Summary

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed how the federal government identified and dealt with employees whose performance was less than fully successful.

GAO found that: (1) federal agencies rated 5.7 percent of the estimated 1.57 million federal employees as poor performers; (2) 62 to 70 percent of the poor performers either improved their performance to fully successful, voluntarily agreed to vacate their positions, or had performance actions proposed against them; (3) 76 percent of supervisors indicated a willingness to deal with poor performers; (4) supervisors experienced problems in dealing with General Schedule (GS) and Wage Grade (WG) poor performers because they were limited by law in the actions they could take to deal with those individuals; (5) government procedures for handling poor performers were generally similar to those in nonfederal organizations, although several nonfederal organizations provided more supervisory options; (6) 11 percent of supervisors were not identifying poor performers, and 8 percent of supervisors with poor performers did not assist them; (7) approximately half of the supervisors experienced difficulty in implementing the process for dealing with poor performers; (8) those supervisors who did not identify poor performers believed that the process was too time-consuming, wanted to avoid confrontation, or believed that management support was lacking; (9) due to the subjective nature of identifying and dealing with poor performers, the current legislative and regulatory framework for dealing with poor performers placed heavy emphasis on protecting employees against unfair treatment; and (10) supervisors needed training and technical assistance to assist them in identifying and dealing with poor performers.