CHAPTER SEVEN
Ageing is a global phenomenon. By 2030, 55 countries are expected to see their 65 and older populations amounting to at least 20 percent of their total. There are more people aged 65 and older than the entire populations of Russia, Japan, France, Germany and Australia combined. By 2040, the global population is projected to number 1.3 billion older people, 14 per cent of the total.
In developed countries, those over 60 control over half the wealth. What makes them even wealthier now is that many older people are working well beyond retirement. Indeed, by 2050, the terms ‘ageing’ and ‘retirement’ won’t resemble our concepts of today. Retirement is based around a fundamental assumption of living for about 20 years after leaving the workforce. As life expectancy increases, it becomes unfeasible to stop working at the traditional retirement age. For many people today, retirement funds will need to last 40-plus years after age 65. So people are working longer: not just because they need to, but also because they want to.
By 2019, Tasmania will have the oldest population in Australia. One in four in Tasmania will be aged 60 and over. At 30 June 2011, Tasmania had the oldest median age of all the states and territories, at 40.2 years. In 1990, it was 32.1 years. What doesn’t help is the exodus of young people to the mainland. The brain drain has affected Tasmania’s economy which consistently underperforms the rest of Australia.
South Australia is another state now being ravaged by demographics. According to a report from geography professor Graeme Hugo and associates to the South Australian Office for the Ageing, the number of people in the state aged 65 and over has grown at three times the rate of the population over the last decade. Those aged 75 and over grew at six times the rate. The fastest growing group was those aged 55 to 64. Hugo forecasts over the next quarter century, the 65-plus population will grow three times as fast as the younger population. That group will double in number. The numbers aged 75 and over, the most intensive users of health and aged care services, will more than double. South Australia has the oldest population in Australia with 15.4 per cent of the population aged 65 years and over compared with 13.3 per cent nationally. South Australia has the second oldest median age in Australia after Tasmania at 39.4 years. In 1997, only 9.2 per cent of the state’s workforce was aged between 55 and 69. A decade later, it had reached 15.4 per cent. Over the past decade, one in 10 men over the age of 65 have continued to work. There was a trebling in the participation rate for women aged 60 to 64. Older workers in South Australia are more likely to be employed in clerical and professional occupations, where cognitive skills and experience are more valuable. They are mainly found in strongly or moderately growing industries including health and community services, property and business services, education and retail.
What’s happening in South Australia and Tasmania is a microcosm of the forces that will transform Australia and the rest of the world.
The ground is shifting, and management culture will have to change. Companies will also need to change operations and the way they manage their people.
Companies will also need to change their human resources practices. The best way to reduce the growth in pensions is to keep people working. This generates more tax revenue and reduces handouts. Politicians and bureaucrats might consider tax breaks to ensure people stay in the workforce. But the question is whether companies can be persuaded to take on, or keep older workers.
A big issue is the skills shortage with baby boomers leaving and fewer people coming in to replace them. Some companies have come up with creative solutions. Several years ago, IBM Belgium set up a separate company that saw retirees in effect contracting back their services but on a reduced salary. That way, the company held on to their skilled employees while keeping them off the books. It is possible that other companies here might adopt similar strategies.
Another solution was raised in Harvard Business Review last year when Rainer Strack from the Boston Consulting Group advised companies to do an audit of their workforce’s age and assess how this would affect their productivity and service. This would allow them to develop strategies around training, health care management and job transfers.
They’re your best assets, so use them
Older people have more money, more business acumen, and greater influence. They want to keep working, and they’re often far more valuable than less experienced employees. So why do we assume it’s a good idea for them to stop working at a certain age? Why don’t companies make a greater effort to keep older workers?
The ageing population is not a problem that needs to be managed — it’s an opportunity that companies can seize with some long-term planning and creativity. Both your customers and your workforce are getting older fast, regardless of whether you adapt.
Managers need to adopt strategies that will change attitudes to ageing workers, including raising awareness of the benefits of keeping them. They will have to introduce more flexible work practices, tailor training for older workers, facilitate promotion and internal job changes, design jobs and workplaces to prevent or address functional decline of workers and develop specific programs to facilitate employment and transition to retirement. And entrepreneurs will have to take opportunities that are now opening up.
The problem of older women
Older women, those who are 45 years and older, are a critical part of the Australian workforce. They represent 17 per cent of the Australian labour pool. According to the Productivity Commission, increasing women’s labour participation rates to match men’s would increase per capita GDP to 2044-45 by 1.5 per cent.
All this has enormous implications for older women. With life expectancy increasing to 84 for women, and 70 per cent of women rating their health as good, older women can extend their working lives for many years, transforming the workforce and society’s expectations. Simply put, there will be more older women in the workforce. They need to be accommodated but unfortunately that has not been the case.
Older women are a growing population and the challenges of ageing are more pronounced for this group because of discrimination: educational disparities; early marriage; childcare; lower income; occupational barriers and segregation; moving out of a career and job market to raise children and lower retirement income.
According to the ABS, 150,700 older women are under-employed, or 16 per cent of those employed part time. The under-employment rate for women aged 45 and over is 6.5 per cent, compared to 4.7 per cent for men of the same age. Older women are also more likely to work fewer hours than men in the same age bracket – less than 20 hours a week.
