Plan to replace retirees

What is your company doing to replace its retiring workforce?

I’ve thought about it on occasion, but never gave it serious consideration until recently, when I started to think about my own retirement.

My October column focused on how we need to attract young people to manufacturing jobs to replace aging workers. This column looks at the practical problem of replacing retirees. While you may not consider it your problem, you should still care. If your company doesn’t do something, you’ll have to pick up the slack when experienced people leave—and I’m only half kidding.

Currently, about 10,000 people in the U.S. reach 65, the traditional retirement age, every day, according to a report on the U.S. News and World Report website. While working at one machine shop, we saw five of the 50 employees approaching retirement within a 5-year span, meaning roughly 150 years of experience would be out the door. It didn’t seem like a big deal until the shop struggled with a repeat job that one retiree had handled previously. Someone suggested calling the retiree, but he had moved and wasn’t interested in returning.

The shop muddled through, but learned a valuable lesson. It prepared for future retirements by starting a mentoring program. Those who planned on retiring were assigned three or four individuals to mentor. They taught the younger ones how to run difficult repeat jobs, cross-trained them on different machines and provided setup assistance.

At another place I worked, retirees could work flexible hours 2 or 3 days a week, focusing on critical jobs they knew how to run. After a while, the retiree would train younger machinists on these jobs, passing along vital knowledge. The program cost money, but younger employees benefited from the senior associates’ experience.

At some facilities I have visited, especially large companies, managers try to retain retiring employees either by convincing them of the benefits of retiring later or enticing them with higher wages, better benefits or both. This works in many instances.

Other companies, however, wait until the last minute to replace retiring employees, often hiring a replacement only weeks ahead of time. The pressure is then on the new workers to learn what they can from the retiree as fast as possible. I have never seen this approach work well. Something was always left out in the training—inadvertently or in some cases deliberately as retirees wanted to show how indispensable they were.

When training new workers to replace retirees, prepare for it well in advance. Most workers plan their retirements at least a year or two in advance. If a shop suspects someone will be retiring soon, it should start looking for a replacement immediately. During that 1- to 2-year period, the newbie can learn a lot from the retiring person. By working together, ideas and experiences are transferred from old to new.

Granted, if the retiring individual announces he’s retiring in a few weeks, problems can occur and the company will have to scramble to figure out how to replace him. But that’s no different than an employee quitting: It’s a real pain in the short term, but the company survives.

What would it take for you to come back to work after retirement or stay on longer? More money, flexible hours, better benefits? Personally, any of those might sway me. CTE