IMPROVING COMPANY PERFORMANCE WITH AN OLDER WORKFORCE

The months before the collapse of so many dot-coms in early 2001 were marked by the influx of senior executives into a once totally youthful culture. These new companies, usually started by twenty-somethings with brilliant, innovative ideas, suddenly brought in older business managers to help them to weather what seemed like bumps on the fast road to success. For all too many it turned out to too little, too late.  The lesson is clear: experience counts. The world’s industrial societies remain youth-oriented, even though the so-called baby-boomers, the group that brought about this orientation, are now in their mid-fifties. People in the industrialized nations have been retiring well before the retirement age. 

The message: companies that don’t retain and recruit older workers won’t be able to meet demand, let alone grow. Older workers, however, are not just bodies to fill vacancies. Companies need older workers for their experience, institutional memories, work ethic, and perhaps surprisingly, their ability to accommodate change and to focus – moreover, they are likely to remain with an organization longer than younger workers.

A Value-added Proposition

Many beliefs about older workers result in companies deciding that younger workers are a better-value proposition when it comes to hiring, training and retention – these beliefs are potentially false. 

• Older workers cost more:  While the actual salaries of new, younger replacements may be lower, there are hidden costs of replacing older workers, for example severance pay and agency fees for replacements.

• Older workers are less creative: While younger workers may come up with a larger number of ideas in meetings, fewer of those ideas prove to have value. Some have already been tried and failed, others don’t work in the company’s culture. Measuring the value of new ideas is more important than measuring their number.

• Older workers don’t learn as much as well as younger workers: Surveys show that the ratings of older workers increased between 2008 and 2000: the percentage of older workers rated excellent for flexibility rose almost 18 percent, the percentage of older workers who are comfortable with new technology rose almost12 percent. One problem may be that the average age of trainers is 33, also people learn differently depending on their age.  For example, older workers unfamiliar with a classroom setting may do better learning one-on-one or on the shop floor.

• Older workers aren’t worth retaining, because they won’t be around for long: Today, younger workers move from job to job quickly, because they haven’t been raised in an environment in which corporate loyalty is a part of their thinking or tradition.  Older workers remain longer, partly because they are more concerned about finding a new job if there is an economic slowdown.

• Older workers have poorer attendance records: Human resource managers report that older workers are less likely to be late or absent than younger ones. Also workers over 55 account for 13.6 percent of the workforce, but only 9.7percent of on-the-job injuries, and workers over 50 file far fewer worker compensation claims than younger ones.

• Older workers have less to contribute: Not only do older workers contribute, but when organizations are concerned about maintaining their institutional history and values – and maintaining skills and techniques when those remain constant – they turn to older workers. Older workers can train new workers by training side-by-side with them and pass on the expertise and experience accumulated over long years, often reducing formal training time. Moreover, it takes an institutional memory to answer such questions as: Why were certain decisions about process made? Why don’t we do business with company X? These are things that don’t get captured in memos or expert systems, they are the stuff of history stored in memory, and they are invaluable.

Attracting Older Workers

No matter how companies may want to keep older workers, however, they are likely to discover that many such workers don’t want to stay, at least, not under the same conditions they had in past. Many no longer want to devote their lives to work. Even though life expectancy has increased dramatically so that people are no longer afraid they’ll have time to do the things they’ve always wanted to do if they put off retirement, the urge to enjoy life while they’re fit and hearty is strong.

People want to take that exotic vacation, spent time with grandchildren, take courses, or pursue hobbies now. And often work has become tedious and dull, partly because companies don’t offer older workers training opportunities, leaving them bored and interested in any form of change. This is where companies need to be imaginative. This is the time for companies to employ the concept of flexibility to employment, to wake up to the fact that they can hold on to valuable older workers by being creative.  Some companies have adapted, and they are better positioned to take advantage when the baby boomers consider retiring.

Flexible Arrangements Include:

• Part-time permanent work: These jobs are scheduled for less than 40 hours a week whether fewer hours a day, or fewer days a week. For those of actual retirement age, it might involve a contract reducing the numbers of workdays by one day a week for the first three months, two days for the next three, and so on until full retirement is reached. 

• Contract work or consulting: This covers temporary assignments on specific projects rather than temporary work for different companies on an as-needed basis. Companies looking for workers on specific arrangements often entice retired workers to return for the life of the project because they understand the corporate culture.

• Telecommuting – working at home at least part of the time. For older employees, working at home can make life easier, but it doesn’t provide the social interaction that can make work attractive.

• On-call-work: This arrangement, found most often in organizations such as hospitals that must be fully staffed at all times, involves a guaranteed minimum number of hours. It usually involves varying shifts, so is ideal for older workers who have few specific demands on their time.

• Special assignments – these include temporary assignments, for example, serving on a disaster recovery project, representing the company in a community project, or working abroad. 

Over the next few decades, the workforce in general will become older, and the baby boomers will begin to think strongly about retirement. Experience, people skills, focus, a strong work ethic, and the desire and ability to learn make these older workers extremely valuable. Attracting and then finding ways to hold on to the best is going to be the key to success. Organizations must begin to address misconceptions about older workers and put in place programs to address their needs and aspirations.

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