“We were forced to,” explains Carol Dyck, the City’s inclusion coordinator and HR consultant. “We saw some really good people walk out the door and hated to see them go but didn’t know how we could stop them.”

Dyck is referring to two senior level managers from the engineering department who hit retirement at the same time. “So losing both of them in six months was like, ‘Oh my goodness! We can’t have all this knowledge walk out the door at the same time. What can we do to prevent that?’”

The City had to literally think on its feet. Especially since these two engineers were just the tip of the iceberg. When the City took a closer look it saw that 60 employees would be retiring over the next 10 years and realized that it would have to “think outside the box.” In other words, not only decide what it needed to do in order to retain its valuable older workforce but also what those workers would be willing do to for the City once they hit that plateau and were ready to go.

Since it couldn’t afford to lose staff and be faced with no one to fill jobs, Red Deer decided to make the most of what it had: people it knew and who knew the drill. The City effectively came at the problem with both barrels blazing, tackling both labour shortage and training issues at the same time. Here’s how it played out for one of its workers retiring from the water treatment plant:

“We helped him apply for his pension,” says Dyck. “He had a bit of a break, took a bit of a  holiday, then came back on a two-year term position where he would still do basically his job, but mentor two of the younger people to get where they needed to be.”
 
Out of the 1200 people that the City of Red Deer employs, most of the retained mature workers are bus drivers, parks laborers, engineers and senior clerks who now collect their pension and a nice little paycheque to boot.

“I heard one of them say, ‘You know, I didn’t miss the stress of the work, the constant deadlines, the constant politics that happens within a workplace, but I did miss the people.’ So when we offered her to come back work part-time, it was perfect,” Dyck explains. “She got to have her friends back. She got to have some work that was meaningful to her. And yet she had her freedom.”

Dyck has found that mature workers are absent less, healthier and definitely more loyal.
“Young kids if they don’t like the job today, they’ll walk across the street and make more money,” says Dyck. “Whereas the seniors, they’re very loyal. They want a decent salary but they’re not chasing the buck like young kids do. If they find a job they like, they’re going to stay. That’s working for us.”

It’s working so well, in fact, that when the provincial government held a mature worker forum last year, it chose Red Deer as its site. To the City of Red Deer its mature workforce is a blessing. People are now coming to Dyck asking for work beyond their retirement years.