Federal employees who qualify and are approved by their agencies may begin submitting applications to participate in Phase Retirement in November. Who actually can participate in Phased Retirement is really agency driven. It might be another few months before there is enough data available to gauge interest in the program. Many HR professionals in the Federal government and outside of the service feel that the program will meet a slow death. Agency personnel officers are not bothering to train staff or think beyond what they’ve heard because they do not believe in the survivorability of the program.
It would be interesting to know if OPM did an interest survey of Federal employees prior to implementation to see what the numbers looked like. There does not really seem to be an incentive attractive enough to draw a crowd. However, I could be wrong and I hope I am. OPM has stated that one of the primary purposes behind Phased Retirement is to protectand preserve institutional knowledge. I have long said that if that is in fact the real reason behind Phased Retirement then the program should have never left its place of inception. The harnessing of and the protection of institutional knowledge is a critical aspect of succession planning whose responsibility lies squarely in the hands of management.
When a culture of promoting indispensability has been cultivated and grown by the Federal government, how can institutional knowledge be passed on. Federal government workers as do workers in many employments, public and private, feel that they must not share knowledge in order to keep their jobs. To exhaust resources to build a program that has been around since the Federal sector was established, just not utilized, is a massive waste of resources, including time, energy and effort. Change the Performance Management System – and incorporate the passing on of knowledge as a performance element, then the whole idea of Phased Retirement would have just been making small talk.
P. S.  Always Remember to Share What You Know.
Dianna Tafazoli