According to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, only eight per cent of senior executives and 4 per cent of line managers are women. These would be women in that 54 to 45 year old group. Only three per cent are CEOs. There are not that many executive managers with profit and loss responsibilities who are women. This is not a good supply line for board positions. Women do not get the opportunity in senior management ranks to obtain the necessary skills to progress through the organisation necessary for them to take on the role of non-executive director.
In her book, The End of Equality: Work, Babies and Women’s Choices in 21st Century Australia, Anne Summers notes a 50 per cent rise over the same period in female-headed sole parent families with children, two thirds of them totally reliant on government support, joined by large numbers of older divorced women lacking superannuation, all dwelling on the economic margins of society.
Sex discrimination commissioner Elisabeth Broderick says getting more women into senior management is harder than getting them on to boards because the gap is created by the cultural underpinnings of organisations. “The makeup of the board doesn’t necessarily speak to the same degree of the cultural underpinnings of a company,’’ Broderick says.
She identifies three forces underpinning these biases: cultural, belief and structural. The belief barrier goes to what many managers believe the ideal worker looks like. “Most Australian companies think the ideal worker is someone who is available 24/7 with no visible caring responsibilities, so that means male,” she says.
Cultural beliefs include what makes a good mother. “We as Australians believe that good mothers spend all their time with their children”. Structural factors include external child-care. “The real issue is childcare with the affordability and availability of it.”
“People also talk about conscious and unconscious biases,’’ she says. “The fact is career development systems can replicate disadvantage for women. They may look neutral on the face of it, but they would require you to have experience in international jurisdictions and working 24/7. These look neutral but they disadvantage women.”
An Australian Human Rights Commission report, prepared by Jo Tilley, Jane O’Leary and Dr Graeme Russell, found that women are more likely to retire at a younger age than men. That’s hardly surprising, given the conditions they face. The study found that the average age of retirement for women was 49.6 years compared to 57.9 for men. The researchers found that close to 60 per cent of women will have retired by the time they are 55. Only 1.8 per cent of full-time and 2.7 per cent of part-time workers said they had no plans to retire. The research also found that women over the age of 45 were more likely to be casual workers than men, although men tended to overtake them at the age of 65.
Certainly, there are benefits if companies take measures to address the problem. According to the Australian Productivity Commission, increasing the participation rates for women over the age of 55 would increase per capita GDP growth by 1.5 per cent in 2044-45. Research also shows that organisations can achieve better sustained job performance, higher motivation levels, more reliability, improved staff retention; and the accumulation of knowledge, experience and skills by recruiting older workers. That would be especially true for older female workers as gender diversity research shows the benefits would include reduced attrition, greater innovation, better access to target markets and reducing legal reputational risk.
There are a number of strategies companies can employ: parental leaves, part-time policies, and travel-reducing technologies to help women stay the course. While the many barriers that remain are substantial, interventions at critical career points could have a strong impact.
In April 2011, the board at Suncorp endorsed a three-year diversity strategy. The aim, the board said, was for the company to get the best out of its people. The company had a target: 33 per cent female representation in senior leadership by the end of June 2014. This was a two percentage point increase from its benchmarked position in June 2011.
To do this, the company established a Diversity Council. Chaired by the company’s CEO Patrick Snowball, the council piloted flexible working initiatives allowing people to work from home while being connected to the Suncorp hub. It identified the female talent pipeline for key leadership roles and it created targeted development programs for women to build their careers. To make it accountable, it set down quarterly board reporting to track progress against gender targets. It also addressed gender pay inequities via a pay equity review, and it organised unconscious bias workshops for leadership teams, and established a recruitment policy to ensure the final short-list for senior leader positions would include at least one female and one male candidate.
Such was the success of the program that Suncorp met its 2014 target of 33 per cent women in senior leadership positions. In fact, it got there two years ahead of its strategic target.
A proper skills audit has to be unbiased so that gender, ethnicity, age or whether or not the person is physically challenged are irrelevant. What every company needs to be doing is assessing the skills it needs.
As the Australian Human Rights Commission report points out, Australia’s future workforce will depend heavily on the employment of older women. It will future-proof organisations and position them for success in the future.
The key industries in which older women are represented and where there will be strong employment growth in are community services, health, education, retail and among professional workers. According to the ABS, just under one half of older women are employed in health care and social assistance, education and training and retail trade occupations, and just under two thirds are employed as clerical and administrative workers, professionals and community and personal services workers. These are the sectors that will have to put in place strategies for older women. They are also the sectors that will boom.
To summarise, strategies for older women include:
· •Flexibility
· •Skills audit
· •Gender and age targets
· •Addressing pay inequities.
· •Introducing parental leave schemes, part-time policies, and travel-reducing technologies
Examples of equal opportunity leadership
Deloitte
Accounting giant Deloitte has been recognised as an equal opportunity leader for women by the Federal Government’s Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency for eleven successive years. The firm has picked up the awards because of its Inspiring Women program. Launched in 2004, Inspiring Women comprises a series of programs seeking to identify and support talented women in the organisation.
Specifically, Inspiring Women does this through several ways.
