16 SEPTEMBER 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL It’s the EER Itself …! BY JOHN BONDS RESPONSE TO APRIL 2023 SPEAKING OUT, “WHY OUR EVALUATION SYSTEM IS BROKEN AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT” John Bonds, a former U.S. Army officer, joined the Foreign Service in 2017 and has served in Hong Kong, Islamabad, and London. He is currently a student at the Foreign Service Institute and will serve in São Paulo upon completion of training. Virginia Blaser’s article, “Why Our Evaluation System Is Broken and What to Do About It” (April 2023 FSJ), was fantastic. It provided many tips to rated employees, raters, and reviewers, as well as pointers on what the Foreign Service agencies can do about the problem. While all of those tips are wonderful, they fail to tackle the main obstacle to realistic, effective, and less timeconsuming reviews. To bring our human resources efforts into the 21st century, we must take a hard look at the actual problem: the Foreign Service Employee Evaluation Report (EER) itself is broken. The EER often fails to identify particularly high- and low-performing colleagues. It is time-consuming and onerous to produce. It distracts from our goals and often fails to reward skills that make both effective leaders and followers. It often fails to reward basic effectiveness in a job, but rather demands extra projects that may even take away from a rated employee’s core work responsibilities. It has essentially become a creative writing exercise. It is time to take a close look at how we do things. A new EER could save massive amounts of labor-hours while simultaneously making it easier for the promotion boards to identify high and low performers. and training are most useful for promotion? Are certain bureaus and embassies doing a better job of managing a diverse workforce? Recent moves to publish demographic data are a step in the right direction. We hope the State Department will now take the next step to follow through on its Strategic Plan and make its workforce data more transparent. Treating demographic data as a strategic asset would be a positive step for a department that has historically struggled to leverage the best that this diverse country has to offer.
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