How to stem the “silver tsunami”

Baby boomers are retiring in droves, and the exodus will continue for several more years, exacerbating the public sector’s staffing crisis—here’s what to do

The term “baby boomer” applies to anyone born between 1946 and 1964. There have been a lot of baby boomers—according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 73 million in total, and this demographic today represents 21.5 percent of the population. However, by 2030, all the baby boomers will be 65 or older, which means that many already are leaving the workforce and more will follow in droves. The Census Bureau estimates that about 10,000 people cross the age threshold every day. It further is estimated that about 365 Americans retire every hour.

Consequently, the baby boomer exodus, i.e., the “silver tsunami,” promises to exacerbate the acute staffing shortages that many public sector organizations already are experiencing, compounded by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When someone working for a public sector organization retires, the consequences can be dire due to tremendous loss of institutional knowledge regarding the organization’s operations and technologies.

This problem is not going away—if anything, it only is going to grow, at least for the next decade or so. And it could not come at a worse time. Many public sector organizations are going through a digital transformation, radically changing the way they deliver services to the citizens they serve, whether it be by transitioning to cloud-based services or by implementing innovative technologies that will enhance their response capabilities. This type of transformation requires information technology (IT) skillsets, an area where there is an even smaller talent pool to draw from given the competition from the private sector, which tends to offer more competitive pay and benefits.

Consequently, action is needed to counteract the problem and its effects. It is vitally important then that every public sector organization develops succession plans that identify the job requirements for each position, how candidates will be recruited, how they will be evaluated, how they will be trained and how they will advance.

Fortunately, several effective strategies and tactics exist that can be leveraged by any public sector organization, as follows.

Think differently about recruitment and hiring

As technologies and operations evolve, as they always do, public sector personnel will need new skill sets in the future. For example, broadband communications networks and devices—e.g., smart devices, alarm systems, traffic sensors, medical/biometric sensors, public and private fixed and mobile cameras and Next Generation 911 (NG911) systems—will generate a flood of data that will be overwhelming unless personnel have the abilities needed to analyze and contextualize the data. That’s because the data will have little to no utility without context. This could mean proficiency in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will be needed in certain recruits to enable them to turn raw data into something actionable. This is particularly important as it relates to emergency response—law enforcement, fire/rescue, emergency medical and 911—because actionable data can be leveraged to enhance situational awareness.

Staying with the 911 community, emergency communications centers (ECCs) traditionally looked for verbal and typing skills when recruiting telecommunicators. However, in the future, the ability to respond to visual cues and to monitor numerous screens simultaneously likely will be as important, or more important, when hiring telecommunicators.

Even where recruiters look for new hires needs to change dramatically—today’s recruits, especially Millennials and Generation Z, only know a world dominated by the internet and social media, so recruiters need to figure out a way to leverage those channels. All of this means that public sector officials need to rethink what they want in their recruits, with an eye to the future.

Two recruitment methodologies exist that all public sector officials should consider. One is Topgrading, which was developed by Dr. Brad Smart, who is considered by many to be the world’s foremost expert on hiring practices. It focuses on identifying “A” players, defined as someone who is in the top 10 percent of professionals in his or her chosen field. Having a roster of A players is vitally important to every organization, but none more so than public safety agencies, which encounter situations every day where lives are on the line and every second counts.

Clifton Strengths is the other methodology. It is designed to identify a person’s strengths as well as weaknesses. It is vitally important that people are placed into positions for which they are best suited, i.e., ensuring that round pegs are being placed into round holes, because people tend to perform better, and sometimes achieve remarkable things, when they are working in areas of strength.

Regarding retention, it can be difficult for a variety of reasons to raise salaries, so public sector officials need to offer more and better incentives and benefits, e.g., more time off, enhanced retirement packages and improved medical/dental benefits. It’s time to get creative.

Think differently about personnel training and advancement

Like skill sets, training regimens will need to evolve to align with the new realities born of technological and operational evolution—i.e., the training regimens of the future assuredly will look quite different compared with today’s regimens.

When someone leaves, many organizations, across all business sectors, often try to fill the opening from within, and a lot of the time they do so by promoting someone who has performed well in their current position for a lengthy amount of time. The public sector is not immune to this. And doing so is not necessarily a bad idea, because it is healthy for employees to see that the organization provides opportunities for career advancement.

However, all too often the promotion is made without any thought given to whether the recipient is well qualified for the new responsibilities. Compounding the mistake of not properly vetting supervisor candidates is that most agencies do not offer supervisor training—that too needs to change. A deep understanding of the job a person is leaving behind does not, by itself, qualify them to supervise others.

Document everything

The retirement scenario would be less problematic if public sector organizations had thorough documentation regarding workflows, standard operating procedures, and policies, but they often don’t—this is especially true of smaller agencies. A couple of years ago, one of our clients discovered the hard way the veracity of this statement. When the person responsible for its geographic information system (GIS) retired, a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge went out the door with the person. This affected everything from updating geospatial data to drawing road centerlines and emergency service zone polygons.

