Last Frontier KPBM March 2015

18 |MARCH 2015 WWW.KPBJ.COM
julie tappero
There’s a dark cloud on the horizon
that may be threatening your company’s
ability to function. If you’re
like two-thirds of the other companies in
the United States, you are
happily ignoring this dark
cloud and doing nothing to
prepare your business.
What could this awful
impending crisis be? Take
a look at the faces of your
co-workers. Do you see Baby
Boomers? Ten thousand
of them are retiring every day! And
when they do, they take with them a lifetime
of knowledge and soft skills that can
be harder to find in the workforce today.
What’s your company doing to prepare for
their departure?
During the Great Recession, we know
that many Baby Boomers delayed retirement
or even rejoined the workforce to
rebuild their savings. But now that the
economy is recovering, they once again
have some options. As someone who
spends time in workforce development
and economic development, I constantly
hear from employers that younger people
entering the workforce often lack soft
| human resources
Businesses should prepare
for Baby Boomers’ departure
skills, such as teamwork, commitment,
ethics and communication, which mature
workers bring to the table. Before we
let our mature workers walk away, how
do we transfer
it’s beneficial
to retain your
current older
employees
while you
create a
system for
them to
transfer their
knowledge to
your workers.
their technical
knowledge and
soft skills to new
workers?
A great place
for your business
to start is with
AARP’s free online
Workforce
Assessment Tool.
This brief screening
tool allows
you to enter specific
information
about your workforce,
provides
a personalized
analysis of how
retiring workers
will affect your
company, and addresses what skill shortages
you may face.
A study by the Society for Human Resource
Management revealed that the impact
will hit some industries more than
others. Particularly hard hit will be government
agencies, utilities, health care, social
assistance, finance, insurance, real estate,
and organizations that are grantmaking,
civic, religious and professional, etc.
Once you have an idea of the impact your
company is facing, you can take some steps
to prepare.
First of all, it’s beneficial to retain your
current older employees while you create
a system for them to transfer their knowledge
to your workers. In order to do that,
you may need to change some of your
workplace policies.
The Society for Human Resource Management
report revealed some of the key
benefits that attract and retain older workers.
At the top of the list was flexibility in
work location. I know many Washingtonians
who go to Arizona in the winter. Perhaps
if they could take their work with
them, they wouldn’t have retired quite so
soon. Second was career flexibility, such
as reduced responsibilities, and third was
work hour flexibility, such as job sharing or
phased retirement. I kept a bookkeeper on
staff for a couple extra years by reducing
his duties and letting him work from home,
where he could take care of an ill spouse.
In other words, recognizing the older
workers’ changing priorities and bringing
flexibility to the table may help delay the
abrupt loss of a valued employee.
As we all know, when someone does a
job for many years, they end up with institutional
knowledge in their heads, and oftentimes
it’s not written down anywhere.
Now that you’ve retained your older worker,
the next step is to promulgate some
transfer of their knowledge to others in
the workplace.
One way to facilitate this is to create a
formal cross-training program in the business,
making sure that there is more than
one person capable of performing the essential
functions of the job. If your older
worker starts to work a more flexible
schedule, the cross-trained employee can
step in for them periodically to ensure the
person is fully capable in the position.
Pairing an older worker as a mentor to
a younger worker has many advantages
in the workplace. Much has been written
about the challenges of having a multigenerational
workplace. Encouraging baby
boomers to work intimately with millennials
can break down those barriers.
But it has the added advantage of helping
younger workers see soft skills in action
and to learn from their mentor why those
skills have been important in the growth
and success of the mentor’s career. A mentor
is someone who models positive behavior
through trust, so creating mentorships
can effect change and create better
relationships between co-workers.
One note of caution. The Age Discrimination
in Employment Act protects anyone
over the age of 40 against age discrimination.
If you ask a 64-year-old person
what his or her retirement plans are,
and then you take some adverse action
against the person shortly after that, you
may very well find yourself with an age
see boomers | 23