Viewpoint: Coaching Your Employees to Finish Strong as They Near Retirement

​Baby Boomers are beginning to retire in large numbers. AARP says 10,000 people a day are retiring from work. Most companies have no formal program to aid these employees in this transition. Although we often have extensive onboarding programs, little to nothing is done when an employee is ending his or her career, except a goodbye party. 

For many people, upcoming retirement means coasting until the day they are done. Dave was a senior-level manager who announced his retirement one year in advance. The problem was that Dave then became "retired on the job." He stopped innovating. He stopped moving new ideas forward. He avoided conflict by ignoring problems. He no longer aggressively led his team.

Dave had been very successful in his career but he ended poorly, so that was how everyone remembered him. His team suffered poor morale because its members felt they were stuck until Dave left his position. That is a problem for the whole company.

Help retiring employees to end strong at your company. Instead of letting employees coast and drain the company coffers, HR can support retiring workers as they end their careers in the best way possible, fully contributing up until the last day. 

Some key strategies include:

• Creating a planning-to-retire educational program. HR should develop a workshop to show employees how to plan out their future, paying special consideration to how they will handle all the free time they will have once they leave the company. The course can cover financial planning, too. The employee will be grateful for this assistance.  

• Coaching the employee's manager. Managers of departing employees need instruction on how to support someone leaving the group. The formal coaching should offer proven strategies to keep the employee engaged until his or her last day. The supervisor should encourage the employee to complete as many key projects as possible and accept the responsibility to not let the employee become retired on the job.
  

• Documenting their knowledge. As many Baby Boomers walk out the door, their depth of experience and insight depart with them. Companies should have these employees document their knowledge by creating a training manual or by adding pages to the organization's intranet so other employees can learn from these folks.
  

• Training a new employee. Ideally, the organization should promote or hire a replacement and have the departing employee train the new person. Having a two- to three-week training period helps the new employee get up to speed and be more productive, more quickly. 

• Offering a "bridge job." Finding talented workers to replace departing Baby Boomers will become harder to do in our tight labor market. Developing a transitional or bridge job where the employee remains at work on a part-time basis may allow the company to avoid the quest for talent that is often not available. Baby Boomers want more flexibility and fewer work hours at the end of their career. In fact, 72 percent say they plan to work in their retirement. Annette was an IT specialist who wanted to leave the energy utility she worked for. The HR department was under the gun to deliver a new human resource information system and asked her to continue working three days a week with the ability to take more unpaid vacations. This new bridge job kept her in her role for 18 months until the big project was completed. 

Final days may be a bittersweet time for employees to say goodbye to their co-workers, friends and the company itself. Having a supportive send-off is a great policy to ensure that everyone leaves on a positive note and will speak highly of your organization after the departure. 

Robin Ryan is the best-selling author of eight books, including her newest, Retirement Reinvention: Make Your Next Act Your Best Act (Penguin Books, 2018). She has a busy Seattle-area career counseling practice helping clients nationwide. Learn more at www.MyRetirementReinvention.com.