In any given year, fewer than 2 percent of the City of Atlanta's employees are told by their bosses their performance needs improvement or is unacceptable.
More than half are given top marks -- rated highly effective or outstanding, according to documents obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Channel 2 Action News.
Critics say the apparent lack of rigor in evaluations undermines Atlanta's efforts to measure how well the city is serving residents and hundreds of thousands of commuters who visit every day. It also threatens the performance-based approach that Mayor Kasim Reed touted when he took office, an effort aimed at raising efficiency at a time when public resources are limited.
"Just completely implausible," City Councilman Howard Shook of Buckhead said of the scores. "It's very frustrating. I would like to see us move to...a much more rigorous system."
Atlanta is not alone in saying that almost no employees are performing below standards. In Cobb County, only about 25 to 30 employees -- out of a workforce of roughly 4,200 -- are told they did not meet expectations each year, said Tony Hagler, human resources director.
That's less than 1 percent.
"You have some people who could be tougher" Hagler said. "Evaluations are always a challenge in any organization."
Gina Pagnotta-Murphy, president of PACE Atlanta -- the Professional Association of City Employees, said she's not surprised that the vast majority of employees are told they meet baseline requirements.
"Ninety-five percent of employees, contrary to popular belief, do their job," said Pagnotta-Murphy, who supervises a small team that maintains city vehicles.
Reed's administration thinks there is plenty of room for improvement and has vowed to reform the evaluation process. The city is requiring that each employee be trained in customer care, which will be a factor in performance reviews next year. And in June, the city will roll out training for all managers on having difficult conversations as they evaluate and motivate employees.
"It's a culture shift," said Yvonne Cowser Yancy, Atlanta's commissioner of human resources, of the city's 7,500-employee workforce. "We're looking at strategies to tackle those people who are high performers, as well as low performers."
Lack of manpower
In Atlanta, there is evidence that not all the positive reviews were deserved. On any given workday last year, only three of five employees in the solid waste division of Atlanta's Department of Public Works were on the job. That absenteeism left taxpayers to foot the bill for overtime and hiring extra help.
Residents and businesspeople have complained of delays, lost files and conflicting demands from an alphabet's soup of departments when they tried to get construction permits. The city recently reformed that process and cracked down on absenteeism.
Ken Berman of Grove Park said he and his west Atlanta neighbors tried to get help from the city's zoning and code enforcement offices in tearing down an abandoned and mostly-demolished property. The house is used as a dumping ground for trash and tires, he said.
City officials said they didn't have the manpower to track down those responsible, so residents did the research and sent the city information on the property owners, Berman said.
"We are still unable to get the city to take action," he said.
The disconnect between the wide praise Atlanta employees receive in their evaluations and the poor experiences of some people seeking services is evidence ofa flawed system, concluded Benjamin Y. Clark, assistant professor of public administration at Cleveland State University.
"It is highly unlikely all of the employees are actually performing that well," he said.
Atlanta officials say they are taking the issue seriously and pushing consistent poor performers off the city's payroll.
A spokesman for Reed said 83 employees have been dismissed since July 1. Another 46 employees have resigned while on a "performance plan."
Rating system
There are no easy answers as to how Atlanta can tighten its ship. One method to inject some spine into employee evaluations has become increasingly popular in private companies. Under the "forced distribution" rating system, each department is allowed to give a set number -- usually a small number -- of top grades.
Ideally, the remaining employees are forced into discussions about improving performance.
That approach might make top employees feel appreciated, but it runs the risk of alienating solid but unspectacular workers, said James W. Smither, a management professor and human resources expert at La Salle University in Philadelphia.
"All of this creates real dilemmas for employers," Smither said. "There are no solutions that do not have at least some undesirable side effects."
The true distribution of performance in the workplace may actually be the opposite of what Atlanta's charts show, according to a study in the journal Personnel Psychology. It suggested that most organizations have many low performers, a lower number of mid-range contributors and a very low number of high-achievers.
"If you're going to be performance-driven, you have to have some standards for performance," said Deb Keary, vice president at the Virginia-based Society for Human Resource Management. "If you don't have standards and you don't have transparency, it's going to be hard."
One complication for Atlanta and neighbors such as Cobb and Gwinnett counties to improve the evaluation process: merit pay increases have disappeared as budgets have shrunk.
With no money attached, some say employee evaluations are low-stakes exercises in paper pushing.
Gwinnett County, for example, has not done a merit increase in three years. But the county has stepped up training for managers to emphasize the importance of accurate reviews, said Kenneth Poe, the county's director of human resources.
Another complicating factor, studies conclude, is the "halo effect." Evaluations in government and the private sector are routinely distorted by employees who are liked by their supervisors.
Pagnotta-Murphy said that, since the evaluations are not tied to extra money, it's not a bad thing for employees to get good reviews. It can be extra motivation, she said.
"Give that employee a ‘highly effective,'" she said. "Let him be proud of it. It definitely has an effect."
Looking out for taxpayers
The Atlanta-Journal Constitution and Channel 2 Action News gathered documents detailing how metro Atlanta cities and counties often do a poor job evaluating their employees. Those evaluations should be a vital tool in rewarding high achievers and weeding out poor performers. But they have not been used effectively. It is coverage you will only get here.
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