Nearly one in five city of Denver employees didn’t receive a timely performance evaluation in 2008 but got pay raises anyway.
The city’s compensation system mandates that employees who do not get an evaluation from their supervisor be marked as “successful” and given a merit pay raise.
But a complicated evaluation process, and an admitted lack of attention to a lingering issue, led to pay increases for about 1,500 of about 8,600 eligible without a formal evaluation.
Councilman Chris Nevitt said during a council committee meeting that some employees have told him they haven’t received an evaluation for three years.
“We don’t know if those people stunk or if they’re doing a great job,” Nevitt said.
Kelly Brough, chief of staff for Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, said the issue has been a concern.
“We very much want our workers to have a timely evaluation,” Brough said. “That feedback in terms of what’s working and what we can improve is critical.”
Nevitt arranged for Jeff Dolan, executive director of the city’s Career Service Authority, to brief the council on the subject Tuesday.
Dolan said during the briefing that he hopes to automate the evaluation system by 2010 and to streamline the evaluations.
The evaluations are done for career service employees, who make up roughly half the city’s workforce.
Of those city workers receiving timely evaluations last year, 54 receiving a rating of “needs improvement,” 3,954 received a “successful” rating and 3,140 received an “exceptional” rating.
The salaries of firefighters, police officers and sheriff’s deputies are set in collective bargaining, and those safety employees don’t receive the evaluations.
Kathy Maloney, spokeswoman for the Career Service Authority, said city supervisors still can conduct the evaluations at a later date and can change salaries retroactively. But city rules mandate that salaries can only be adjusted up after late evaluations.
The Career Service Authority also doesn’t know the dollar amount of how much salaries increased automatically because of the lack of performance evaluations, she said.
Brough, who headed up the Career Service Authority before becoming the mayor’s chief of staff, said she also heard of complaints from employees during her tenure at career service.
“It is an ongoing issue,” she said. “We tried to figure out how we can streamline the process, but about a year ago we all agreed it was an area that we could improve.”
Dolan said he plans this year to streamline the evaluations for career service employees from the current 12-page document to a two-page document.
Dolan said tracking why the employees didn’t get their evaluation on time is difficult. The evaluations are conducted manually on paper and aren’t kept in computer format, which makes doing statistical analysis cumbersome, he said.
“We need technology enhancements or about 50 analysts to do the work,” he said of the difficulty in determining which supervisors are conducting evaluations and which aren’t.
Dolan said some supervisors may spend nearly all of their time actively working and not enough time actually supervising and conducting evaluations.
“There should be a conversation about what is the role of a supervisor,” Dolan said.
Other problems could stem from employees’ transferring to other jobs, he said.
Christopher N. Osher: 303-954-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com
