How one organisation begins to consider what it needs from experienced workers
What Happens When an Organisation Rethinks Retirement? Anika had always thought of retirement as something the organisation prepared people for, not something it needed to question for itself.
She was about to discover that the two things were not quite the same.
The Retirement Plan
Anika was the senior HR director of a large professional services organisation.
Retirement was something her team knew how to manage.
There were policies.
There were conversations.
There were pension arrangements, succession plans and handover processes.
When someone approached retirement, the organisation began preparing for their departure.
It was orderly.
It was familiar.
It was also becoming increasingly difficult to ignore what was happening around them.
Two experienced employees were approaching retirement within the next year.
Christine had spent more than thirty years building relationships with some of the organisation’s most important clients.
Lim was one of the organisation’s most experienced technical specialists. He knew its systems, processes and history better than almost anyone.
But they would also create opportunities.
Dylan, a younger manager, was already thinking about what their departures would mean for the next generation.
Who would take their places?
What knowledge would need to be transferred?
What opportunities would open up?
The questions were familiar.
But Anika had begun to wonder whether they were the right questions.
The People Behind The Succession Plan
Christine was the first to make her position clear.
She wasn’t ready to stop working.
But she didn’t want to continue working exactly as she had been.
She no longer wanted the pressure of a five-day week and the constant demands of senior client management.
What she did want was to continue working with some of the clients she knew well.
She also wanted to spend more time helping colleagues develop their confidence in client relationships.
Lim felt similarly, although for different reasons.
He enjoyed his specialist work but had grown tired of managing people.
After decades of solving increasingly complex problems, he found himself spending more time in meetings about the work than actually doing it.
He wasn’t looking for another promotion.
He wanted more time to use what he knew.
Dylan listened carefully.
But he had a concern of his own.
He had worked hard to reach his current position.
If experienced people stayed indefinitely, where did that leave people like him?
It was a reasonable question.
Anika knew it needed to be part of the conversation.
The Question Anika Hadn’t Asked
Until then, the organisation had approached retirement from one direction.
Someone was leaving.
The organisation needed to prepare.
But what if the person wasn’t simply leaving?
What if they wanted to change the way they worked?
Anika began to think about the two people in front of her.
Christine didn’t need another senior role.
Lim didn’t need another management position.
Neither wanted to be treated as though they were simply postponing retirement.
They wanted something different.
And that made Anika ask a question she hadn’t asked before:
What could these people contribute if they weren’t required to continue working in the same way?
It was a surprisingly different question.
What Experience Holds
The more Anika explored it, the more she realised that the organisation had been thinking about experience mainly as something that needed to be transferred before someone left.
Knowledge transfer.
Handover.
Succession.
All important.
But experience wasn’t simply information that could be written down and passed to someone else.
Christine knew how to recognise a client relationship that was beginning to change before the client said anything.
Lim knew which apparently straightforward technical decisions had caused problems ten years earlier.
They had both developed judgement through years of seeing situations unfold.
That couldn’t simply be put into a document.
Perhaps the organisation didn’t only need to capture their experience.
Perhaps it needed to use it differently.
A Different Kind Of Contribution
Anika began exploring possibilities.
Christine could work fewer days and spend part of her time mentoring colleagues and maintaining selected client relationships.
Lim could step away from people management while continuing to work on complex projects and advising less experienced specialists.
Neither arrangement was a conventional promotion.
Neither was quite retirement.
And neither was designed simply to keep an older worker in a job.
They were different ways of contributing.
But there was still Dylan.
Anika didn’t want to solve one problem by creating another.
If experienced employees stayed indefinitely in the same roles, emerging leaders could lose opportunities to progress.
So the organisation had to think more carefully.
This wasn’t about choosing experienced workers over emerging leaders.
It was about finding ways for experience and progression to work alongside each other.
And about recognising that different stages of a WorkLife might require different kinds of roles.
Making Room For More Than One Future
The conversations became more complicated.
There were questions about pay.
Responsibility.
Career progression.
Team structures.
Client expectations.
And fairness.
There was no simple policy that answered all of them.
Anika realised that perhaps this was why organisations often relied on the retirement process they already had.
It was easier to manage a departure than to redesign a role.
Easier to replace someone than to ask what else their experience might make possible.
Easier to think in terms of age and employment status than contribution.
But if people were living and potentially working for longer, perhaps organisations would increasingly need to become better at this kind of conversation.
Not:
When will you retire?
But:
What kind of WorkLife do you want now?
And:
What could that make possible for you and for us?
Rethinking The Later Stages Of WorkLife
Anika didn’t suddenly have all the answers.
The organisation didn’t introduce a new retirement policy and solve the problem.