1. 1.The business women of the year program, designed to identify talented women in the firm as early as possible.
2. 2.Mentoring program: A mentor can be found for both men and women in Deloitte. It has to be said this is not mandatory, it’s only on request.
3. 3.Structured development programs: The firm works alongside groups such as Chief Executive Women and has also created a career-resilience program working with career development agency Xplore for Success and a networking program working with well-known female directors.
The best testament to the success of the program: growth in the number of female partners at the firm over the last decade, from 4 in the 90s to more than 95 today.
Deloitte has set a target of 25 per cent female partners by 2015. Every business unit in the firm has been made aware of this. Each unit is measured and held accountable for how it’s tracking towards this target.
The key to achieving this has been the way the firm has incorporated women’s career paths into its performance metrics. Managers are measured on how they achieve it.
Every “business segment lead” or “cluster lead” – that is to say, the leaders in the firm – are measured against a set of performance metrics which set in place preferred requirement for female-to-male ratios at both partner and director level. The metrics also include a preferred ratio for female voluntary departures to all voluntary departures in each business segment.
And this is the key to Deloitte’s success: it has created a climate for accelerating the careers of women by incorporating them into the firm’s performance metrics. When partners and directors are evaluated in their performance appraisals, their careers and compensation are evaluated in the context of gender equality. The firm’s business segments are measured on the number of women leaders they have, as well as on the retention of women in their team.
Parsons Brinckerhoff
Engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff has specifically recruited more women despite the fact that fewer women do engineering. The number of women working there has been slowly increasing, although they are still outnumbered, partly because fewer women do engineering and science at university.
The firm has introduced flexible work arrangements with variable start and finishing times, working from home schemes, study leave, phase-in retirements and systems that allow people to purchase annual leave. It has schemes that allow people to accrue 12 weeks over three years and take three months leave. It has increased maternity leave from six weeks to 16.
As part of their gender strategy, the specific focus has been on women in management and leadership roles. Based on the last available figures, there was a 5 per cent increase of females in the manager classification to 29 per cent.
While there are more male engineers than female, the firm has aimed for a gender balanced result when it comes to recruiting managers. The result: 54 per cent of external appointments to manager roles were female.
The firm has systems to ensure it has at least one female candidate considered for all management vacancies across the company. There is also a requirement to have at least one female present on the interview panel for all management roles.
The firm has also implemented a specific mentoring project for female staff to develop female senior talent. The percentage of female participation in the firm’s accelerated development program has continued to build over the years.
Parsons Brinckerhoff also called in a diversity specialist to review its recruitment practices. It established a PB Women’s Network which looks seeks the views of women around the mentoring program. The Network looks at the effectiveness of the accelerated development program and whether the firm supports the needs of carers (both male and female) and those who work part-time.
Senior females and managers leaving the firm are expected to meet with the firm’s managing director to talk about their experiences while they were working there.
The old and the jobless
The big challenge for over 50-year-olds in today’s job market is to make themselves irresistible to prospective employers. The growth in age-related industries, from fitness to recreational vehicles to education, will provide them with many new job and career opportunities.
However, the reality is that older workers who have been targeted for redundancy packages will struggle to get back into the workforce. Age discrimination is against the law in many countries but it is still rampant in the job market. According to the ABS, unemployed 45-64 year olds often have more difficulty in obtaining work than younger job seekers. That means they are more likely to be out of work for longer if they lose their jobs. The ABS stats show that unemployed people aged 45-64 years are more likely to be long term unemployed than younger workers.
An Australian Human Rights Commission report released in 2010 found that there is a lot of age discrimination going on. “Research and consultations show that a number of people over 45 years of age feel they are pre-judged and rejected for reasons such as not ‘fitting into the environment’ or for being ‘too qualified’,’’ the report said.
According to a National Seniors Australia report titled The Elephant In The Room, companies are excluding older workers by placing job advertisements that contain phrases such as ‘fast-paced’, ‘high-flyer’ and ‘can-do’. These are expressly inserted to exclude certain groups.
Then consider language like ‘deadwood middle managers’ by some employers when deciding who to make redundant. It’s just another example of an age-based employment stereotype.
With these challenges, how does an older worker go about nailing a job? To begin with, people over the age of 50 can use their experience as a selling point. Australia has a growing skills shortage partly because boomers are leaving the workforce faster thanis entering. KPMG demographer Bernard Salt calls it the “baby bust”. He says the boomer dominance saw 200,000 enter the workforce each year. This is falling and will continue to scale down, slipping to 50,000 by 2025.
That will create massive gaps. As a result, more companies are likely to start turning to older workers. There are small signs it might be happening already. We are now seeing older people working well into their 70s but not in traditional 9-to-5 jobs. They are moving into the labour force in new roles: part-timers, consultants, contractors and temps. In the next 10 years, finding new ways of working with a growing army of older people at arm’s length from the organisation will be one of the most challenging managerial issues. It will create new job markets for boomers. In an economy constrained by skills shortages, the experience of boomers could become an asset for companies wanting to fill gaps. Boomers are in the box seat.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t happened full-scale yet. One survey shows only 17 per cent of companies have programs in place to use the skills of retirees or former long term employees. That will have to change. With the skills shortage, it will become a big management issue. And that’s good news for boomer job seekers.
