The Impact of a Randomly Assigned Time and Place Management Initiative on Work and Retirement Expectations

This article examines the causal relationship between a workplace flexibility arrangement and retirement expectations. The data come from a unique large-scale randomly assigned time and place management (TPM) initiative that recently took place at a regional healthcare system in the United States with more than 9,000 employees. A difference-in-differences approach was used to assess treatment impacts among older full-time career employees and comparisons were made with a nationally representative group of older Americans from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We found evidence that the TPM initiative had a statistically significant impact on employees' retirement expectations; employees in the treatment group were more likely than those in the control group to expect to remain with the organization until retirement, though treatment impacts dissipated somewhat toward the end of the study. The results indicate that workplace flexibility could be one solution to promote continued work later in life, as flexible work arrangements have the potential to impact retirement expectations and patterns of labor force withdrawal.