OPINION

Cotterell: A salary bonus is an iffy incentive, at best

Bill Cotterell
Democrat correspondent

On paper, employee bonuses make a lot of sense.

In practice, particularly in government, not so much.

In announcing his 2016-17 budget priorities last week, Gov. Rick Scott called for a three-part incentive plan that could reward top-performing state workers with up to $1,500 in their earnings for the next fiscal year. For a conservative Republican, not to mention one who came straight from the corporate boardroom with no prior experience in government, this is a perfectly predictable example of trying to run government like a business.

After all, the best employees deserve to be rewarded. Those who just do their jobs deserve to keep them — all other things being equal — and those who aren’t pulling their oars should be told to shape up, if they remain on the payroll at all.

The Legislature will work its will on the budget when it convenes in January. If past performance is any indication, lawmakers will not substitute any across-the-board pay raises. They might not even adopt Scott’s bonus plan.

The first tier of the governor’s plan is a $500 bonus for employees in any agency that meets performance standards. The next part is $500 for employees rated “satisfactory,” or better, in their job evaluations. And the last part is a share of budget savings calculated in each agency, which could go as high as $500.

The first two steps — accomplishing an agency’s mission and meeting an individual’s performance standards — shouldn’t be much trouble. The third part is a little iffy and could be unfair to the staff.

What if you work for a relatively small agency that finishes the year significantly under budget? There will be a lot of money left over to divide among fewer employees.

Conversely, what if the Legislature short-changes your agency but you and your coworkers struggle all year to serve the public the best you can? You just barely manage to make supply and demand meet, with barely tuppence in the till when the fiscal year ends. So you out-performed expectations but, through no fault of you own, there’s little or no Stage Three bonus money to be disbursed.

The prospect of a bonus can be an incentive, if you really think you might get it. But after years of no pay raises, a 3 percent payroll tax for their pensions, and various other efficiency ideas dating back to (at least) the Lawton Chiles administration, state workers are rightly skeptical.

About 30 years ago, Gov. Bob Graham tried “merit pay” for school teachers. Govs. Bob Martinez and Chiles tried various incentive pay plans, including one-time bonuses and percentage rewards for money-saving suggestions. The Legislature has funded a couple of “bonuses” which weren’t really bonuses, rather they were one-time payments for everybody.

Performance pay is necessarily subjective, subject to favoritism and circumstances. In the private or public sector, workers don’t have batting averages or shooting percentages that allow one person’s ability to be scientifically measured against another’s performance.

Personal popularity aside, government employees do so many things, they can’t be measured by a standard yardstick. Is the Highway Patrol’s best DUI officer more valuable to the state than a child protective services worker in the Department of Children and Families? Both save lives, but you can’t just measure by the numbers.

Is a computer specialist more valuable in DEP than in the Attorney General’s office? Is an employee who has one stellar year more deserving than a steady performer who has served the agency well for 10 or 15 years?

The temporary nature of a bonus is another consideration. If someone has contributed a lot to the success of an office, in the public or private sector, they deserve to be recognized. One-time payments that do not calculate into their base salaries, or figure into their peak earnings for pension purposes, are a nice way to say “thank you” — but not as good as a permanent raise.

Finally, there’s another fairness aspect. In the private sector — and these Republicans swear they want to make government more like the private sector — employees usually get raises when the company makes money. Not always, and maybe not enough, but companies generally try to share at least some of the profits.

In announcing his budget, Scott was very happy about the state’s projected revenue collections for next year — its profit margin, if you will — and he intends to give back about a $1 billion of it in tax cuts. There are also many, many millions in financial incentives to out-bid other states in attracting new businesses.

It would be good if the state budgeted benefits for its employees with the same enthusiasm it shows for tax cuts and business incentives.

Bill Cotterell is a retired Tallahassee Democrat reporter who writes a twice-weekly column. He can be reached at bcotterell@tallahassee.com.