Experts say the most important part is to make sure that age is not an issue. Much of it, they say, comes down to attitude. And much of it is not about managers, it’s about the older workers taking responsibility.
First, you need to skill up. If you are still employed, you should get all the training to ensure their skills are right up to date. That will not only help you keep your job. Those skills will be critical if you are targeted for redundancy. National Seniors chief executive Michael O’Neill says employees should be maximising their skills while they are still employed so that they can refer to these when they are seeking work. “That means updating what you’re doing, getting training and ensuring your skills are current,’’ O’Neill says.
Kathy Kostyrko, public sector director at recruitment agency Hays, says that self-confidence is important. She says the worst thing people should do is look at their age as a barrier. “If I feel I am being discriminated against because of my age, I will become more defensive and protective,’’ Kostyrko says.
Older job seekers should also be as flexible as possible. That might mean being prepared to take on lower paying work down the ranks in a company. It is harder to change careers unless you are open to starting from scratch, including dropping salary down to a starting-salary level.
Career coaches say that dates should be left off resumes, especially for degrees earned decades earlier or jobs held long ago. Dates should only be used for recent positions.
They say it is also important to be careful how ageing job-seekers describe themselves. Rather than saying, for example, that you are a senior engineer or an engineer with 30 years’ experience, it would be better to talk about your ‘diverse’ or ‘extensive’ experience.
It is better to use a functional resume format over a chronological one. The length or breadth of your experience is not important here. Employers want a brief idea of the most relevant experience as it relates to the position. It is important to highlight keywords and skills you’ve obtained and make sure these are related to the job description.
You should update it with accomplishments from your most recent position. Then, you should edit the entire document so that each position description demonstrates your value to prospective employers; quantifies how each accomplishment benefitted the company; and where appropriate states (or estimates) the dollars you earned or saved the company for each accomplishment. The overall goal is to show a prospective employer how you could benefit from hiring the job seeker.
You should read it as if you’re the hiring manager, considering interviewing the person whose CV is in front of them. As you read each phrase, you should ask: “What’s in it for us?” They are trying to figure out how that person could benefit the company. You can find other tips on resume-writing and editing online.
It’s a safe assumption that any electronic version of the CV will be scanned by software before a human ever sees it. To get through the automated gatekeepers, you need to apply the principles of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to your CV. This does not require technical skill – all you need to do is read job descriptions very carefully, and where possible use the same keywords in your CV. Industry buzzwords change all the time – so older workers may need to read many job descriptions to find today’s keywords that match their skills and experience.
You could also consider using colour to make your CV visually stand out. If you’re sending printed copies, coloured paper makes your resume easy to spot on a messy desk. Alternatively you could use a template that incorporates colour in a logo, monogram or section headings – all of which work equally well in printed or electronic format.
Unless you’re in a particularly edgy industry, you should avoid multiple fonts, patterns, jarring colours, or insufficient contrast between the text and background – keep it professional, readable, and uncluttered, yet different enough to stand out. You should ask peers for their opinions: show them a few CV designs and ask them to choose the one they’d want to interview.
Also, it’s important to be concise. At the top of the resume, you should give a quick summary of career experience, calling out the skills and job functions that most closely relate to the position. But you should do it in only one or two sentences, no more. Remember that the manager reading the resume will only spend 30 seconds looking at it. Capture their attention. Get to the point straight away.
O’Neill says that it is important to ensure the resumes look current and presented in a way that recruiters are looking for. Get the important stuff about your achievements up top — don’t list things in chronological order.
“You have to ensure it flows clearly and that the current skills and experience are highlighted loud and clear rather than being buried in detail,’’ he says.
“A lot of recruitment processes are time-poor so you have to get to them quickly. They will inevitably grab those that tell their story well rather than having to dig their way through all the detail.”
He says older workers should also make extensive use of social networking, particularly sites like LinkedIn. Emailing resumes is now standard procedure. “You need to continue to push barriers beyond the traditional ways of getting jobs. These days, it’s much more about getting on the front foot and using all the means and mechanisms available to snag the job,” he says.
He says it is also important for older workers to build networks, not only in their current work circles but beyond. Networks kick in when people are looking for work. Most jobs come from people you know. “Strong networks within your own contacts are important. You need to make sure you use opportunities to maintain your social connectedness.”
To compete for 21st century jobs, you need 21st century skills. Many colleges offer a range of affordable computer training seminars that provide all the skills needed to compete with younger job seekers. It is also important to utilise the resources closest to you. The family is an obvious start. Kids, nephews and nieces and grandchildren can help job seekers comprehend all things digital. They will be happy to get their boomer relatives up to speed with all sorts of things from a computer operating system to social media platforms.
Also, you shouldn’t worry if you have to go back to study. A forced career detour might mean you need new skills, whether it’s a full-blown degree, a diploma or certificate. It shows the prospective employer that you’re serious about finding a new career, that you are capable of adapting and learning.
If, as a job seeker, you feel you are an expert in your field, you should consider applying for consulting or contract opportunities. Or you can set up their own business.
