U.S. Census Bureau Request to

Except the Gainsharing Awards Program

From Spending Caps in FY 2012

The U.S. Census Bureau respectfully requests that it be allowed to maintain its Gainsharing Awards Program as a standalone program, independent of those awards programs, which are to be centrally funded, in FY 2012, in an amount equal to 1% of the non-SES salaries within the Bureau. The Gainsharing Awards Program permits employees to share in organizational savings resulting from productivity gains and/or cost reductions in excess of predetermined performance goals. The organization’s goals include improving productivity, reducing waste, reducing costs and/or creating savings in production costs. The program focuses employees on these goals by translating organizational performance goals into individual performance targets. The program relies upon specific financial measures to calculate the “gains” (i.e., cost savings) that are shared between the employees and the sponsors of the program/project. The employees’ awards are funded entirely by these cost savings.

Program Supports A Key Department of Commerce Strategic Objective and is Critical to Achieving the Administration’s Top Domestic Priority

The Census Bureau’s National Processing Center (NPC) is a data processing facility featuring the latest in telecommunications and computer processing technologies to support the nation's economic and demographic indicators. In addition to data capture and transcription, the NPC is responsible for managing the Census Bureau’s telephone interview program. At present, the NPC is managing more than 200 data collection and capture projects for numerous Federal agencies. As such, the NPC directly supports the Department of Commerce’s Strategic Objective 1.3, which is to advance key economic and demographic data that support effective decision-making by policy makers, businesses and the American public. In turn, the work of the NPC is critical to achieving this Administration’s number one domestic priority, to stimulate economic recovery and help America emerge a stronger and more prosperous nation.

Gainsharing Awards have been used at the NPC for nearly 40 years as a technique to motivate employees to improve production and reduce operating costs. The Gainsharing Awards Program is critical to the NPC precisely because its work is sponsored by other organizations and Federal agencies. These sponsors are the direct beneficiaries of the savings achieved. Not surprisingly, the Gainsharing Awards Program is used extensively throughout the NPC on a broad range of surveys and projects.

A Fair, Production-Based System Which Supports Continuous Improvement

Each participating survey or project has a distinct set of organizational goals associated with its work processes, as well as a corresponding set of individual performance targets that apply to the employees conducting that work. For data transcription, the NPC has a Standards Unit, which is responsible for establishing the formulas used to calculate individual performance targets. This is done pursuant to a thorough review of the survey/project and takes into consideration a variety of factors, including the complexity of the work being performed, time-and-motion studies of the work process, wait times (if any) and a variety of other factors (including the tools used by the employees to conduct the work, the degree of automation required, etc…) The individual performance targets are conveyed in terms of production and error rates. Whenever any significant change to the work process occurs, the Standards Unit conducts a new review of the survey/project and, where necessary, establishes new standards and related individual performance targets. For the Telephone Centers, the individual performance targets for each survey are established directly by the survey sponsors. Performance targets are conveyed in terms individual performance in relation to organizational performance. Typical individual performance targets include the number of survey completions per hour above the average for the Telephone Center as a whole, refusal rates lower than the average for the Telephone Center as a whole and refusal conversion rates that are higher than the Center’s overall average. In addition, to qualify for an award, the interviewer must maintain a WebCati login time of 80% over all of the scheduled hours of work.

Feedback to program participants is ongoing throughout the year. For instance, the NPC’s data transcribers receive feedback on their individual production and error rates on a weekly basis, to permit them to monitor their current performance against the individual performance targets established for each of the surveys/projects on which they work. In addition, error rates are updated with each batch of work that has been keyed. In fact, the error review process has been automated to permit employees to review their individual errors on-line. Weekly and monthly reports are also provided to the program branch chiefs so they may monitor individual employee performance and, as necessary, correct observed performance problems (through training, closer supervision or other means of direct intervention) or motivate employees to higher performance. In the Telephone Centers, all interviewers are monitored. Feedback from the monitoring sessions is provided to the interviewers at the conclusion of each monitoring session. Also, feedback on how well the interviewer has performed in relation to each survey’s established performance targets is provided to the interviewer on a monthly basis.

The Gainsharing Awards Program is widely viewed as a fair and objective method to motivate employees to superior performance. It has received broad support from management, employees, the American Federation of Government Employees (which represents the majority of the NPC’s non-supervisory workforce) and the NPC’s many program sponsors. In addition, the frequency of the payout (monthly) sets it apart from all other awards programs within the Census Bureau and serves to renew employee commitment to excellence each month. Accordingly, the Gainsharing Awards Program does not settle for attainment of the status quo but constantly pushes employees to higher levels of performance by allowing the NPC and its sponsoring organizations to reset performance goals at periodic intervals to ensure organizational savings always outweigh program expenditures.

Monetarily Quantifiable Operations Driven by Preset Productivity Formulas

For the purpose of determining awards eligibility, individual performance is assessed against established targets at the end of each month. For data transcribers, Gainsharing Awards are available to those employees, who achieve at least 100% of their production targets while maintaining an acceptable error rate below 0.08%. Under such circumstances, the employee receives 10% of the resulting savings each month, while the remaining 90% of the savings are passed on to the survey/project sponsors. These awards are by no means automatic. If an employee does not meet the established individual performance targets, (s)he will not be eligible to receive an award. The awards are charged directly to the survey/project sponsor, which also reaps the benefit in terms of savings. In the Telephone Centers, facility averages are gathered on a monthly basis or at the end of each survey processing period. Once that process is complete, the data is compared to each interviewer’s statistics to determine who has exceeded the sponsor’s performance targets. Accordingly, the sponsor pays awards only to those interviewers who have exceeded the performance targets, which the sponsor itself has established.

Self-Funded with a Strong Return-on-Investment

Historically, the NPC’s Gainsharing Awards Program has proven to more than pay for itself by achieving savings well in excess of the amount of awards paid to employees. Over the past 5 years alone, the program has documented the following costs and savings:

The imposition of any requirements, which would have the effect of restricting the Gainsharing Awards Program’s ability to motivate employees, makes no sense from a business perspective. Over the past 5 years, the cost/savings ratio has been such that every dollar spent on Gainsharing Awards has generated $9 in savings. These savings have been passed on directly to the survey and project sponsors. The NPC’s Gainsharing Awards Program is a proven winner, which emphasizes the importance of reducing costs and saving money. Capping the program in any way, whether by requiring that it be funded from the 1% performance pool (instead of being funded directly by the survey/project sponsors) or by limiting award spending to levels observed in 2010, will have an adverse impact on overall production and quality and end up costing the Bureau and its sponsors more as a result of missed opportunities for savings.

In summation, the Census Bureau requests that the Gainsharing Awards Program be exempt from the 1% awards pool because Gainsharing Awards are funded directly by survey and program sponsors, not from a general pool used to fund performance awards, special act awards and other monetary awards. In addition, the Census Bureau requests that spending on Gainsharing Awards not be restricted to any predetermined level but be limited only by the amount of savings generated by the participants.

We thank you for your consideration of this request.