In the coming months, Hewitt Canada will publish a series of Advisories looking at options for reversing the early-retirement trend and encouraging older employees to keep effectively participating in the workforce. In addition, the Advisories will examine the details of workforce management and the compensation issues that will arise from changed retirement attitudes and practices. Succession Management and Knowledge Transfer No matter how long retirement is delayed, all employment ends eventually. Even though an organization can’t retain its employees forever, it can retain as much of their knowledge as possible. Employers with a large number of employees approaching retirement age will need to ensure the preservation of their institutional knowledge once the older generation of employees departs. This requires advance planning, because once the knowledgeable employees are gone, their knowledge will be gone, too. ”Tacit knowledge,“ the knowledge that employees carry in their minds, can be crucial to organizational success, yet it is difficult to access. Organizations need to plan how and when key knowledge and skills will be transferred. That involves two separate steps: capturing the knowledge from the person who currently has it, and passing it on to the person who will eventually need it. Employers cannot count on younger employees remaining with them throughout their careers. Studies show that ”Generation X“, the generation following the Baby Boomers, has a penchant for changing jobs and employers. The generation after Generation X, sometimes called ”Generation Y“ or ”the Millennial Generation,“ is even less concerned with employer loyalty and long service with a single employer. Add to this the future competition for labour in general, and organizations cannot count on limited numbers of individuals to preserve their vital institutional knowledge. Thus, organizations must find ways to preserve tacit knowledge in a form that can be accessed by any future worker – even those who will never directly interact with the current holders of that knowledge – and that can be re-used as often as necessary. In order to plan for knowledge transfer, employers will need to review their workforce demographics as a whole. Next, identify the risk of high retirement, employee turnover and/or knowledge loss in each functional area. Which skills and knowledge topics are critical to organizational objectives in those functional areas? Those are the skills and knowledge that will need to be transferred, and the demographic projections will show the timeline in which that transfer will need to take place. Phased retirement, rehiring retirees as contractors or consultants, and rehiring retirees on a part-time or seasonal basis can all be leveraged as one last opportunity to encourage knowledge transfer. These options can therefore serve a dual purpose, maintaining workforce numbers and strength as long as possible, and also ensuring that key knowledge and skills are retained for the organization’s future success. Getting a Jump on the Competition The workforce of the future will be younger, less experienced and may lack some of the knowledge and skills required in a knowledge-based economy. But because this workforce will be much smaller, demand will exceed supply and there will be intense competition for workers. |
