Extreme Old-Timers: A Specific Staff Challenge for Utilities

They're going to retire someday, so get ready before you get rocked

Last month, we talked about the MrBeast memo and its applications to the electric utilities industry. Like YouTube, we’re an industry under fire from all directions. We’re in a state of total disruption, and with respect to resource planning, security, and broad-base business models, the conventional wisdom of ten years ago is bunk.

But not every part of the industry is like YouTube. The broad mandates of distribution engineering, line operations, and customer service have survived the changes in technology and doctrine. And barring extraordinary circumstances, it’s really hard to go out of business as an electric utility.

This means that outside the hectic flashy parts of the industry, we see a kind of staffer with management challenges outside the scope of “innovation-centric” organizational behavior.

Consider the Extreme Old-Timer.

A Brief Case Study

GonLight is a regional electric utility managing Pelargir and its metro area. GonLight manages the Forlong the Fat Combined-Cycle Gas Plant, a power plant that requires emissions tracking by the Gondor Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Middle-Earth Power Pool (MEPOOL).

For the past twenty years, a guy named Hirluin managed the emissions-tracking paperwork for the Forlong Plant. But six months ago, he retired to go skiing up in Arnor. Things go fine until someone checks the MEPOOL terminal and learns that the emissions paperwork for the Forlong Plant is no longer compliant. The penalties for this error are a couple million Gondorian Dollars.

What happened?

GonLight assembles a panel of staff to figure out what form MEPOOL was waiting on. Hirluin passed the EPA paperwork to Éomund and the MEPOOL paperwork to Ioreth. The consulting service Grey Wizard Analytics serves as a backup and has done so since Hirluin started at GonLight.

None one on the panel has a full picture of the emissions compliance requirements, but after some back-and-forth, they identify two paperwork streams with two different data entry portals.

1. The EPA paperwork, which asks for NOx, SOx, CO2, and particulate matter. Éomund has access, and Grey Wizard Analytics has helped out before. Grey Wizard Analytics should have access by VPN, but the VPN provider got changed a year ago, and no one told Grey Wizard.

2. The MEPOOL paperwork, which asks for NOx, SOx, CO2, and total MWh generation. Ioreth and Éomund have separate logins that apparently touch different parts of the portal.

Someone on the panel asks if these logins are tied into the IT department’s password manager. Ioreth and Éomund look at each other. We have a password manager?

MEPOOL sends automated reminder emails before submission and a confirmation email after submission, if you checked the appropriate box. EPA sends no emails at all—if no one checked, an error could have sat for another six months until GonLight had to submit year-end emissions data.

Ioreth is writing a standard operating procedure (SOP) for the MEPOOL paperwork now. Éomund says the EPA paperwork is so complicated that an SOP would be insufficient—it took him six months to learn the process from Hirluin, and Hirluin didn’t mention this form that should have been done. Grey Wizard can help, but Éomund never talked to them. It’ll take some time to find the right email address.

The Problem

Electric utilities are full of Hirluins—Extreme Old-Timers (EOTs) who have worked at this one company for fifteen, twenty, twenty-plus years, have an incredible depth of experience, and have lacked the ambition or social skills to document their process. (If they had the ambition and social skill to independently document their know-how, they wouldn’t have stayed at this job for so long, would they?)

EOTs have an incredible depth of knowledge, not only of their realm of expertise but also of the history of the organization. However, an EOT has not developed a big-picture view of their organization and may not have questioned the quirks, inefficiencies, or counter-intuitions of their role. (If they could or would, they would have at least asked for a promotion in the past ten years.) Hirluin in our case study hasn’t written an SOP for any of his work. He doesn’t teach people what he knows until asked. He doesn’t even know what needs an SOP—when that password manager went live, it didn’t occur to him that the EPA and MEPOOL logins should go on there. In fact, he probably ignored the email from IT announcing that they launched a password manager.

This is not necessarily a knock on folks like Hirluin. Extreme Old-Timers—and the mid-career staff who are on track to become EOTs—are great for the many routine tasks that electric utilities must manage even in these Unprecedented Times™️. Put these people in desks, pay them enough to raise a family, tack on cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) that outpace inflation, and your retention problem is solved. If I hadn’t sold my soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for knowledge back in 2012, becoming an EOT would guarantee the pay necessary for the road bikes and boutique espresso I say I want.

Extreme Old-Timers don’t need aggressive hiring programs, or an intern pipeline, or perpetual room for growth. In fact, they only need a light touch…until they retire.

