Human Resources: How to Reverse the Loss of Experienced Talent

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, America’s 76 million baby boomers last year began to reach age 60 at a rate of one every seven seconds. Thirty-five million boomers will retire between 2000 and 2020, and in the decade after that, another 23 million will join them.

If you haven’t already noticed this trend in your own organization, get ready: A good portion of your workforce will be leaving in the next two to 10 years, and they’ll be taking their years of experience and hard-earned talent with them. As a consequence, you’ll going to have a hard time meeting your customers’ needs unless you have a plan in place and are operating now.

Following are a few strategies for reversing the loss caused by retiring baby boomers:

1. Offer retirees part-time or consulting arrangements. Although experienced workers have done their time and look forward to their post-career years, many will seek more than a leisurely retirement. While they may want to spend time with their families, develop hobbies and travel, many will feel unproductive once they’ve said goodbye to a lifelong career.

The upside for catalogers is that if the can retain these experienced employees on a part-time basis, they can accomplish the same job in less time than a brand new employee with little experience.

2. Establish mentoring relationships. When you hire recent college grads, give them part of the job that the experienced people used to do. Set up mentor programs between employees close to retirement and these younger recruits. Let the mentors show the greenhorns how to do the job, but don’t place full responsibility for the duties on the new employees to alleviate unnecessary pressure. If you can pair these two types of employees up, you will begin to get great benefits almost immediately.

3. Consider adding more part-time employees. Most companies think they need to create and fill only full-time positions. But consider the merits of job-sharing, and offer the program to retirees and college students. Hire two people who can share the job and cross-over one day or for a half-day each week to brief one another, review progress, and decide who’s responsible for what in upcoming projects. This arrangement will meet both groups’ needs for time outside of work.

4. Offer appropriate benefits. Many experienced part-time employees don’t need certain benefits like sick leave and vacation time, because you’re not employing them full-time. But they still may need health care or long-term care plans. Consider offering them summers or winters off to pursue adventures or just to relax.

Similarly, interning or part-time college students don’t need full standard benefits packages. They may get health insurance from their schools or parents, for example, but perhaps they need tuition assistance or college credit for the time they work in your organization.

One word of caution: If you offer cafeteria-style benefits that allow employees to choose from a wide list of options, make sure you’re following all applicable Federal regulations. You may need to offer such options to all your employees, not simply to certain individuals who you feel need it.

5. Mentor existing staff early. In addition to bringing in college students and recent grads, part of your process when vacancies occur must be a plan to mentor your existing employees. Most organizations don’t nurture less experienced employees in order to bring them up through the ranks.

Because you statistically are unlikely to lure all of your retirees back, you need to use your experienced but pre-retirement employees for this mentoring role. When their talents and experiences mean they no longer have to fight for their own careers anymore, that’s the time to enlist them to develop other people who can one day take their place, allowing you to promote from within.

6. Develop a plan to deal with retiring talent. An essential element of dealing with the mass exodus of valuable experienced baby boomers is to be aware of what’s happening -- that your best people may be retiring -- and begin your planning early. Even if they’re not retiring, perhaps simply planning to leave the organization because they’ve decided it’s time to move on, experienced employees usually will talk about their plans in evaluations and performance reviews, giving you the opportunity to react accordingly. The better prepared you are for this coming and growing trend, the more apt your company is to remain profitable, despite staff changes.

Marsha Lindquist is a business strategist, author, speaker and chief executive officer of The Management Link, a business development consultancy. She can be reached via e-mail at marsha@marshalindquist.com or via her Web site, http://www.marshalindquist.com.