Such a scenario could impact every public sector communications system. If operation of vital systems were compromised because a viable succession plan was lacking, the impact on public service could be devastating. This also applies to operations. For example, the personnel shortages that are affecting law enforcement agencies could have an adverse effect on their ability to respond to an emergency efficiently, effectively and in a timely manner.

Similar examples can be found in every type of public sector organization, so, document, document, document.

Don’t hesitate to outsource, also known as “smart sourcing”

No matter how well public sector organizations perform the strategies and tactics outlined in this article, the time inevitably will come when they would benefit from subject-matter expertise provided by an independent, vendor-agnostic third party.

In the aforementioned example involving the retiring GIS professional, Mission Critical Partners (MCP) was hired to perform the duties of this person for several months. The subject-matter expert (SME) was embedded in the facility, and his presence enabled the organization to conduct a deliberate and through search for the retiree’s replacement. Without this SME onsite, not only would the recruitment have been rushed, potentially resulting in the hiring of someone who was not as well qualified for the job, but the organization’s GIS function would have been compromised to some degree.

In another instance involving a major city public safety organization, MCP first was hired to support the organization’s procurement of a computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system and a records management system (RMS). After these systems were installed, the city continued to outsource its ongoing CAD system administration, once again by an embedded SME.

And a third example includes a county in Pennsylvania that made the decision to outsource all its day-to-day IT related functions and operations, including server management, cybersecurity, helpdesk support and onsite network and system monitoring, as well as support more than 100 applications that support its operations. Doing so enables the county to be more agile and flexible in the management of its IT infrastructure, while also being able to innovate rapidly as new solutions come online.

The driver for having these experts perform tasks that otherwise might be performed by the organization’s personnel is the staffing shortage, which in one instance was compounded by a hiring freeze.

Become leaner

This might sound counterintuitive given the current staffing crisis, but the concept is about removing extraneous steps in an organization’s work processes to make personnel more efficient, not further reducing headcount. Every step that remains must add value to the organization’s workflows. Eliminating steps that have no value ultimately saves time, reduces errors and results in a higher-quality experience for those served by the organization. The idea generally is to leverage the organization’s available resources more efficiently to enhance the quantity and quality of what is being accomplished.

The concept is based on the Six Sigma methodology developed by Bill Smith in the mid-1980s. The methodology is comprised of a set of techniques and tools designed to improve operational processes and efficiencies by identifying variation in processes. It really gained traction after Jack Welch, General Electric’s then-CEO, made it central to his business strategy a decade later. Since then, tens of thousands of companies have strived to attain Six Sigma certification, in an effort to reduce process waste, saving time and money in their organizations.

Regarding personnel, the lean organization concept requires adaptation to the changing environment. Again, leanness doesn’t necessarily constitute fewer personnel. Instead, it requires that all personnel be well trained and well suited for the new responsibilities that are emerging. It also may require reorganization and redistribution of personnel resources to accommodate emerging and evolving needs. The micro goal is to make personnel as efficient as possible regardless of their responsibilities, while the macro goal is to enable the organization to reduce the time it takes to perform tasks, add value and enhance quality.

Corrections is another public sector that is struggling to find workers—the number of corrections officers skipping work or calling in sick is at an all-time high. One area of impact concerns the ability to provide adequate health care to inmates. It is crucial that corrections officials understand the health care needs of their inmate populations, as well as any diagnoses and treatment regimens that have occurred. For example, more complete health care information would help officials make housing decisions that best protect the inmate population from infectious-disease outbreaks such as COVID-19. Knowing who has been infected and with whom they have been in contact enables officials to make better-informed decisions—e.g., whom to quarantine and how to make the best use of limited space.

However, this has been made more difficult by the challenges associated with collecting accurate health care information from inmates. The challenges are heightened when a correctional facility is experiencing a staffing shortage. Fortunately, automated electronic data-collection/data-sharing solutions have emerged. Automating data collection and sharing has several benefits, including error reduction, enhanced policy compliance, and reduced likelihood that the collected data will be lost. In the context of the staffing crisis, automated solutions require less personnel.

It should be noted that “becoming leaner” is not achieved by turning personnel into multitaskers. Scientific studies have shown that the human brain only can hold one conscious thought at a time. While physical multitasking is possible—for instance, folding clothes while engaged in a telephone conversation—cognitive multitasking is not. The latter requires switching between tasks rapidly, which is infeasible.

Thus, requiring personnel to handle multiple tasks simultaneously is a bad idea. Better is to allow personnel to focus on tasks for which they are well suited, and then train them well so that they can perform those tasks as effectively and efficiently as possible. Given this, the lean organization concept in some instances might require more personnel as tasks increase in number and/or complexity.

In summary, the severity of the staffing shortage that is afflicting public sector organizations nationwide, driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and the “silver tsunami,” cannot be overstated. However, by applying the strategies and tactics identified in this article, such organizations can reduce substantially the impacts and even improve their situations dramatically.

Darrin Reilly is president and CEO of Mission Critical Partners, which provides consulting, lifecycle management, information technology, network, and cybersecurity solutions to public sector organizations. He can be emailed at [email protected].