Favoring Flexibility

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A full third of the U.S. population are baby boomers, and they’ll begin retiring in the near future. But the inevitable skilled worker shortage can be softened if some of them can be convinced to stay in the job market for a while. That’s why many companies are restructuring jobs and policies to encourage older workers to stay on.

“Many of our part-time staff would be considered to be in the retirement age category,” Koo says. “They may have retired from other companies and are now doing this type of work on a part-time basis as a way    to maintain their professional activity.”

Lee Hecht Harrison has no set retirement age, she says, and allows employees to stay on as long as there’s work for them. Part-timing is an especially good way for people to “step down” slowly into full retirement—or not.

“We don’t have a mandatory retirement age, so we have a number of employees who have reached their mid-60s and decided to keep working,” Schilling says. “We’ve got employees who are 70, even getting closer to 80, who still want to work. As long as we have work that needs to be done and they’re still able to do it, they can stay on.”

Like other forms of human-resources flexibility, flexible retirement is a way to stanch the brain drain. “Flexforce is about retaining good people who want to serve clients and can do it in a lot of different ways,” Schilling says. “Rather than saying, ‘You need to fit into this bucket or that bucket,’ we’re saying, ‘Tell us what you can do, and let’s figure out how we can make it work within the business.’ That’s not to say that we’re going to say yes to every single thing that somebody comes up with. But if we can do it and it’ll help us keep a really good person, we’re going to make it work.”