The most important part is attitude. Don’t say: “I am too old, they won’t look at me.” If you think you are qualified for the job, then go for it.
How companies can manage age
Monash University research shows that companies are now bringing in measures to adjust to the change with more intense knowledge transfer measures, getting older workers to do coaching and mentoring and more health and well-being programs.
But Professor Phillip Taylor, a director of research and graduate studies at Monash, says companies have a long way to go. “We know from our studies that while organisations surprisingly perhaps seem to be interested in employing older workers, they don’t seem to be terribly interested in investing in them,’’ Taylor says. “They want people who have skills and competencies that they need. But they are not interested in investing in developing skills and competencies, which is a real concern.
“Older workers are used as a stop gap but they are not used as the future. So if you have what we need, we will have you. Otherwise, no thank you. The knowledge older workers have is valuable but employers are not interested in investing in it and developing it.”
HR specialist Margaret Harrison, who runs Our HR Company in Melbourne, says the failure to train is wrong. Training them creates a more competent, well-rounded and innovative workplace.
“Quite often you’ll find that people of mature age aren’t put up for training which is an absolute form of discrimination and it can’t be excused,’’ Harrison says.
“They still need to keep growing. Everybody wants to keep their career growing, no matter what age they are. It’s important they have all the opportunities of career development that everyone else has in the organisation. That means training.”
“The biggest problems that happen would be that younger managers have this in-built discrimination factor. You see it again and again and it’s really nasty.”
That’s hardly surprising, she says. Most human resources managers are either in their 20s or 30s and wouldn’t have the experience and knowhow. “The HR managers need to be trained up,’’ she says. “They need to know how to actually coach the younger managers on how to deal with these older people. If they have these innate prejudices themselves, how on earth are they going to do that?”
She says younger managers need to be trained. “The main thing they need to do is manage the managers who manage the old people to start with. They really need to give the young managers skills to manage older people so that they know how to deal with the mature generation. Part of that is the respect factor and understanding that a lot of these mature workers had past experiences, both work experience and life experience, and they do like to be treated as people.”
It means making some adjustments too. “If you know some personal details about them, like their children and grandchildren and the rest of it, it’s really important. Mature people like clear instructions and no ambiguity. Their body might be slowing down but most times their brain hasn’t,’’ she says.
“One of the other key things is that companies need to know how to manage flexible work arrangements. They might like to have an afternoon where they pick their grandchild up from kindergarten, they might like to keep touch with their mates who retired earlier.”
Catriona Byrne, the creative director at SageCo, a company that helps organisations navigate ageing workforce risks, says it all comes down to basic management.
“We always say that the whole age management thing is really about good talent management. In a lot of ways, the management principles don’t change but there are a couple of important things when you’re managing someone older than you that you need to change,” Byrne says,
“The first thing is to challenge your own assumptions about retirement and work. We have it ingrained in us in Australia about retirement. Some managers think late career isn’t about developing. They think late career is about heading towards retirement. As a younger manager managing an older worker, if you have that in your psyche, it’s not going to help you manage.”
That means having difficult conversations about issues. “If someone is a dud at 55, it’s quite possible they were a dud at 25. It’s not about age, it’s more about attitude.
“If you’re a younger manager and you have a problem with an older worker, don’t assume it’s about age. Sit down and have a management conversation about whatever the issue is and that gets back to that point.”
And the conversations they should have are not about when the older worker plans to retire. “These are the conversations around how you would like to develop in your career. What training opportunities would you like to have? How do you see your role developing? What sort of flexibility do you see might need in the next 10 years?”
Managers need to offer older workers flexibility. They have to balance work with responsibilities of looking after grandchildren and elderly parents, and they also need to time out to pursue other interests.
“They might say ‘I would like to work but I want to do it differently. I would like to work three days a week’ or ‘I would like to change my role from a management role to a specialist role’ or ‘I would like to do more project work rather than the ongoing work’.
“Or they might want to continue the role they have or job share or change an aspect of it.
“So experienced accountants might be able to go to three days if they can palm off some of the administration to a younger co-worker might be able to do. Looking at that job design so people can work longer but work differently.
“Some do want to work full-tilt five days a week but the trend we are seeing is that older workers want to avail themselves of flexibility options in the broadest sense of things.”
This is why financial services group Sun Life Financial has set up an “unretirement index”. Sun Life has defined “unretirement” as “working at least 20 hours per week after the age when one is eligible to receive Social Security benefits.” Sun Life conducted a survey of people in the US aged between 18 and 66. The survey found that more than half of working respondents — 52 per cent — said they expected to work at least three years longer than originally planned and just as many respondents expect to retire at age 70 as age 65. The greatest proportion of respondents (20 per cent) plan to never stop working. When asked at what age they plan to stop working, the highest proportion of American workers (20 per cent) stated: “never”.
Case study: working into your 70s and the end of retirement
Many of the workers at Mercy Health in Melbourne stay on after the age of 65. It’s not surprising – 45 per cent of the workforce is over the age of 45 and the number of mature workers there is over the age of 45. Mercy Health provides health services, aged care and home and community care.
Group diversity organiser Catherine Owen says the home and community care division has a majority of older workers. Most are in their 50s, some in their 60s and even 70s. “The home care side of the business appeals to that older demographic of the business,’’ Owen says. “It’s flexible, people can work casually, they can choose their hours of work and there are not many younger people coming into health care.”
