One blog post suggests that the police officers just love their jobs and therefore are staying on longer than planned.  Other media reports say that the VPD may be a victim of the recession; with stock prices falling considerably and retirement funds shrinking, employees are delaying their retirement.  Various polls published in the media indicate the decline in value of investments is impacting retirements.

 It’s natural to link together pieces of information and come to a conclusion as to the true cause of VPD’s workforce budget issues. However, this is an issue to start asking questions about. Is it really the recession that is causing delayed retirements?

Using data supplied from the HR Metrics Service, here are the 2009 retirement stats:

Private Sector = publicly and privately owned business, not-for-profit, cooperative organizations

Public Sector = government, crown corporations, government institutions

Based on these figures, it appears that people are still retiring, more so and at an earlier age in the Public Sector.

Statistics Canada doesn’t report regularly on retirement rates and ages and so we don’t have any information on what normally happens as a result of a prolonged decline in the stock market.  However, they reported in 2007 that people retire younger if they:

·         belong to a union

·         have a pension plan

·         are long-tenured employees.

Employees who belong to a union are more likely to have an employer-sponsored pension plan.  Those with pension plans tend to not have the same risk issues as those who have invested RRSPs in the stock market and have therefore lost a part of their retirement income.  And finally, long tenured employees have put in their time to qualify for a full pension or receive a retirement payout of some form.  Therefore, it makes sense that public sector employees retire more often and earlier than private sector employees because more often they are unionized, offer a pension plan and have long-tenured employees.

While we don’t know yet whether or not people are delaying their retirements and will not know for another year or two whether or not the Retirement Rate actually slowed down in 2009, how can we be so sure as to what’s happening at the VPD?   Here’s some background:

The officers are for the most part unionized and they have pension plans.  The VPD has a solid workforce planning model that has served them well for years. They use the “80 factor” to determine who qualifies for retirement; when years of service + age are added together, if they equal 80 or greater, the employee qualifies for full pension.  Mining historical retirement data, they discovered that most officers retire within a year after qualifying for full pension.  Therefore, the VPD hired fully expecting a group of retirements to occur after the Olympics.  So what happened this time?

The VPD blames the recession, but not for the most commonly cited reasons.  According to Superintendent Steven Schnitzer of the VPD’s personnel services, most police officers go on to second jobs after official retirement with the VPD.  With fewer jobs, there are simply not enough post-retirement jobs to go around.  While the VPD cannot confirm this with certainty, this seems to be the most obvious explanation why their typically successful workforce model has veered off course this year.

Everyone loves a good story but unfortunately what we hear and read isn’t always the full story.  In this case, the news reported that police officers are not retiring and we as media consumers made the assumption that it was due to the recession.  But there are other key lessons here – first, workforce planning works but we need to include scenario planning, such as the possible impact of a recession on our workforce plans.  Second, understand where your employees come from before they came to work for you and where they go after they work for you; this information may provide more insight than initially considered.  And third, don’t lap up everything you read or hear in the media.  Instead, use it as a piece of information but do your own independent research using reliable sources and find out what makes sense for your organization.

Helen Luketic, CHRP brings more than nine years of HR experience to her current role as HRIS Analyst at Vancity, where she’s assisting the organization implement new HR systems and processes. For her innovative achievements at Vancity, Helen was the recipient of BC HRMA’s 2008 Rising Star Award. In her previous role as Manager, HR Metrics & Research at BC HRMA, she combined her CHRP, B.A. in Economics, HR information systems knowledge and experience in HR metrics to develop the HR Metrics Service and related workshops, presentations and webinars to teach HR professionals about HR metrics and benchmarking.