Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research
To Phase or Not to Phase?: That is the Question!
Kathie Lingle's Work-Life Blog
I would like to introduce guest blogger, Jim Dwyer, VP, Global Compensation and Benefits with American Express. Jim serves on a unique multi-disciplinary task force within WorldatWork that is exploring all aspects of the much-debated phenomenon that goes by the label of managing multigenerational issues. This is the second in a series of guest blogs from this task team and discusses the hot topic of phased retirement. We welcome your feedback!
Kathie Lingle
Director, Alliance for Work-Life Progress
To Phase or Not to Phase? That is the Question! Guest Blogger: James Dwyer - American Express Company
Feb. 20, 2008 — Like many other compensation, benefits and work-life professionals, we wrestled with the design, logistics and ROI of a "phased retirement" program, whereby mature workers within the company could continue working on a reduced schedule leading up to and following the minimum retirement age.
After much discussion among a network of stakeholders, including business leaders, HR colleagues and C&B staff, we are proud to be launching this program on a pilot basis within the next few weeks. I thought it would be helpful to readers to understand some of the issues we considered, so that their initiative is a positive and productive one.
Know your population: Analyze the age of your population in several ways, including by business unit and organizational level. You may be surprised by what you find out, it will dictate the relevance of the effort, and help you build a business case if you have a problem.
Find a pilot group: Instead of trying to "boil the ocean", start small and targeted. In our business, we found two functional units with an aging population and specialized skills. In response, we will only be offering the program to this population for 2008.
Design the program to meet your objectives: Make sure that you establish appropriate guidelines regarding eligibility (performance-based), and evaluate whether any employee expenses affiliated with part-time employment (perhaps they pay an extra premium for some insurance) are waived so phased workers are not discouraged from participating.
Since we are just in our launch phase, I do not have any results to provide at this point, but will blog back later this year with our story. In the meantime, if there are practitioners out there with a story to tell about their phased retirement program, we would love to hear about it!
Thanks everyone.
Jim
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