A panel of experts agreed that the government must cultivate innovative approaches to managing its workforce to deal with an upsurge in retirements and the pressure to meet performance mandates.
They spoke April 1 at a breakfast seminar on workforce management sponsored by Cisco Systems at the FOSE 2008 conference and expo hosted by Federal Computer Week's parent company, 1105 Government Information Group.
“We have to think in nontraditional ways about the workforce,” said Janet Barnes, chief information officer at the Office of Personnel Management and co-chairwoman of the CIO Council’s Information Technology Workforce Committee. “It’s not just hire somebody, bring them in and [have them] work eight hours a day sitting at [their] desk.”
Barnes said OPM’s Career Patterns initiative stresses alternative work arrangements for workers at various stages of their careers. It “challenges people to think differently about how to tap into different segments of the possible workforce,” she said.
“We have some jobs [in government] that may just require a short period of time — three to six months — to do at a fairly senior level, perhaps on an emergency basis, and maybe that [can be] done by someone who’s recently retired, doesn’t want to work a full-time schedule anymore and may want to work from home,” she said. “Why not think about that?”
The panelists also agreed that the government must find ways to meet the expectations of the young generation of technology-savvy workers if it wants to recruit and retain them.
Alan Balutis, director of North American public-sector consulting at Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group and the session’s moderator, said young employees expect agencies to provide the same technology they’re using in their everyday lives, such as wikis, blogs and other collaborative tools.
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