Chapter 18. Using Workforce Planning to Define the Impact of Retirements on Your Workforce

One of the greatest staffing issues currently facing HR and the staffing functions is the large number of potential retirements that could occur in the coming few years. This looming wave of retiring baby boomers threatens to create major shortages in required skills and staffing levels in many organizations, at multiple organization levels. Are you fully aware of the impacts that retirements will have on your organization in the coming years? Have you defined the specific staffing actions you will take to address these needs? Have you begun to actually implement those plans, in advance of those coming needs?

If you are not already doing so, you should act now to identify critical retirement-related shortages, define the impact that those shortages will have on your talent pool, and develop specific staffing and development plans in response. In other words, your company should now be developing and applying the strategic workforce planning process to identify and address these critical retirement issues. In fact, if you are attempting to address these retirement-related issues outside the context of workforce planning (e.g., if you are about to implement generic, across-the-board-type solutions), your effectiveness will be limited indeed.

When it comes to retirement analysis and planning, many companies seem to just spin their wheels, choosing to simply analyze problems at a “high level” (e.g., calculating overall retirement rates for large groups or units of employees) rather than actually solving those problems. High-level solutions are by definition general and generic. As such, these solutions are unrealistic and impossible to implement in any meaningful way. Retirement issues are best addressed through the implementation of specific staffing strategies and plans that are targeted to key issues. HR and staffing departments cannot simply identify and clarify coming retirement issues. They must also create and implement staffing plans that drive the actions that will best address these issues. This chapter describes how workforce planning can be used to identify and actually address the critical staffing issues that retirements may raise in your organization.