When one retirement represents half a department's expertise, you need a different approach to workforce resilience.
Here is the short answer. You cannot stop the retirement wave, and you probably cannot out-recruit it either. What you can do is protect the three things that actually walk out the door when a veteran employee leaves: their knowledge, their relationships, and the culture they helped build. That means finding out where expertise is concentrated before it disappears, capturing the institutional knowledge that lives only in people's heads, and listening to the staff you still have so they stay. Smaller governments feel this more sharply than large ones, because a single departure can take a huge share of a department with it. The encouraging part is that a resilient response is mostly about preparation, not budget.
The "silver tsunami" is not a forecast anymore. It is arriving. In the most recent national workforce research, more than half of state and local HR managers said the largest wave of retirements is still ahead of them, in the next few years. Nearly half of governments expect public service retirements to climb over that same window.
Here is the part that should get your attention. In that same research, only about 13 percent of state and local governments had a succession planning process in place. That number has barely moved in nearly a decade. So the most predictable workforce event of our lifetime is coming, and roughly seven in eight governments have no formal plan for it.
That gap is the real story. The retirements are not a surprise. The lack of preparation is a choice, and it is one you can still change.
In a large agency, ten people might share a single function. If one retires, the team absorbs it. In a small or mid-sized city, one person often is the function. They are the only one who knows how the stormwater system was designed, why the budget is structured the way it is, or which vendor to call when the permitting software breaks at 4:45 on a Friday.
When that person leaves, the loss is not one tenth of a capability. It can be most of it. That is the hard math of a smaller organization. The same lean staffing that makes your city nimble also concentrates your risk. A departure that a big county would barely feel can knock a small city's department flat for months.
It helps to be honest about what we know and what we do not. What the data clearly shows is that the retirement wave is large, it is near, and most governments have not planned for it. What varies from place to place is where your own risk actually sits. That part is not knowable from a national report. It is knowable only by looking at your own workforce, which is exactly where a resilience plan should start.
When you lose a long-tenured employee, you lose more than a job title. You lose three things at once, and each one needs a different response.
The first is explicit knowledge, the facts and procedures that could be written down but usually never were. The second is tacit knowledge, the judgment and shortcuts that only come from doing the work for twenty years. The third is relationship capital, the trust that person built with residents, vendors, council members, and neighboring agencies.
You protect these by measuring where they concentrate, capturing them before they leave, and giving your remaining people reasons to stay. Three steps, in that order.
You cannot protect what you have not located. Before you build a succession plan, you need a clear picture of who is at risk of leaving, which departments are most exposed, and what would make your best people stay.
This is where The National Employee Survey (The NES) earns its place. The NES is a scientifically valid, anonymous assessment that measures employee experience across eleven dimensions, including career development, leadership effectiveness, organizational communication, and the drivers of retention. It tells you not just who is unhappy, but why, and it benchmarks your results against hundreds of other public agencies so you can see where you truly stand.
The City of Novi, Michigan used The NES to establish a baseline for its culture before problems could spread. As Assistant City Manager Victor Cardenas put it, the goal was to see where employees stood and start building from there. That baseline is the foundation of any real workforce plan. Without it, you are guessing about where your expertise is thin and where your retention risk is highest.
Most institutional knowledge in local government does not live in a system. It lives in scattered documents, old email threads, and individual memories. When the person retires, so does the memory.
Polco Track was built with this problem in mind. Through its Bring Your Own Data capability, Track lets a community pull its own information into one place, from department statistics and service delivery data to strategic plans and the institutional knowledge that everyone relies on but no one has written down. Instead of that knowledge sitting in one person's head or one forgotten folder, it becomes a living, searchable repository that sits alongside national benchmarks.
The payoff is that continuity no longer depends on a single employee. And with Polly, Polco's AI analytics assistant, your team can question that data directly, surface trends, and build planning materials without needing the one person who used to know where everything was. The knowledge stays with the organization, not with the individual.
The best retirement plan is one where fewer of your critical people rush for the door, and the ones who stay are ready to lead. That comes down to trust, and trust is built by listening and then acting.
Nevada County, California shows how this works. The county ran The NES in 2018, acted on what it learned, and ran it again in 2021 to measure progress. Communication and supervisor performance both improved. More telling, leaders found the survey doubled as a recruitment tool, because they could point to a workforce that felt heard. As one leader noted, if you do not act on the results, you signal to employees and residents that you were not really listening. Measurement without action erodes trust. Measurement with action builds it.
Culture matters too, especially the culture you can teach to the next generation. The Papillion Police Department in Nebraska found that employees who grew up in the community had higher job satisfaction, so the city made community values an explicit part of onboarding rather than something people were expected to absorb on their own. The result is a department where most employees stay for the long term, in a field where turnover is common. That is what durable culture looks like. It is taught on purpose, not left to chance.
You do not need a large budget or a new department to start. You need a baseline.
Pick one thing to do this quarter. Run an employee survey to find out where your expertise and your retention risk actually sit. That single step turns a vague worry about the "silver tsunami" into a specific map of which departments to shore up first, and it gives you the data to make the case for everything that comes next.
The retirement wave is the most predictable challenge your city will face this decade. The governments that treat it as a surprise will scramble. The ones that prepare will barely feel it. The difference is not size or budget. It is whether you started before the water hit.
See how The National Employee Survey and Polco Track can help you locate your risk and protect your institutional knowledge before it retires. Request a demo to walk through it with our team.