HOW Do Boomers’ Economic Decisions to Postpone Retirement
Impact Younger People? With the economic turbulence of the past year, many
boomers have postponed retirement. What does that do to succession planning? How does it impact younger
people’s career aspirations?
WILEY-LITTLE If baby boomers don’t
retire, it will impact upward mobility. If people are saying they have
to work five more years and can’t
retire, then the pipeline gets clogged.
When you look at our millennials
and Gen X and Y, they want those
promotions, they want the recognition that comes with it, and usually that’s the money and the office.
We’re going to have to figure how to
deal with that, making sure that they
have the right level of engagement.
SMITH I see this as a huge opportunity for organizations to move to
what we call a lateral organization,
one where you can move up, sideways and diagonally, and to redefine jobs. We have an opportunity
to transfer knowledge. There was
this panic about people retiring and
people not knowing how to turn
the lights on anymore. Now we can
effectively use that analogy to tell
people how to turn the lights back
on, and we have this opportunity to
transfer this knowledge in a more
leisurely way and co-inhabit jobs.
started to see more scenarios where
the younger generations are going
to become some of the supervisors
and managers of some of the baby
boomers.
JACKSON As a national trend, I
have found that Y’s have to be prepared to go against a retiree for a
job because retirees are leaving, but
they’re not going to go sit on a front
porch and rock—they are still very
vital. The difference is they’re not
going to go back and look for their
job, they’re going to look for the
job they always wanted to do. And
they’re very willing to start.
WILEY-LITTLE [Retirees] have great
ideas. We were looking at starting
a retiree employee-network group
because we want to understand bet-
ter what we may be facing and how
it is that we can re-engage some
of our retirees in our work force
because we know some of the sta-
tistics and talent shortage. How is it
that we can look at jobs in a differ-
ent way?
DEJONGH We see it
more as an opportunity versus a
challenge. Within
Accenture, we really promote meritocracy. At the end of the
day, regardless of generation, those who
are high performers
are really going to do
well. We have already
STAN SMITH We have an opportunity to transfer knowledge.
SMITH Do you find
that when they
come back, however, they look a lot
like millennials?
There is a friend
of mine who is a
nuclear engineer;
he is 65 and they
pleaded with him
to stay on. He said,
“I’ll stay on under
three conditions: 1)
You pay me what you always should
have paid me because I am only
working half a year, which is three
quarters of a year pay for a half of
a year; 2) I don’t want to have to
come in for corporate face time
[which is what they had to do—to
be seen by executives who were
traveling anyway]; and 3) I want to
be left alone just to do my job and
go to the training that I have to
go to and not have to put up with
the corporate politics” … He figured they wouldn’t do it; they said,
“When do you want to start?”
So, it’s a small example, but it’s
an incredible example. I said, “You
sound like you’re 25 years old.” He
said, “This is what I always wanted
to tell my employer, and now I can
finally do it.”
WILEY-LITTLE We’re finding that
[people who] are in the end of their
careers are saying there are parameters that they want to put on their
lives. They need more time away
and more flexibility. In the surveys
we do with our employees, we’re
finding both groups are almost
looking similar in their satisfaction
and in their requirements.
DEJONGH Then there’s compensation. We already see it as a major
difference and we spoke a little
about it earlier in terms of instant
gratification for Generation Y, but I
think the current impact that the
market conditions have had across
all the generations in terms of “pay
me now” versus “pay me later” is a
huge issue.
