Future Bright For Semi-Retirees

If the traditional act of retiring can be compared to an on-off switch - here today/gone tomorrow - then the new retirement is a dimmer switch.

Increasingly employers are using a variety of options, including shorter work hours, part-time work and working at home to retain longtime employees. It’s called “phased retirement” and it’s the coming thing, according to a new study by Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a Seattle-based research firm.

Retirements are being transformed by a potent brew of demographics and economic factors - the aging work force, an evaporating experienced labor pool, longer lifespans, a growing sense of financial insecurity by retirees and a desire to remain active.

Researchers polled 586 large firms nationwide employing a total of 3.2 million workers. Included were 19 companies in Washington, Idaho and Oregon. The vast majority of firms employed well upward of 1,000 workers.

Regional results closely track national results, said Jackie Armbrost, senior retirement consultant at corporate headquarters in Seattle.

Three of the firms polled are headquartered in the Spokane area, she said. She was not at liberty to divulge their identities, which would breach confidentiality.

She also was unable to say how many of the 19 are offering “phased retirement” as an employment option.

“However, they are interested in the concept, we know,” she said, “because that’s why they participated in our study - to get our research results upon completion.

Half a dozen phone calls turned up two large local employers with work options that jibe with the concept.

“We don’t have a formal program called ‘Phased Retirement,’ said Liz Cox at the Spokane division of high-tech pioneer Hewlett-Packard, “but we have a program that we call `Work Options.”’

“It can provide avenues for older workers to transition toward retirement by rearranging their work schedules. We have variable work shifts. And people can go to part-time status. Some of our senior employees have gone this route as they approach retirement.”

Washington Trust, Spokane’s largest and oldest home-based bank, which has served the community going on a century, is “blessed by a highly tenured work force,” said Drew MacAfee, senior vice president of human resources. “Recognizing the unique value of longtime employees, we have a combination of ways to accommodate highly experienced seniors who express a desire to stay on past traditional retirement age.”

One way is to lighten the work load, reduce responsibilities and ease stress levels, while allowing individuals the opportunity to continue putting valuable experience to work. “We try to find the right niche,” said MacAfee.

“The institutional experience of some of our senior employees is both invaluable and irreplaceable,” he said.

Predictably, old-line companies are much more likely to offer phased retirement than employers that haven’t been around a very long time. Those employers whose work force averages 45 to 50 years of age are twice as likely to offer phased retirement as enterprises skewed toward younger workers.

Although currently just 16 percent of large employers offer phased retirement, another 28 percent say they are interested in establishing such programs within the next two or three years.

Meantime, three of four firms surveyed said they recognized phased retirement as a viable strategy for addressing labor shortages, which 61 percent of participating companies said they already are experiencing.

As the demographic vice tightens, difficulty in attracting qualified employees will rapidly intensify, designers of the study predict. Indeed, within the next five years, the research results show, three-quarters of the firms surveyed fully expect to be in a severe bind.

“It will not be surprising,” said Valerie Paganelli, another of Watson Wyatt’s retirement consultants, “if at least half of all employers have phased retirement programs in place within a decade.”

Moreover, the coming skills crunch could spur another trend already gaining ground - “unretirement” or re-entry into the work world, researchers speculated. Three-fourths of men in their 50s who drew pensions in 1993 also worked at least part time.