M. Voridis: Continuous improvement of the skills of civil servants through the new evaluation system

The structural changes that the new evaluation and targeting system will bring to the operation of the public administration were highlighted by the Minister of Interior Makis Voridis during the first reading and elaboration of the draft law of the Ministry of Interior entitled: “Targeting, evaluation and reward system for strengthening the efficiency of the public administration and other provisions for the human resources of the public sector “in the competent Committee of the Parliament.

Mr. Voridis pointed out that the main goal of the new evaluation system is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of employees in order to strengthen them and clarified that a change of philosophy is promoted in the Greek State based on the continuous improvement of skills through integrated action plans. which do not involve a punitive nature.

The Minister described the current evaluation system that SYRIZA legislated as an administratively heavy system whose total cost amounts to 40 million euros per year per man-hour, noting that the result did not offer any possibility of utilization.

Indicatively, he explained that the grading of employees is placed on a scale from 0 to 100, where 90 to 100 are considered excellent employees, from 75 to 90 very sufficient, from 50 to 75 sufficient and partially sufficient and below 50 insufficient and unsuitable. According to the scoring data of the current system in percentage presented by the minister, 51.5% of the employees have been judged to perform their duties excellently while 46.11% very adequately. Taken together, the above percentages give a total of “very sufficient” and “excellent” employees of the order of 97.61%, he stressed and added that 2.23% are considered “sufficient” and “partially sufficient” and 0.16% “insufficient “and” inappropriate “.

He therefore observed, for the above reasons, that the current system is gradually being abandoned by all the large multi-person companies around the world and is being replaced by an evaluation system, in the form of indirect dialogue, which aims to detect and improve the skills in which lags the employee.

At the same time, Mr. Voridis presented the significant changes that occur in the evaluation of managers, which will be determined at a rate of 50% from the achievement of the goal of their organic unit, at a rate of 40% from the evaluation of their skills and at a rate of 10% from the judgment of their subordinates who will grade them on a scale from 1 to 5.

In this way, as he mentioned, a close connection of the goal with the evaluation is achieved and its achievement is entrusted to the superiors, reminding that the goal and its connection with the evaluation was foreseen in the previous system, but never implemented as it required a ministerial decision. which was not implemented.

“With the new system, the targeting process is disconnected from the Minister’s decision and transferred to an official level where it will start regardless of whether the minister has made a relevant decision or not,” he said, adding that the basic choice of the new targeting system is to determined jointly by the head and subordinate of an organic unit. He clarified, however, that in the event of a disagreement, the supervisor has the first say in its final configuration.

He even described the goal setting process as a pyramid that starts with the employee and reaches the minister. “If one part of this pyramid decides to act deceitfully at the expense of another, setting an impossible goal, then the goal will fail altogether and therefore he himself,” he said. Respectively, if it is agreed together with all those involved to set the target low, then this will have a series of adverse effects on the minister.

Finally, regarding the issue of understaffing that some organizational units may face and the claims of the official opposition that it is impossible to implement the goal there, Mr. Voridis clarified that it is formed with realistic criteria, always adapted to the real capabilities of each unit.