She says many workers there are reluctant to retire. There are two reasons, financial and social.
“The feedback we have had from people one is financial, they just can’t afford to retire,’’ Owen says. “They haven’t been earning huge wages in the health care industry.
“Then there is the social side of things. We have a lot of people who have worked with us for 20 plus years. A lot of their social needs are met through their colleagues so I think that is a concern for them as well. They want to maintain the connection with Mercy Health.”
The problem, she says, is that many of them are struggling to do work which is often physical, where people have to be lifted and moved around.
The group has set up a Corporate Champions program where managers have conversations with those workers about their plans for the future. That can also include them deciding to retire.
“We are looking at a stepping-stone program where there would be a variety of steps people could take in their later career,’’ she says. “Do you want to step up and be a mentor? Do you want to step down and take some flexibility? Do you want to keep working but not at the same level of responsibility? Looking at different pathways people can take and how we have those open conversations and crucial conversations with staff coming to managers and then managers approaching staff.
“The feedback we have received around what people are wanting to do is they are not necessarily ready to leave Mercy Health but they need a break. So they might take three months off and do some volunteering or spend some time with grandkids. We are working around some options for that where they can still come back to Mercy Health in a couple of months and being rejuvenated and they come back to work because they’re not really ready to leave Mercy Health but need some time out.”
The key has been to focus on flexibility.
“For quite some time, people have thought flexibility is only there if you’re having a baby so we are trying to raise that awareness that it’s not just for people who are having a baby, it’s open for everyone,’’ she says.
Many will purchase extra leave. Others will take unpaid leave. But most of them, because they have been working there for more than 20 years, will take it as long service leave.
As she sees it, this will continue to be an issue at Mercy Health. An ageing workforce makes it inevitable and it’s something the group has to manage.
The need for flexibility
Flexibility is the key to attracting and retaining older workers. Organisations will need flexible work practices in place. Managers will be expected to have the skills to deal with requests for more flexible work.
Flexible working hours can assist older employees achieve a work-life balance by enabling them to arrange their hours so that they can attend to personal commitments — for example, accompanying an elderly parent to the doctor, attending grandparents’ day at school or helping out with child care.
According to the ABS, over 40 per cent of full-time workers, or around 1 million Australians, intend to switch to part-time work for a few years before retirement. For many, it might not about leaving the workplace. Instead, they would be focused on establishing a new, sustainable pattern of work for a different stage of life. Flexibility allows a person’s level of investment in work to change over the course of their life. This means they will not necessarily follow a simple career path which ends with a retirement party at age 65. They might not be winding down or looking to achieve a particular peak before retiring. Depending on the individual, they might be accelerating or decelerating the pace of their work. They might be ramping up or ramping down their workload to reflect changes in lifecycle, needs and aspirations. Some might be planning to move to a new location. And many would be ready to contribute in new ways.
A 2010 National Senior Australia study, Valuing and Keeping Older Workers, found that older workers were more willing to work flexible schedules and that flexible working arrangements were the most attractive to older and younger workers. The message there is that companies looking to recruit need to incorporate flexibility into their work schedules.
There are many different forms of flexibility. It can cover many different areas: self-employment, part time work, casual work, fixed term contract work, seasonal work, shift work, telecommuting and consulting. It can cover different sectors from managerial to skilled trades, from personal service occupations to sales work and customer service.
This means older workers need flexibility in the scheduling of full-time work hours, including flexitime or compressed work-weeks. They would also welcome flexibility in the amount of time spent working, including part-time, part-year, or job-sharing. Some would look towards phasing into retirement on a reduced-hours basis. Another option is career flexibility with multiple points for entry, exit and re-entry, including formal leaves and sabbaticals.
Other options would include fewer hours per day or week, fewer days per week, time off without pay reduced pay spread evenly over the year, providing a different position in the organisation, working school terms only, working from home, taking on a training role to make use of the older worker’s experience, special project work, purchasing annual leave and sabbaticals.
Another option is phased retirement where a special type of part-time work arrangement is designed specifically for older workers, allowing them to gradually reduce the number of work hours worked each week or the number of work weeks over a period of time. Usually, older workers negotiate a phased retirement with the organisations where they worked before moving into phased retirement. Many older workers would be likely to postpone retirement if they were offered phased retirement.
Companies can also look at flexible work contracts that offer choices of either long-term or project-based work, perhaps as consultants or temporary employees. Flexible employment contracts make it possible for older workers to enter, exit, and re-enter the work force in a fluid manner. Many older workers would welcome choices of either long- term or project-based work. Flexible work arrangements and other non-monetary characteristics of work may be more important than wages to many older workers.
It is true that these flexible schedule options are typically offered for all employees, and not just older workers. But they make particular sense for older workers because they allow valued, mature employees. In 2010 the Australian Government introduced a right to request flexibility for parents of pre-school aged children and children under 18 with a disability. Older workers, however, have no such right despite the push to keep them in the workforce longer. This has to change.
