Stepping Up Succession Planning

(from the Harvard Business Review) How can schools and other organizations more effectively manage the transfer of knowledge and skills when older employees walk out the door? Organizations worldwide are beginning to confront this and other questions related to the aging population. In the United States, there were 65 million people older than 60 in 2017, a number expected to grow to more than 77 million by 2020. Researchers Peter Berg and Matt Piszczek, noting that an aging workforce increases an organization's risk of "skill loss" as older workers retire, outline a number of formal and informal tactics for addressing these risks, including:

• Delay and transfer: Find ways to delay the exit of skilled older workers to buy time to train younger workers. Tactics include reduced or flexible working hours, different shifts so they can provide on-the-job training to their replacements, and documentation processs to capture knowledge.
• Mixed-age teams that allow younger workers to learn directly from older workers while showing the older workers that the organization values their knowledge and skills.
• Track changes over time to assess factors such as how many people in any unit can do a job, how important each role is to the organization's success, and how likely it is that someone can take over a job if the employee currently in it were to leave.

More at the Harvard Business Review

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