More Federal Workers Are Staying on the Job Longer ture of institutional knowledge, keeps skilled labor in place and offers mentoring possibilities for younger employees. On the other hand, it can block the progression and development of less senior staff and can lead to immediate, large-scale human capital challenges if departures are widespread and sudden. Different agencies have adopted various responses toward aging workforces, a 2009 GAO report found. Titled Older Workers: Enhanced Communication Among Federal Agencies Could Improve Strategies for Hiring and Retaining Experienced Workers, the report found that agencies it reviewed with particularly high proportions of older federal workers (including the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Agency for International Development) shared common challenges and had taken different approaches in adapting to them. Until 2011, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) had a similarly high percentage of employees eligible to retire, a period during which it was projected that 48 percent of the full-time SBA employees (not including disaster temporary employees) would have been eligible to retire within five years. In November 2011, the agency offered a Voluntary Early Retirement Authority/ Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment (VERA/ VSIP) option, and the percentage eligible to retire within five years declined to 23 percent after the VERA/VSIP. “We continue to pay particular attention to this group, because these employees still represent about a fifth of all of our employees,” says Bridget Bean, the SBA’s chief human capital officer. “We try to determine where those employees are located, in what program offices, and which are in mission-critical positions, so that we can understand their impact and the opportunities they present. We try to pay attention to them, persuade them to be a part of the team as long as we can and work with them to help transfer their knowledge to newer employees.” Narfe magazine survey respondents reported a wide range of interactions with younger colleagues and managers. Many say they have encountered no difficulties and have been prized by younger managers and colleagues for the experience they bring to the table. However, other survey respondents say that younger colleagues have openly expressed frustration
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that the respondents’ continued employment was blocking their advancement at the agency. Still others report increasing challenges, such as the burden of staying current with new technologies and the psychological challenges of adjusting to a workforce in which a steady stream of colleagues retires. The SBA’s Bean says there are workforce strategies that can address intergenerational employee tensions. “You do have tensions regarding advancement potential, where younger employees want to grow and learn but positions are encumbered. The question is how to reconcile that with the merit principles we hold dear. We’ve responded by, in collaboration with our union, creating teams across generations, with more than 150 employees of different ages and seniorities, from GS-4s to SESers, from across the agency that seek to address challenges that they couldn’t do in traditional teams, such as looking at the biggest risks at the agency and how we should address them. “In addition to fostering joint projects with younger employees, we also try to make sure that older employees are not isolated by supporting efforts to address their specific needs. For example, we have an affinity group for the 50-plus group of employees who are empty nesters to give them an opportunity to volunteer to serve their communities. Those types of programs also are valuable because they can help employees to grow as a whole person, outside of their employee boxes.” A considerable number of narfe