Flexible regimes like this allow older workers to remain active in the work force while still having the opportunity to tend to matters outside of work. They also make business sense in that they are consistently identified as one of the most effective ways to attract and retain older workers.
Alison Monroe, managing director at SageCo, said research canvassing opinions of 2500 aged 50-pus workers indicated that older employees want to stay employed, but under flexible working conditions. Monroe says that studies show that older workers generally want to remain employed either on a full-time non-fixed hour working week, part-time or under other flexible work scenarios if they feel valued.
She said the 2010-11 data shows that a whopping 81 per cent of older workers said they would continue to work, if they could work differently.
Four companies recently recognised as being among the best companies for offering flexible schedules to older workers are Scripps Health, First Horizon National Corporation, Volkswagen of America Inc., and St Mary’s Medical Centre.
Volkswagen America offers its workers part time options, job sharing, telecommuting and sabbaticals. The company explains its ideas in its corporate social responsibility report:
“All staff members are entitled to up to five years ‘sabbatical’, they do not need to have a baby. Five years to care for the family, to study, to have the adventure of a lifetime, circumnavigate the world. There is no need to tell us why, only when they will be back. Volkswagen keeps a backdoor open for its people – although not necessarily the old workplace. A guarantee is given for the entitlement to a job within the former occupational group – piece-work, performance linked wages, time Family support 48|49 wage or salary.”
The Marriott Hotel’s older employees are into their 60s, 70s and 80s. Forty-three percent are 45 and older; 18 per cent are 55 and older. The company offers packages making downtime without pay available to workers in centres when things are slow. They may take longer breaks, work shorter shifts, leave early or take extra days off. This is offered informally to hotel staff during slow periods.
Flexible work checklist for business:
· •Establish policies that promote part time work or flexible hours and flexible leave options to older workers, such as lifestyle leave and career breaks.
· •Consider establishing programs to facilitate re-hiring former employees who have retired. These programs could include setting up talent pools for part time or project work, or for mentoring and training.
· •Consider phased retirement opportunities with older workers, as an alternative to standard retirement practices.
· •Review the culture and operation of the workplace to ensure that it is suitable for older workers. Ensure systems are in place that will see them getting support from colleagues.
· •Consider the accessibility needs of all workers when implementing new software and other business systems
· •Develop strategies to prevent career stagnation amongst older worker. This could involve including subsidised study, secondments and putting them on to new projects.
· •Review job roles and adjust tasks to ensure that the organisation offers meaningful work that matches older workers’ capacities and talents.
Case study – creating flexibility
Teachers Mutual Bank, one of Australia’s largest mutual bank, has embraced flexibility as part of its workplace model. The bank has gone so far as to put a flexibility clause into its enterprise bargaining with its workers. There is a good reason for this. Almost half of its 450 employees (44 per cent) are over the age of 45 and one third are over the age of 50.
Helen O’Reilly, the bank’s chief HR officer says the reasons for implementing the change were strategic.
“We recognised a couple of years ago that not only was the population at large ageing but also so was our workforce and we needed to put in some flexibility and opportunities for people reaching retirement to ensure they remained engaged while working for us and also as part of our strategy to manage the skills and the knowledge that we have in the organisation,’’ O’Reilly says. “So when we were negotiating an enterprise agreement we actually included a clause that recognised the need to offer mature age workers an opportunity to apply for flexible work, whether it be changes to hours or going part time as they transition to retirement.
“What we recognised was that if we were asked about flexibility or reduced hours and we said no, we knew that one of two things would have happened. The person would have left and we would have lost them altogether, or alternatively they would have stayed because financially they couldn’t afford to leave but they would have been disengaged while still working here.”
She says the flexibility schedule would allow workers and the company to manage their retirement more easily. She says one of the great fears older workers have is of being sidelined once they let their manager know they plan to retire. That is why they are reluctant to discuss it.
“They don’t just to walk out the door one Friday and never go back to work again,’’ she says. “They might like to transition, see what they might like to do in retirement, whether it might be volunteering or any other type of thing, so they would have the opportunity to try that before they leave the workforce altogether A big part of it was to assist long term employees to try and make it easier for them to transition.
“The other side of it was that we would gain as well because we could manage their succession and try and set some of program in place for the transfer of knowledge.”
“What we are trying to say is that’s not our mentality, we do understand that you can be very committed at work but also that you are committed to other things outside of work,’’ she says.
“For us it comes down to the person, their role, and their value.”
She says most of the people taking more flexibile packages opted for reduced hours or working home. The only exceptions were those who had customer-facing roles.
“Then the discussion has to be around what job could you do and you might need to transfer to a different role where you could work from home,’’ she says.
“That’s where we have to weigh up the costs versus the reward we’re getting and if we’re wanting to retain good long term employees, the benefits outweigh the costs.
“We did say when we put it in that it’s not an entitlement, it’s an opportunity for you to sit down, have a conversation with your manager and it has to work operationally for the organisation.
“If it’s not going to work for us, we can’t approve it but there are a lot of options available and putting the onus back on the employee for them to come to us with a proposal that will work.”
As part of that process, the company trials the new arrangements for three months to see if they work and to iron out any kinks.
O’Reilly says it’s also a model that builds productivity.
