PACER SHARE Productivity and Personnel Management Demonstration

This report describes the PACER SHARE Productivity and Personnel Management Demonstration and the plan that has been developed to evaluate it. PACER SHARE is a five-year demonstration to determine whether several changes in federal civil service practices being tried on an experimental basis will improve organizational productivity, flexibility, and quality of work life while sustaining (or improving) the quality and timeliness of work and the capability to mobilize during emergency or wartime. The demonstration is designed to attain these objectives through several innovations in personnel practices and through productivity gainsharing, which returns one-half of cost savings to the work force. The personnel system changes include job series consolidation; revised base pay determination, including pay banding and elimination of individual performance appraisal; supervisory grading criteria changes that emphasize job responsibilities and deemphasize number of subordinates; and Demonstration On-Call hiring authority, which provides for rapid employee release and recall. Although the two-year results for PACER SHARE do not provide evidence of significant cost savings, they offer encouragement that the project may be beginning to achieve its desired objectives in other areas. In future evaluations, a broader range of measures will become available for analysis and current measures will become more meaningful.