Manage age diversity in the workplace
Article Type: How to … From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 7, Issue 5
Practical advice for HR professionals
Everyone is, or should be, in favour of age diversity. Age diverse workforces offer a lot of advantages, particularly to companies that want to face their customers on “like speaks to like” terms. But an age diverse workforce is both an outcome of a process and a part of something bigger. For the process, reach for local government and legislative guides; for the “bigger something”, reach for age management. This article offers advice on how to approach age management in the workplace.
Step 1. Be clear on the challenges
Meanings and understandings differ of course, but when we talk of diversity we seem to lean towards the “softer issues”, such as observing human rights, equality principles and corporate social responsibility, expressed particularly in hiring policies, the ways we treat and speak to each other and so on. All are important and generally aligned to business success. But there is a sharper, harder collection of business challenges raised by workforce ageing,which exponents of diversity agendas often seem to miss. I refer of course to demographic change, the thirst for knowledge in global markets and the damage when scarce know-how quits for a premature twilight of comfortable sloth!
Step 2. Avoid knowledge drain
To focus on this bigger picture, age management addresses business needs and contains the ideas of age diversity, though it embodies much more. Looking back on how HR managers have approached age issues over the years, there is widespread use of fixed retirement ages, in some case encouraged by legislation,in addition to a “get rid of the old, bring in the new” approach to managing redundancies and organizational change. Both leave organizations denuded of knowledge for the future.
Step 3. Focus on age management
On the other hand, there have also been thousands of creative HR managers with great ideas to let older people play a part, rehabilitate, retrain, return to the workforce, remain in jobs where they perform well, move sideways to new roles and so on. Examples proliferate. The Swedish Vattenfall power generating company I visited recently told me how their chief executive Lars Josefsson realized the company was bleeding knowledge as older workers left the company. Their wasteful policies were reviewed and measures introduced to encourage older workers to remain beyond planned retirement dates. Now, every effort is made to keep them, including imaginative schemes offering greater flexibility,downscaling of working hours, training as mentors and structures to share their knowledge more widely. This is the stuff of age management.
Step 4. Take a strategic approach
Often one finds good age management approaches, albeit isolated and not joined up in any strategic way. As HR professionals, too often we lack a sense that age management is a necessary element in understanding the longer term business needs of organizations. A bright eyed, bushy tailed HR professional comes up with a stop gap solution to a short term problem and gets widespread praise. Then the bright eyed, bushy tailed HR manager moves on and it all falls apart. There is no champion, no business understanding, no sustainability and no skills in age managing. Age management has to be driven by a business notion– planned, led, costed and argued for at board level. There has to be sustainability built in, and this means training. For age management to work,every manager must become an age manager.
Step 5. Look at the big picture
There is a huge gap in understanding among HR professionals, despite the genuine contributions to innovating age management from the bottom up. As a profession we have failed to share knowledge adequately and join the disparate elements together. There is an absence of system, even though in fact, there is plenty of knowledge out there if people look for it. Looking at interventions separately one can classify them under the headings shown in the list below. Good age management practice starts by understanding the age risks facing the organization and is characterized by a multi-track technique. There is no point in addressing the age risks in isolation, if good work is then undermined because some other dimension is missing:
Job recruitment.
Learning, training and lifelong learning.
Career development.
Flexible working time practices.
Health protection and promotion and workplace design.
Redeployment.
Employment exit and transition to retirement.
Comprehensive approaches.
Changing attitudes.
Ergonomics and job design.
Reward policy.
Chris Ball, PhDChartered FCIPD, Chief executive of TAEN – The Age and Employment Network. TAEN is a specialist think tank specializing in policy analysis and consultancy around age, employment and age management. Ball is a member of the employment experts’ group of AGE (the European Older People’s Platform) and President of EAMN, the recently formed European Age Management Network. He can be contacted at: chris.ball@taen.org.uk
