Retirement Track

If the Office of Personnel Management meets its 105 goals for 2008, federal employees will know a lot more about their benefits. And to add extra transparency to the process, they'll be able to follow whether OPM is meeting those goals on the agency's deadline tracker.

"We've added an expectations section," OPM Director Linda Springer said in a Friday press briefing during which the agency rolled out an addendum to its five-year strategic plan created in 2006. "We don't leave it up to readers to determine what happens when, for example, we put counselors in military hospitals to talk about federal jobs. It's about a whole performance management environment that begins with knowing what you want to achieve."

OPM has set specific target dates in 2008 and 2009 for launching resources designed to help federal employees access their personnel files and prepare for retirement. Here's a rundown of dates and projects:

• July 1, 2008: By this date, OPM wants to have a completed proposal for making more benefits information available to employees and retirees via the Web. Springer said she envisioned a tool that would help employees plan their retirement by plugging different dates into an application, and then assist them in modeling how their retirement benefits would be paid out. OPM plans to launch the tool by Dec. 1, 2008.
• Aug. 1, 2008: OPM will collect all the resources it's created into a single online library.
• Sept. 1, 2008: By this date, the agency expects to launch a new and updated directory for its official Web site. That should make it easier for federal employees to find whatever information they need about pay and benefits, and help ensure that new tools don't get lost within the site. OPM also plans to conduct training for each agency's benefits officer by Sept. 1. Those sessions will become an annual event to make sure benefits officers have the latest information and are comfortable conveying it.
• Jan. 1, 2009: By this date, the agency hopes to have finished moving data into electronically accessible official personnel folders so that employees can access their personal files. At a time when workers are concerned about the fairness and transparency of pay-for-performance systems, it's a good idea to make that information easily accessible.
• Sept. 1, 2009: OPM plans to roll out an interactive system that will help prepare federal employees for retirement. The system will be customized to meet individual needs based on responses to the already launched Web-based retirement readiness survey.