The motto of the Office of Personnel Management is "Ensuring the Federal Government has an effective civilian workforce." John Berry, OPM's new director, believes that recent years have proven that motto to be inaccurate, and has made it apparent that he will waste no time in his new role to do something about that immediately.

On Tuesday, Mr. Berry unveiled his innovative new ideas to revive the broken civil service system in front of an audience of students at his alma mater, Syracuse University's Maxwell School. (Video)

The focal point of Berry's proposal centered on the core principal of merit. "It's time to reinvigorate merit for the 21st century," he said. "We must make changes now if we are to maintain the quality of our civil service, and we've got a lot of work to do." 

The GS, or General Schedule, has 15 grades, and has been the primary government employee pay scale for over 60 years. Berry asked his audience to consider doing away with the current GS system and replacing it with something entirely new. "Our hiring system is quite frankly broke. Five decades after the last major attempt at pay reform, the cracks are showing," he says. Though he opined that the system will not crash any time soon, he believes that it certainly cannot last another five decades.

"How do we practice the principle of merit in the 21st century?" Berry asked the students, and then offered what he calls "the 4 pillars of civil service reform," suggestions for improving our current system. They are: defining and appraising merit today; making the system flexible yet fair for both workers and employees; motivating and rewarding good performance while addressing poor performance in a tactful and productive way; and properly training, educating, and developing workers over the entire course of their career.

For the first pillar, Berry suggested replacing the GS system with climbing a ladder of three stages: apprentice, journey-level, and expert, all of which would have an incredibly high bar in order to achieve the next level of your career. For the second pillar, he asked that we consider a results-only work environment where time clocks are thrown out and there are fewer restrictions on employees, which he feels will likely boost morale and increase productivity and performance.

The third pillar is that good performance should be rewarded with a bonus that is reviewed by a panel, voted upon by employees, and finally published for the sake of transparency. Berry also believes that there should be only 3 levels of reviewing an employee's performance: in good standing, outstanding, and finally not in good standing, for 5% of workers who need improvement or be removed. 

For poor performances, he suggests that rather than just suddenly firing someone, give the managers gradations to remove someone, and when firing is necessary, train managers how to have those difficult conversations with their employees.

For the last pillar, Berry strongly suggests focusing on education, taking course related to the job, and adding training into the budget. He notes that "the federal government does a pathetic job of training. . . It's shameful. Training is always the first thing to get cut from the budget and the last to get put back," he said.

Berry emphasized that the problem mainly lies with the system itself, not the people, and that the OPM does not need to be reinvented, but rather make the best use of its employees. He believes that people are assets and need to be treated just so. "People aren't a piece of the equation; people are the equation," he said. Though he is aware of the challenges ahead, Berry said that he aims "to get it achieved before Christmas."