Your Institutional Knowledge is Just One Person’s Knowledge

Institutional knowledge is an MBA buzzword that refers to processes, history, connections, and efficiencies bespoke to your organization. It includes written materials, long-term scuttlebutt, and the oral history of your organization. The challenge, however, is that a lot of so-called institutional knowledge is in fact carried, collated, and disseminated by a single person. This is less a problem with shorter-term employees: consider the difference between a Python script written a year ago for a pilot program and a program that’s been embedded in your SCADA system for ten years. That ten-year program is the special domain of an Extreme Old-Timer, who will build and maintain that program but never bother to comment it because they know this code inside and out, and who else would look at it?

This applies to all kinds of institutional knowledge—the connections between your commercial rebates specialist and local facilities managers in your service territory, the encyclopedic knowledge that your distribution engineer has of your feeder network, the compete mastery your customer service representative has over that customer information system (CIS) that you haven’t updated in a decade.¹

You, the reader, do not know how much of that knowledge has been preserved in human-readable format. However, your EOT doesn’t know either, because they also have not considered how they would train someone else to do their job. If they had the initiative to document their own processes, they would have asked for a promotion years ago. Asking your EOT to “document their process” with no further instruction will at best return a standard operating procedure with some holes where “obvious” decisions will go, and at worst return a 1-3 page Word doc that’s totally worthless as documentation.

Sounds Like a Serious Problem Ichiro, How Do I Fix It?

I don’t know! I’m not a manager; I’m just taking MBA classes. But I have a few ideas.

1. Systematize the Documentation Process

An Extreme Old-Timer is not looking to advance their career—if they were, they would have done so already. At one end, they’re doing a fantastic job but for one reason or another, they are not asking for more out of work. On the other end, they’re doing the bare minimum necessary for you not to fire them. Either way, their annual performance reviews are probably pretty short affairs.

Replace them with annual (or semi-annual) check-ups on process documentation. Block out time for them to update system maps, comment new code, update emails and phone numbers of key contacts. Don’t simply ask to “update process documentation,” because you know—and I know—that nothing will happen after that request.² Ask for specifics.

I heard reporting requirements changed our forecasting model. Have you updated the SOP for that?

You fixed a bug in the SQL template we use for checking our PPA invoices. Have you propagated the fix to all the scripts based on that template?

This, of course, requires you to know in detail what your reports do, which in turn requires you to keep regular notes during your one-on-one meetings.

…You keep notes from your one-on-one meetings, right?

2. Enlist Interns, Apprentices, and Entry-Level Staff

Nothing identifies procedural holes quite like a font of dumb questions—which is to say, a young, enthusiastic hire. The new hire wins from this process—they get to learn how an organization works by touching all the relevant buttons and presenting on their notes. If you keep them long term, making them document ancient processes will onboard them for the job you just hired them to do. It’s great!

If your Extreme Old-Timer is a few years from retirement, there’s value in hiring their replacement “early.” Give the new hire a year or two learn from your EOT, so that they can identify all the holes and inefficiencies in your EOT’s workflow before your EOT retires to go skiing. Don’t wait until your EOT is six months from retirement—you should know how old they are, so pre-empt the retirement conversation.

If your EOT is not retiring in the short-term, you can run an intern through the process instead. You’ll still get a useful deliverable, and the intern will get an interesting artifact that they can show to their next job. And hey, if they did a good job as a process-recorder, maybe they’d be good at another role in your organization. Or maybe you could pawn off this kid to another utility who could use a full-timer.

3. Let Things Break, I Guess

This is, naturally, the messiest option, but an organization can always learn the hard way.

Just…remember to learn the lesson.

Let (Some) Employees Become Extreme Old-Timers

I should stress again, I have nothing against Extreme Old-Timers or the people who will become Extreme Old-Timers in ten years. It is normative and valuable for people to have lives more important than their work, and frankly, it’s cheaper for organizations to hire people who don’t want such expensive accoutrements as mentorship, rapid career growth, and the subsequent escalation in pay expectations. There are downsides to filling your organization with “high achievers”—or worse, social climbers who tell you they’re high achievers.

But you have to manage this category of staff differently. A playbook of management strategies by and for Harvard Business School alums is not going to help with a billing specialist who’s trying to keep their head down. More importantly, this category of staff will not directly punish you for poor management. I’ve seen utility staff trundle on while senior managers try to fire each other. The lights stayed on. Things were fine for the time.

But someday those staffers will cash out and retire to go skiing in Arnor. Some hidden task of theirs will go undone. And you won’t know until it costs you a couple million dollars.

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This post and the information presented are intended for informational purposes only. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of their current or previous employers or any elected officials. The author makes no recommendations toward any electric utility, regulatory body, or other organization. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, the author has not independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author assumes no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.

1. btw I’d bet money that if you haven’t been updating your software, the People’s Republic of China already has a backdoor in your software.

2. Speaking from experience, I’ve been writing this blog for four months, and the Notion dashboard I’ve developed around it is already a mess. It will only get cleaned “if there’s time” (lol) and the projected cleanup escalates continuously.