Organizational Development for Knowledge Management at Water ...

Project Study # 21
Retiree Program
Project Description: The City of Phoenix Water Services Department is experiencing a
knowledge drain due to retirements. We have approximately 1,400 employees, of
which 300 are eligible to retire in the next five years, and 400 employees who have five
years or less of service with the Department.
Often, critical staff are promoted or retire and there is no one readily available to
perform their daily job duties. Our goal was to establish a retiree program that allows
for the use of soon to be retired and retired employees in a training capacity to pass on
their knowledge and abilities to their replacement. With a retiree program, we hoped to
achieve a knowledge transfer from experienced employees to less knowledgeable
employees, and a faster development (shorter learning curve) or time to competency of
new employees. The City of Phoenix allows for the contractual hiring of former
employees as independent vendors to provide specific duties including training. Some
of the department’s contracted retirees who are working on special projects have a fixed
work schedule. The retirees provide training work on an as-needed basis. They are
contacted directly by our supervisors to provide employee training in the areas of
instrumentation, electrical, and plant operations.
Size of Utility: 1,400 employees
Critical Success Factors: To establish this retiree program the knowledge retention pilot
committee, which consisted of employees, supervisors and Human Resources Staff all
internal to the Water Services Department, held a series of meetings to: get the buy-in
from our Executives and Middle Managers that this program would be beneficial to the
staff and the Department; identify critical knowledge that was lost through retirements
and/or lacking in new employees and supervisors; and identify retirees with this critical
knowledge that were interested in training new employees. We then obtained approval
to hire specific retirees back under a training contract.
Cost: Because this program was implemented as part of a much larger training
program, several vendors including retirees were hired under training contracts, the
costs to implement this were minimal and were limited to staff time to identify the
training needs, negotiate the cost of services, obtain necessary approvals and
coordinate the training. These activities occurred over one or two hours a week over a
two month period. The only direct costs would have been the newspaper advertisement
for the services, $200.00.
Alignment: This initiative is aligned with human resources development as part of our
Operations & Maintenance Technician training program.
©2011 Water Research Foundation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.