Across the federal government, large numbers of baby boomers are reaching the age of retirement. In 2006, more than 60,000 people left the civil service. The federal Office of Personnel Management believes that 2009 will be the peak year for boomer retirements. What can federal agencies do now, to stop this massive loss of institutional knowledge?
Stepped-up recruiting and staffing efforts will help a little, as will additional emphasis on outsourcing. Still, those measures will not be enough to stem the flow of institutional know-how, which has been steadily accumulated for decades in the minds of the federal workers, now rushing for the exits. To prevent this loss of priceless, corporate memory, more business process modeling is needed – just as soon as possible.
Departing workers can be motivated to support such loss-prevention measures, if their managers challenge them to leave behind a legacy that will have the effect of preserving their hard won years of experience. Replacement workers, on the other hand, can also be motivated to proactively engage right away in an organization’s process improvement program. Incentives can motivate them to immediately share some of the best practices and lessons-learned, which are brought to their new job as part of their prior experiences.
Preserving Institutional Knowledge
Business processes reflect the means by which an organization provides value to the customers it serves. Business Process Modeling (BPM) is not just for organizations thought to be in financial trouble. For agencies faced with the threat of a brain drain, BPM can provide much needed relief. Because process models demonstrate how work is performed in an organization, they provide valuable insight into every aspect of business performance, from management, to operations, to customer service — even to measuring and accounting for results. By capturing how work is performed before staff members retire, and having the results validated by the retirees themselves, the organization is left with much of the institutional knowledge accrued by those workers – in the form of documented, reusable process models.
The validated business process models can then be put to good use in a number of very constructive ways, including these:
- Development of training and orientation materials, for use by new staff members
- Development of standard operating procedures, prescribing the performance of specific tasks
- Establishment of business rules, used to guide decision making at all levels
- Publication of communications material, used to inform customers of the services available from the agency
- Preservation of a process baseline, from which gradual improvements can be planned
- Incorporation into the agency’s Enterprise Architecture (EA), since business processes, activities, and information flows constitute large segments of the EA
- Application to the development of business cases, used to substantiate the need for capital investments
Energizing Experienced Workers
Tapping into the work ethic of senior staff members, especially those nearing retirement, helps the organization in another way that can be easily overlooked. Many workforce studies have shown that older workers are energized by some fairly basic interests, like these:
- Motivating Work
- Sense of Belonging
- Pride of Mission
- Strategic Direction
If properly engaged, mature workers will earnestly strive to provide a view of how their work fits into the operation of the enterprise as a whole. As active participants in the success of the agency they work for, their institutional pride often motivates them to look beyond the obvious, while fleshing out an enterprise view of how the business really operates. Indeed, experienced workers will often willingly accept responsibility for process ownership and process management. With a little coaching on the mechanics, they will help to plan and execute a program of process design. Refuting the notion that their agency operates as a set of discrete units with hard-drawn boundaries, their years of experience seem to open their eyes to the fact that individual business units actually contribute to groups of interlocking workflows and information flows that often traverse organizational boundaries. Some processes – like the payment of a claim for government benefits – will be found to extend far across the enterprise before an output is produced that is valued by a customer. They are also more likely to recognize that the worth of such extended processes to the business must be measured more holistically – not just by adding the sum of the metrics for each segment of the process. As veteran performers of the work they prescribe in models they own and manage, they are also able to convey the credibility needed to secure essential buy-in from other members of the workforce.
Engaging Replacement Workers
What better way to start a new job than to be invited to weigh in – at periodic intervals during your first year (perhaps as part of doing rotations around the enterprise) – on the way the place works from a new employee’s perspective? Many people would react by passing on such an invitation, suggesting they don’t have enough information about the new work environment to comment intelligently on the way it works.
Suppose, however, that you were seriously encouraged to help your new organization by sharing your own experiences with similar work at former places of employment. Also imagine that you became convinced that constructive feedback on business processes and performance at the new place of business can be provided in a manner that adequately protects your identity. Wouldn’t that provide some incentive for you to immerse yourself sooner, in learning about your new organization, while striving to make a meaningful contribution to its process improvement program?
Many new employees, especially those well-credentialed, are eager to share their best ideas and practices with a new employer and their colleagues right away. To overcome any natural reticence to speaking out, employers should offer special awards and other forms of recognition to individuals who manage to get a process improvement suggestion adopted by the new organization and put into practice during the person’s first year on the job.
Final Thoughts
Faced with the departure of large numbers of employees, as baby boomers retire in droves from the federal workforce, government agencies can mitigate the risk of losing institutional knowledge by engaging in a comprehensive BPM exercise before all that knowledge is lost. To realize the best results however, the soon-to-be-retirees must feel compelled to leave for posterity, a record of hard-learned lessons and the practices they perfected over the years by relearning some of those lessons many times over. To obtain the greatest benefit from the legacy left behind by retirees, those hired to replace them should also be induced to engage in a thorough review of the BPM artifacts created by their predecessors. An agency can only benefit, it seems to me, from a situation that encourages new employees to share the beat practices they bring to their new jobs, while at the same time being rewarded for offering constructive suggestions to improve upon the fruits of their predecessors’ final labor.
