The PAS fiasco

Jean Michel Jakobowicz, UN

While most big enterprises are abandoning the PAS evaluation system, it continues to survive (barely) in the UN, despite the fact that it is totally useless and a waste of time. While at the beginning it claimed to enable staff member to meet their supervisors, this function is disappearing with the introduction of the e-PAS.

The biggest fiasco of the PAS is surely the so-called “normal curve”. I am not going to give you a statistic course, but the genius who invented the PAS had decided that the distribution of marks to staff member should follow a normal distribution, namely most staff members would be grated a 3 (the average mark) while there would be as many 1 and 2 as 4 and 5. These geniuses had decided that if a department was to give a 1 it had to give a 5. Which in other terms meant that if you had an intelligent staff member in a department there was automatically a stupid one.

Where do we stand after 5 years ? Data for 2001 are very interesting in this respect. First of all one discovers that only 4 department out of 30 had 100 % of their staff doing their PAS. In the executive office of the Secretary General only 19.4 % had done it in 2001. one can understand that they have more important things to do.

As could be expected there are almost no bad staff member in the secretariat (0.1%). On the other hand, some department have 80% of their staff members rates 1 and 2. even OHRM did not respect the famous “normal curve” as 50% of its staff was rated 1 and 2 and 48% 3.

The most intelligent staff members are in the Office of the Secretary general, in the information department and Oh surprise in UNCTAD.

All these efforts for what? If the big enterprises have abandoned the rating system it is because it did not work, it generated useless tensions and that it gave raise to a number of costly and useless legal action which led nowhere.

In the UN the PAS system is already totally inefficient. The most honest department are just creating a discrimination for their staff by giving them bad rating they do not allow them to get promoted. When one departmental panel receives 50 or 100 applications for one post, it is very unlikely that members of the panel will have time to read in details all the PAS which they receive. They will most of the time just look at the final rating at least to make a firsts election. Which means that if your department is honest you are very bad off.

The only answer to such a degenerating bureaucratic system is a bureaucratic resistance. It our system it is absolutely no use to revolt, a bureaucracy does not know the word revolt, it is not in its glossary. The only thing to do is to cultivate the absurdity of bureaucracy. In the case of PAS the best answer to the absurdity s that all staff member of have not received a 1 or at best a 2 should put a rebuttal and why not go to all the existing panels of the system. Our poor colleagues of the personnel department who have already a lot of trouble to cope with Galaxy will no doubt be drawn in this whole absurdity.

The rating system is absurd. Either a staff member performs well or he/she does not. If he/she does not then he/she has nothing to do in the organization. The rest is bla bla. The only problem of this approach is that it is too simple and does not justify a ASG post!

As for the possibility of granting a bonus to the 1 and 2 currently studied by ICSC it is the biggest stupidity since the creation of a napkin for bulldogs or a condom for snails. This system will transform the organization into a battle field. But that is another story.