The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is pushing hard to implement the new Phased Retirement program. Information has not yet been released concerning the number of employees who have expressed an interest in participating in the Phased Retirement program. OPM is trying desperately to bring younger workers to the service. By retaining some of the older more experienced workers, training of the new employees and getting them up to speed might help with retention through Phased Retirement is both rational and a good potential solution.
It will be very interesting to find out if the phased retirement program offers enough of an incentive to make older workers stay in the Federal service a while longer. For those of us who are Federal watchers the buzz has not been much of a buzz. The Federal workforce does not seem to be too excited about the impending new venture to keep the Federal Government relevant and attractive to a new generation of workers.
The Office of Personnel Management perhaps has not kept up with the changes in the world of work. I can recall when I got my first real job, HR offices were called personnel offices tasked with pushing papers, processing papers without much interaction with people. You went to personnel and filled out your paper work and some woman would ask you about your eye color and your hair color. If she did agree with your eye color she would say something like – who told you your eyes were such and such a color. As personnel evolved, the lady in charge of eye and hair color faded into the woodwork.
After personnel took a back seat, then human resources surfaced. Human resources housed specialists (Classification and Compensation Specialists, Employee Relations Specialists, etc). Then the field found that specialists needed to broaden their base back to be being generalists. The new title became Personnel Management Specialists meaning at least two fields of human resources should be apparent for each management specialist. Human Resources was slowly becoming more involved with people and not just paper behind a glass partition.
After a number of years, personnel evolved into Human Capital Management certainly suggesting a greater involvement with people. Human capital was to hold equal status to financial capital. Given titles and responsibilities have changed, it might be time for the Office of Personnel Management to put on an entirely new face if they expect to attract the millenniums. Perhaps OPM could start by changing its name to the Office of Human Capital Management (OHCM). We stopped using the word Personnel about 10 stop lights back.
I don’t know if phased retirement will do a whole lot for leveraging OPM’s goal of protecting institutional knowledge and passing it on to a new generation. I do know that young people are driven and called to automation almost to the extreme. If we want their knowledge, skills and commitment to public service then leadership had better learn how to drive an Aston Martin wearing skinny jeans and a Mickey Mouse sweat shirt.
P.S. Always Remember to Share What You Know,
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Explanation of Phased Retirement
