I recently attended the AARP ‘Best Employers for Workers over 50′ awards dinner. This was the seventh annual event, meaning that AARP started this commendable effort well before most people were aware that retention of Boomer workers was going to be a critical need for the U.S. economy.

The fifty employers receiving awards (link) certainly deserve the commendations. They are definitely in the vanguard, often because of problems with retaining certain classes of employees.

Award shows are often superficial and fleeting. This one is neither. Companies put a lot of work into their submissions, and the accumulation of these submissions is providing a very valuable list of ‘best practices’ in the area of making the workplace a positive environment for older workers, and therefore helping to retain them. In 2004 AARP had Mercer Human Resource Consulting analyze the best practices in a report (link).

AARP continues to analyze the submissions and has lists of best practices on subjects like ‘Retention’ (link) and ‘Workforce Trends’ (link).

Surveys are showing that most employers are not preparing for the forthcoming shortages of employees. Fortunately for them, when they do wake up and realize they are in trouble, the best practices developed by AARP will give them a badly needed head start in getting up to speed.