I've talked to dozens of HR pros who tell me one of their biggest concerns these days is having employees who can't retire because they haven't saved enough. It seems to be growing clearer three years after the recession that this could be a potential black hole for plan sponsors. In fact, the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) just released an entire study, along with best practices, to help employers adapt to the new paradigm of having older workers in their work force.

According to our research, employees in virtually all demographics are unsure if they will be able to retire. This means there is ongoing risk for employers to spend millions of dollars over time on employees who delay retirement. Here are some of the tangible costs they could incur:

• Increased health care costs. Employees who want to retire but are unable to do so for financial reasons are likely to have significantly higher health care costs on average, which translates directly into costs for your company in terms of increased health insurance.
• Higher costs in keeping older employees in the work force. On average, an employee who delays retirement costs a company anywhere between $10,000 and $50,000 a year.  If the average employee postpones retirement for three years, there is a potential for companies to spend millions of dollars a year if they have a large population of boomers who can't retire.

But even beyond these tangible costs, employers face:

• Declines in performance among older employees who do not want to be working, or cannot effectively handle their job responsibilities, but must work longer for financial reasons. This indirectly impacts the bottom line in terms of greater absenteeism and lower productivity.
• Declines in performance among younger employees who are unable to move up the career ladder, which causes lower morale and decreased motivation.  

To avoid these risks, employers can take some proactive steps to help their employees understand their retirement benefits and use them to effectively grow their portfolios. Here are a few:

Create a Retirement Preparedness program. It may be possible for the retirement plan to fund this program using money from the ERISA budget account. Some of our clients have designed substantial programs that include a variety of services to meet their employees' learning styles and retirement education needs. Through these types of programs, employers help employees understand the way their retirement benefits work as part of their overall finances. Before you implement any kind of retirement education program, gather data on your workforce. This will help you find out where they stand, what specific issues they face, what they know about their existing benefits, and how they learn best, so that the education has an effect on the way they prepare for retirement.