Last week we at OPM recognized excellence among our team members through the Director’s Awards Ceremony.

It not only gave me a chance to put my tuxedo to good use (which I almost never have a chance to do) and to tell the one joke I could remember that’s appropriate for a work setting, but – all kidding aside – it gave us an opportunity to recognize those who have gone above and beyond in service of the American people. And in doing so gave us the opportunity to walk the walk about what a high-performance culture means – one in which we are not afraid to call out individuals and teams that truly exceed expectations and in which we disproportionately reward excellence.

I’ve written about this before (link to WAPO editorial), but the federal government has under-served its employees by trapping them in a system that treats accountability too lightly and fails to reward its top performers. We see this in the historical annual employee ratings systems – where less than 0.5% of a 2 million strong employee base rates below expectations and where nearly every SES (our most senior executives) is rated above expectations. And, as a result, we see this in the annual bonus system which provides little differentiation between satisfactory performance and those who consistently knock the cover off the ball.

We’ve been working to change this culture into one that holds low performers accountable and forces managers to distinguish among their employees based on actual performance – both in ratings and in rewards (link to performance blog). While the Director’s Awards are not a substitute for the traditional end-of-year evaluation cycle, it is a great venue for us to practice what we preach.

So, what did we do differently this year?

First, we reduced the number of award categories and focused them on the five key cultural values that we ascribe to at OPM. Why? Because as my former a16z partner Ben Horowitz has written about – “Culture is a set of actions, not a set of beliefs.” If we don’t find ways to actualize the behavior we want, then a statement of culture is simply that – a hollow piece of paper that makes for a nice hallway poster, but does not become the governing document for desired employee behavior.

Here’s what we believe – and what we rewarded:

• Ask “why” – it’s not enough for us to keep doing what we have always done without asking why we are doing that and whether it still helps us accomplish our core goal of serving the American people. Too often we revert to past practice when a fresh look at the original reason behind a repeated behavior is warranted
• Teams beat individuals – we won’t succeed unless we communicate and work effectively across organizations, both within OPM and throughout the civil service
• Customer-first service – regardless of your job description, we are all in the customer support business. We are here to serve our OPM colleagues, the needs of all civilian agencies and ultimately the U.S. taxpayer
• OPM stands for “Other People’s Money” – we are stewards of taxpayer dollars, so when we spend money we should do so as efficiently as possible and we should not spend money on things that don’t provide sufficient value to taxpayers
• Embrace “measured” risk – for too long, government work has been dominated by a compliance- and regulatory-first culture that hampers innovation and unfairly constrains the ability of government workers to try new things. We take “measured” risk (as opposed to the unbridled risk that some private sector players may take), which means we balance the downside risks of a decision with the potential upside advantages, but recognize that greatness requires innovative thinking that is never without some risk of failure

Second, we dramatically changed the size of the awards. Historically, the awards for outstanding individual performance were capped at $3,000. We changed that to $10,000 – directly in line with our desire to match outstanding results with differentiated and very meaningful recognition. For team awards, we had previously capped those at $1,000 per team member; this year, we increased that to $3,000 per team member. And none of this busted the budget – we simply traded off a more evenly-spread “peanut butter” approach to rewards with a more targeted (and rich) system.

And what accomplishments did we reward?

Here’s a few highlights to give you a sense of the impact of our award recipients:

• Eliminating $3 million in annual software licensing costs by migrating our employee data systems from a legacy vendor to a more scalable and efficient workforce data platform
• Achieving $5.2 million in annual savings through a revamp of our agency-wide procurement processes
• A series of tech innovations that dramatically improve our ability to serve customers – the new Federal Workforce Database (FWD) that provides timely and accurate information about the makeup of our employee base; the rollout of the Online Retirement Application that has served more than 170,000 customers in its first year and enabled us to cut in half retirement processing times; the first AI-enabled tool to reduce by more than 50% the time it takes to create federal job descriptions.

And the list goes on …

We no doubt have lots more to do in service of our customers, but last week was a great opportunity to take a break, acknowledge the many great team members who have helped us make great progress and rev up for the upcoming challenges.