Instead, something more important had changed.
The questions had changed.
Retirement was no longer being treated simply as the final stage of employment.
It had become a point at which the organisation could ask whether the role, the working pattern and the contribution still made sense.
For Christine, that might mean fewer days and more mentoring.
For Lim, it might mean specialist work without management responsibility.
For someone else, it might mean leaving altogether.
There didn’t need to be one answer.
What The Organisation Could Learn
Anika began to see that longevity wasn’t only changing individual WorkLives.
It was changing the organisation’s responsibility too.
If people have potentially many more years in which they can contribute, organisations may need to think differently about how careers evolve over time.
The later stages of a WorkLife don’t necessarily have to be a gradual withdrawal.
They can be a change in emphasis.
Less management.
More mentoring.
Less responsibility.
More expertise.
Fewer days.
Different projects.
A different kind of contribution.
Or, sometimes, retirement.
The point is not to keep everyone working.
The point is to stop assuming that reaching a particular age tells us what someone wants or what they still have to offer.
A Different Conversation
A few months later, Anika was sitting with Dylan discussing what they were learning from the conversations with Christine and Lim.
Dylan had been working closely with both of them, and something had become increasingly clear to him.
The organisation had been thinking about the situation as a choice.
Either experienced people continued in their existing roles, or they stepped aside and created space for others.
But the work itself wasn’t quite that simple.
Some responsibilities could move to other people.
Some could be shared.
Some could be redesigned.
And some of the knowledge Christine and Lim had accumulated could become part of how other people developed, rather than remaining attached to their individual roles.
Dylan wondered whether the organisation was missing an opportunity by treating succession as a handover.
What if it could be a transition in which several things happened at once?
People could take on new responsibilities.
Experienced colleagues could move into different kinds of contribution.
Knowledge could be shared through real work rather than simply documented.
And the organisation could learn what was possible as it went.
Anika could see the potential.
They didn’t need to decide what the future of every experienced employee should look like.
They could start with Christine and Lim.
They could try something, learn from it and adjust it.
Creating The Pilot
Anika didn’t want to introduce a new policy based on three individual experiences.
There were too many questions still to answer.
Would the arrangements work in practice?
Would clients respond well?
Would other employees see them as fair?
And could the organisation create new opportunities for emerging leaders at the same time?
So Anika suggested something smaller.
A pilot.
She talked to Christine and Lim separately.
Christine was interested in reducing her working days, continuing selected client relationships and spending part of her time mentoring emerging leaders.
Lim wanted to step away from people management while continuing to contribute his specialist knowledge to complex projects and becoming available to advise colleagues when his experience could make a difference.
Both were willing to try something different.
Dylan agreed to be involved in shaping the pilot.
Not as someone responsible for making it work for everyone else, but because the organisation wanted to understand what these changes looked like from the perspective of someone building his own career.
They agreed that the pilot would run for twelve months.
For Christine and Lim, it would begin six months before their planned retirement dates and continue for six months afterwards.
That mattered.
They weren’t simply testing whether they could work differently for a few months before leaving.
They were testing whether a different kind of contribution could become part of what came next.
During the twelve months, they would look at what worked, what didn’t, what needed to change and what the organisation was learning.
And if the pilot worked, the arrangements would provide the basis for what came next.
A Different Kind Of Ending
It was only a pilot.
There were still questions about pay, responsibility, career progression, team structures and fairness.
There would almost certainly be things they hadn’t anticipated.
But the organisation had done something it hadn’t done before.
It had stopped treating retirement as a fixed point at which a WorkLife ended and started treating it as a point at which a WorkLife might change shape.
Christine could continue contributing without continuing to work in exactly the same way.
Lim could use his expertise without carrying the management responsibilities he no longer wanted.
Dylan could continue developing without waiting for someone else to leave before his own progression could move forward.
And Anika had a new question to take back to the organisation:
What else might be possible if we stopped assuming that the later stages of a WorkLife all need to look the same?
They didn’t know yet whether the pilot would work.
But they had decided to find out.
And perhaps that was the most important change of all.
They were no longer simply preparing people for retirement.
They were beginning to prepare the organisation for a longer WorkLife.
Perhaps that was the conversation they should have been having all along.
Retirement was still part of WorkLife.
It hadn’t disappeared.
But perhaps it no longer needed to be the only possible ending.
Perhaps the more useful question was what might come before the ending.
And what might come after it.
Because when an organisation rethinks retirement, it may discover that it isn’t really rethinking retirement at all.
It is rethinking what a long WorkLife can look like.
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Explore The Future of WorkLife — stories and reflections on the changing nature of work, the transitions we experience and the possibilities for our next WorkLife chapters.
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