The public sector is a key factor in any developed society. His role has multiple meanings, and one of the basic ones is to perform services for the benefit of the community. Employees in the public sector are largely dependent on the external environment, opportunities and threats in society, therefore it is necessary for them to have a strong intrinsic motivation to work in the public sector and a sense of contributing to society. In the Republic of Croatia, there has been a problem of evaluating and valuing employees in the public sector for years, as well as an insufficiently elaborated scoring system on the basis of which employees are rewarded. The problem lies in the high rate of centralization, the concentration of public service in the City of Zagreb and other larger cities with a lack of regional and local development, and the slowness of administration with a high workload for employees. The Federal Republic of Germany, as a country with a high degree of decentralization of the public sector, has come up with this problem by forming special evaluation criteria intended for employees in regional and local units. It is realistic that the goals cannot be set equally, nor can the criteria, because the central office is very different from the regional and local units. In this paper, the author conducts qualitative research on the German public sector, comparing it with the Croatian public sector. The emphasis of the research is on the introduction of innovations in the system of evaluating and rewarding employees in the German public sector and, based on this, a proposal for the introduction of innovative forms of rewards in the Croatian public sector.