Shifting Employee Retirement into Your Succession Planning

DESCRIPTION:

As your older employees inch closer to the door, you risk losing vital knowledge and expertise to retirement. It’s time to recognize the surge of retiring baby boomers as an opportunity to transform their looming retirements into succession planning for your company. Give your older employees a sense of value, minimize your retraining costs and provide new employees with top-notch training that no manual can equal.

This session links to a number of functional areas in HR, starting with development and training.  Retention of the most knowledgeable and experienced personnel gives training opportunities to newer and younger employees.  Retention also speaks to basic staffing areas that are always a challenge, especially as your baby boomers age.  Another functional area is employee and labour relations.  Much like a family, any unit or team will benefit from different people who are able to connect with and support each other.  Giving older employees a sense of value and expertise goes a long way for the entire group.  This also speaks to organizational effectiveness when you apply the idea that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”—retaining the parts (people) who are most experienced can increase the benefits to the whole (group or unit.)  Leadership is best taught by example and modelling.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

• Gain an understanding of what is important to people preparing to retire
• Learn what appeals to future employees to keep them in the workforce
• Acquire the strategies and tools to keep the expertise your baby boomers contribute to the workplace
• Formulate questionnaires to assess concepts that are employee-based (personal) rather than business-based (related to profit)
• Learn to become more adept at understanding your employees by interviewing and encouraging them to stay longer rather than hiring new 
• Be exposed to a different level of innovation and creativeness in order to revise your job positions and descriptions in ways that are not driven by numbers 
• Learn the skill of negotiation, finding a way to balance the personal needs of future retirees with business values like feasibility and profit margins
  

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Pam Paquet is a corporate trainer who operates and manages her own business as well as a busy private counselling practice.  She is a master’s-level facilitator who specializes in customizing presentations and seminars for businesses and corporations to help employees, managers and executives.  She offers a number of training workshops including stress management, career transition, assertiveness training, conflict resolution, business/organizational ethics and various communication skills.  Her retirement transition presentation grows out of the recognition that retirement can be gradual and that different work arrangements are possible to enable the transition into retirement.    Paquet holds an M.Ed (counselling) from the University of Northern British Columbia (1999) and a BA (Honours) in psychology from the University of Regina (1994) as well as completing professional development counsellor training.  She is registered with the Canadian Counselling Association and has worked in different capacities including career/employment counselling with youth, crisis counselling with victims and life strategy counselling with military personnel.  Her passion lies in customizing and facilitating corporate training and presentations.