How and when valued employees choose to retire can represent a serious challenge for SMEs. As the staff member walks out of the office door for the final time, so too can knowledge and experience that has been gleaned over many years of service. It’s a difficult situation to manage and one that has been exacerbated further by the scrapping of the Default Retirement Age. It means the onus is now on the employee to reveal when they want to go, in turn making their departure more difficult to plan for.
Not that there is much planning going on, according to the CIPD’s 2014 Managing an Age Diverse Workforce report. It reveals that only one fifth of companies surveyed are actually exploring the issue of age-related strategies, suggesting that enterprise is reacting to retirement issues instead of taking a proactive approach.