Good afternoon

I was wondering if anyone would be willing to share how they handle retirement.

We have two employees looking to reduce their hours, going from five days p/w to four days p/w. We've had a chat with one of them to see what they're thinking and they haven't really thought past that first step yet. The other is on holiday so I don't know if they have a longer term plan yet, we've got a conversation booked though.

We have a flexible working process based around the statutory requirements and have used it successfully with employees over the past few years.

So my first thought was, great, it's just another FWR. However, that process does not allow employees to make more than one request in a 12 month period and we'd like to be a bit more flexible with those thinking about retirement so that, if they decide after six months or so they quite like having a shorter working week they can request to reduce their hours further. At the moment they'd have to wait before making that request and that could have the unintentional impact of them resigning instead. We don't want to remove the 12 month  restriction as it gives the company some certainty for a period and encourages people to think about their request rather than chopping and changing.

As a smaller business we don't have a large pool of potential replacements who could step up to fill gaps for those resigning to retire, and by suppporting employees to retire over a longer period it frees up budget to train and/or recruit so it's a huge help for us as a company if they talk to us about their plans.

With the abolition of the DRA retirement isn't something we want to bring up, if the employee is still doing a good job age isn't relevant (as demonstrated by one employee who is 76 works two days p/w and shows no signs of wanting to stop!) but if employees are thinking about retiring we'd rather they talk to us to manage it so they don't feel the only options are to work FT or resign and we don't end up in a capability process which could be avoided.

Do companies still have retirement policies?! It is an unavoidable fact of life we will all get old(er) and want/need to stop working at some point and I think we should try and support this. Can we increase flexibility to manage a long term leaver process (even calling it that rather than retirement, just in case someone else wants to use it) and giving employees a choice between using the FWR option if all they want to do at this point is reduce their hours to 4 days p/w or telling us when they want to retire and managing down over a longer period, as long as we are clear about end dates and notice periods to make amendments that might affect recruitment etc. They can switch between processes as necessary.

I'd love to know how other companies are managing this, and if I'm over thinking it!

Many thanks

Sarah