About a decade ago, the leaders of a healthcare system in Wisconsin had an unpleasant epiphany: They were heading for a major shortage of qualified workers. Beyond the predicted national shortage of nurses, the average age of employees at the Mercy Health System, based in Janesville, hovered in the late 40s.
Kathy Harris, the company’s vice president for human resources and organizational development, recalls the company’s internal discussions: “We can’t have all of the baby boomers and aging workforce disappear on us. It’s not like there are just scads of people to replace them. … Gosh, 10 years from now, where will we be?”
As a consequence, company officials held a series of focus groups with its roughly 4,000 employees, who work in 70 facilities—hospitals, clinics, an insurance company, a home healthcare and hospice staff—in 26 communities across southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois. Many older Mercy employees told them they still wanted to work after turning 50, or even approaching 65, but they didn’t want to keep doing the same thing. A labor and delivery nurse, say, might prefer to work in an urgent-care clinic—or handle insurance claims. A cook might want to work part-time.
Comments from its workforce inspired Mercy to create a program called “Work to Retire.” For the past 10 years, it has allowed Mercy’s older workers to customize their own retirement plans. They can take a different job within the company, work part-time or seasonally, or concoct a more flexible schedule, while keeping their benefits—all depending on the worker’s preference and length of service as well as the management’s needs.
“The main thing it does is that it encourages people to think, ‘I don’t have to leave and then go get a job at the clinic down the road or work part-time,’” Harris says. “‘I can bring this up to my supervisor and not be in trouble.’ When you’re thinking of retiring, you’re not always quite sure how to do it. This … gave people permission to think broader.”
So far, 100 to 200 employees have taken advantage of “Work to Retire”—with 15 to 20 of them currently enrolled in it, Harris says. Any worker 50 and up, white-collar or blue-collar, is eligible to participate. Because the company owns different kinds of facilities, employees have plenty of opportunities to shift into new or less stressful jobs.
In any healthcare business, expertise and experience count. For Mercy Hospital, the goal is to keep its experienced workers, with their loyalty and institutional memory, engaged and happy. “Retaining people is well worth it because you retain their knowledge,” Harris says. “That is not something you can replace, at least in the short run.” The flexibility the program offers caught the attention of AARP, which has named Mercy Health System seven times as one of the best places for older Americans to work. AARP noted approvingly that 35 percent of Mercy's workforce is 50 or older.