The Office of Personnel Management is targeting poor performers in the federal workforce.

OPM Director John Berry admitted that the government has a problem with disciplining and firing poor-performing federal workers, and doesn’t do enough to reward good workers. He discussed the issue during a keynote address to the Human Capital Management-Federal conference this week.

So OPM has begun studying how it punishes employees who cannot or will not improve, reports the Federal Times.

The OPM study is just focusing on OPM for now, but Berry wants to broaden it to other agencies, and he has asked for agencies to volunteer.

Berry said he wants to figure out whether federal employers are being held back by myths or bad practices, or whether laws on discipline and firing need to be changed.

Berry also said OPM’s experiment with a Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE, were very promising. The ROWE program allowed employees the freedom to choose their own work hours as long as they got their work done. Berry said the process helped the agency find out which employees weren’t pulling their weight.

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