of all, we have job security. The city isn’t going to get bought out, layoffs are rare, and we’re not going to be transferred to Toledo tomorrow. Over the last five years, all but three of my friends have suffered extended bouts of unemployement; when they work, they might make three times what I do, but when they don’t, it’s hell. All but two of them had to relocate at least once for work, three (including sometime guest-blogger Dr. Heinous) moved to other cities.

Our pay sucks, but for additional security, we have a pension. In the end, it may not be as good a deal as it once was, and it might be 90% of crap, but that’s 90% more than that $60 an hour contractor is going to get. We can’t afford to go anywhere on vacation, but we do get a lot of days off to relax away from work. (“It’s not as many holidays as your bank takes,” is something I have had to remind customers from time to time. I admit it, I get a kick out of the fact that it never fails to embarass them. For some odd reason, I find I have to use this one in late January more than any other time.) I save up a few hundred $$$ for a computer upgrade; Dr. Heinous is saving up a few thousand for a huge HDTV. But I have never had to deal with a car repossession.

We also get a generous sick leave allowance and cheaper health insurance than at most private sector companies–at least as long as we’re not retired. Hey, when the job description includes broken bones and hazardous work environments, it damn well ought to.

Pretty much, the only reward that the employees can count on, day in and day out, is security. So the employees who stay with the city over the long-term are rarely aggressive “go-getters.” They tend to be far more passive, and think conservatively; confronted with an unusual situation, most employees are already inclined to “play it safe” even before any of the typical motivations of the bureaucracy kick in. In fact, the average employee is likely to do things “the way we’ve always done it” even if the rules say otherwise. Rules are always changing with the wind anyway, right? Retraining employees in such an atmosphere is akin to pushing on a rope–a lot of rope can pass through your hands, but not much gets accomplished.

Naturally, such a passive mindset often extends into other areas of the employee’s life, and looking backwards in time, it is likely to have affected choices involving education, religion, and family. Although traditionally a liberal enclave in the political sense, the Houston employee scene is remarkably conservative in a social sense — many value their family very highly, and are very openly religious. It is not at all unusual to hear a co-worker remark, “God’s got a plan for us, and we just have to follow it,” or some such homily. Nobody thinks twice about it. Anyone objecting to religious icons on an employee’s desk is going to be ostracized in an instant.

A frustrated citizen, confronted by such a (socially) conservative mindset, often becomes angry and assumes that the employee’s reluctance to bend the rules “just this once” is due to some sort of stupidity. Trained in a mode of thought that “the customer is always right” and “the citizen is king,” being stymied by some straitjacket of a policy/ordinance means that the employee is somehow stupid for not realizing that the customer is (of course) entitled to be The Exception To The Rule. In the sense that being unmotivated to agressively seek the best possible education and take high-risk, insecure jobs is “stupid” they might be correct, but I disagree. It’s not stupidity, it’s just a wholly different mindset. In fact, as I’ve watched employees discussing things such as the pensions, unions, and pay, it has struck me very strongly that the average city employee is essentially a blue-collar worker, even when in traditionally white-collar occupations.

Being blue-collar workers in a setting where the public expects white collars is aggravating a cultural divide that has come into play as the pension/pay cycle has intensified over the last few generations. But here’s the twist: it’s not just the citizen towards the employee, as I’ve blogged about earlier; it’s subtly become mutual.

Now bear in mind that these are strictly my obersvations, based on a single department that I’ve been a member of for nearly 20 years. YMMV, and I certainly am not talking about the yahoos who bend over backwards for the developers that really run this city. But I think my observations are pretty accurate. If a city employee decides to buck the system and try to help a customer, it’s not going to be the important businessman, or well-to-do citizen, even if the city is at fault. These customers will almost invariably be greeted with doctrinare “this-is-the-policy” attitudes. A working-class citizen who has acted with reasonable intelligence and not shown overt hostility will get better treatment almost every time. Even if the citizen cannot be granted his or her desire, the employee’s demeanor tends to be friendlier and more time will be taken to explain why it cannot be done. And it doesn’t seem to matter whether the employee has a G.E.D. and works in the front line, or a college degree and is a manager: time with the city is a much stronger indicator of an employee’s reaction. Of course, even such a customer who comes in with an attitude and shouting isn’t going to be met with honey and cream…

And that’s the major thing that’s “wrong” with city employees. However, I have further thoughts on how the upcoming battles between the city government, the SEIU, the employees, and the citizens may develop, but I’m going to defer them to another article in order to wrap this one up.