Generations are in sync on quality of work life, says panel

Despite some well-documented generational differences, baby boomers and millennials essentially need the same thing from their federal jobs: strong leadership and flexible pay.

To combat the retirement wave now cresting in agencies and retain a diverse workforce, the federal government needs to focus on leadership, pay and hiring reform, panelists said Tuesday at a breakfast sponsored by Government Executive.

Chris Myers Asch, one of the architects behind a proposal to create a public service academy, said agency human resource leaders should not consider the wants of generations X and Y unrealistic. "We treat the millennials and Gen-Xers as these alien breeds coming in," he said. "If [other generations] think about what they want now and what they wanted when they started working, it's the same kinds of things. The only difference is we have the technology now to do those things."

Robert Tobias, director of public sector executive programs at American University, said a retirement surge has caused agencies to stop yakking and start acting on strategies to restock their ranks, and providing employees -- particularly younger workers -- with incentives to stay in federal government is more challenging than recruiting. "I hope we don't have to talk this long about how to keep those we hire as we've talked about how we're going to hire them," he said.

Tobias pointed to the 2007 Best Places to Work rankings published by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, noting that the two factors he believed have the most impact on employee retention were leadership capacity and matching an employee's skills to the agency's mission. "When leaders are credible, when they empower those they lead, when they act with integrity … employees will not only stay, they'll max their contribution to the organization," he said.

Ron Sanders, chief human capital officer at the National Intelligence Directorate, said the intelligence community has "passed the tipping point" as far as younger hires, noting that nearly 50 percent of the workforce has five years or less of service. The challenge, he said, is not recruiting young talent but working through other obstacles, such as a lengthy security clearance process and a pay system that does not reward high performance.

The intelligence community has established interim job centers to allow employees awaiting security clearance to perform unclassified work until their clearance investigation is complete, Sanders said. The community also is working to establish a more robust pay system to help retain the best and the brightest.

Sanders said the intelligence community struggles because of a lack of mid-level employees, and so must develop the younger generation as quickly as possible. A new performance management system, implemented across the community earlier this year, evaluates every employee on their personal leadership and integrity. "If you can lead yourself now, you're going to be prepared to lead others very, very quickly," he said.

Toni Dawsey, chief human capital officer at NASA, said the challenges at her agency were different from those in the intelligence community because NASA's workforce is composed mostly of older employees. The result has been an increased focus on leadership training for employees at lower grade levels to help fill the leadership void when baby boomers exit.

"We do not expect to have the retirement wave that other agencies will have; we expect ours to be 10 years behind everyone else," Dawsey said. "Opening up training programs to the younger generation is how we will bring NASA into the future."

Sanders added that the millennial workforce's instinctive ability to collaborate is a great benefit to the intelligence community in particular. After the Sept. 11 attacks, "people need to be communicating and sharing information across boundaries," he said. "This generation won't let anything stand in their way of that."

Meanwhile, panelists also discussed how to manage a diverse workforce composed of civil servants, corporate contractors and nonprofit groups, among others.

Sanders said that a communitywide downsizing in the 1990s required intelligence agencies to tap into their "reserves," or contract personnel, resulting in an increased reliance on contractors to perform core mission functions.

For now, Sanders said, the intelligence community is working to restructure its contract system using a three-step process: inventory, doctrine and mix. This involves ensuring the community has the right number of contractors, defining the optimum purpose for contractors, and determining the make-up of the base civilian, contractor and military workforces.

NASA's Dawsey noted that the shuttle program, which expires in 2010, has 15,000 contractor employees, compared to 1,700 civil servants. The agency, which will launch a program to help prepare for a mission to Mars, is working to restructure the multisector workforce to meet a more ambitious exploration agenda and timeline. This involves "shuttle mapping," she said, where civil servants and contract employees coming off of the shuttle program can determine whether their competencies align with the new mission.

"It's very eye-opening in terms of helping us drill down competencies," she said, "not only for our civil servants, but also our contractors."