“My biggest fear was that if we didn’t do anything and people just stay because they couldn’t afford to leave,’’ O’Reilly says. “That can be very detrimental.”
Encore careers
Encore careers, where mature age workers find second careers that combine their lifelong passion with meaningful work, are part of a big trend. Many mature age workers will leave the corporate environment to, for example, study languages or work in a local school or with the local football club. They might take off and spend time working with street kids in Cambodia. Or they might set up a business. According to the ABS, almost 150,000 retirees over 55 returned to paid work in 2008-09, although only a third cited financial reasons for their return.
Or they create their own businesses. One example is consultant and coach Graeme Smith. When he was 65, he set up a business 1-call which looks after people’s houses when they go away on holiday. He says encore careers are now very much the way of the future for mature workers who have been everywhere and have done everything and are now looking for new challenges.
“With encore careers, people are still looking to be involved. They might be busy helping somebody, they might want to create a little business for themselves or do something that is part of the legacy they like to leave behind,’’ Smith says.
“The word retired should be retired. It’s irrelevant today. If you look at statistics and look at the number of people 55 plus and 65 plus who say they totally want to stop work it’s a very minor percentage of the total population.”
The encore career is being driven by converging trends: financial realities, redundancies, long life spans and the desire for a more purposeful existence as we age. Encore careers build on people’s knowledge, skills and experience but what makes them different is the element of personal change, growth and renewal. Encore careers are implicitly about continuous learning, formal or informal, where the person is constantly picking up new skills. This is what makes them attractive to so many people.
What distinguishes the encore career is that it requires a serious time commitment, as opposed to someone giving their time here and there to particular causes. The rule of thumb is that an encore career is the equivalent of half-time employment, not necessarily every week but certainly over the course of a year.
According to the ABS, almost 150,000 retirees over 55 returned to paid work in 2008-09, although only a third cited financial reasons for their return. They just wanted to stay active.
Another example of an encore careerist is Bernard Kelly. Now 68, he was originally helping managers of charities and non-profits with their management education. They were all older than him and he was going to many of their retirement parties. So he decided to switch careers, and become a property investment specialist.
Kelly describes himself as Australia’s retirement strategist. “Basically, you just have to believe there’ll be another job for you when you retire,’’ Kelly says
“When you retire, it’s just a new career. When you go to a stage show and live theatre and they have encore after encore, they keep calling back unexpectedly.
“If you have a white collar job, you can typically become a consultant in the same field. But you may end up doing something different in the same industry.”
One good example is driving a bus. It’s perfect for an encore career, he says.
“An encore career could be a totally different job and being a bus driver is really quite wonderful because they will never face another lay off,’’ he says. “They earn $70,000 a year, there’s no retirement age. If you’re 55 and your factory closes or you’re working for Holden, becoming a bus driver’s job is probably the way to go. It’s a job that readily accepts people who are 55 and 60.”
Developing an encore career takes some planning. In a study for the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, Jane Figgis from AAAJ Consulting says many TAFE Colleges might in the future be looking at reskilling older people. It’s certainly now happening at community colleges in the United States.
Transitioning to an encore career
Sally Thompson, the chief executive officer of Adult Learning Australia, says many people might not have the skills to make the transition. It’s something they have to work on. An encore career is good for their health, finances and general well-being.
“There seems to be a bit of a divide between those who have the skills to continue on working until later life and even shift into the job they have always wanted to do and those who have been skilled out of the workforce,’’ Thompson says.
“One of our concerns about encore careers is that some of the media make it seem that everyone has that opportunity and that this is the way of the future and because there are trends among some sections of the population to stay in the workforce longer and shift careers, some of the coverage make it seems that’s the case for everyone.
“A lot of people don’t have the skills to stay in the field they’re in, much less shift sideways or do something quite different just for the love of it.
“Also, there’s a generation that entered the workforce, particularly men, who thought they would stay for the next 45 years and they would incrementally increase in pay and status up to the point of retirement whereas in the volatile, globalised world we live in, career paths are much less linear and much more up-and-down.
“Sometimes people don’t have the attitude to say driving a bus might be fun. There’s a generation of people who say: ‘I was in a management role, I couldn’t possibly drive a bus.”
She says encore careers are different. People shouldn’t expect they will be on the same wicket.
“If you’re expecting an encore career to be high status, high pay, you’re going to be disappointed,’’ she says. “You mightn’t be picking up the same sort of money, particularly if you were in a management role. Encore careers tend not to be leadership positions.”
She says people wanting an encore career need to get skills. And if they can’t pick up paid jobs, they could start with volunteering work at, say, the local football club, the neighbourhood house or the local school. The best thing anyone can do to actually get started is to volunteer.
What’s important here, she says, is to maximise engagement. Once they are putting their skills to work as a volunteer, they are likely to pick up paid work.
“If they can’t immediately get paid work, then they have to be willing to do volunteer work or work at a lesser pay and that makes all the difference to people being able to pull themselves back,’’ Thompson says.
“The more you’re engaged and keep your skills going, the more likely that you will pick up paid work.
“They need to start engaging, even volunteer. It’s essential that people engage any way they can, through the footy club, through the men’s shed, through the neighbourhood house, through the local school.”
Career coaches say people planning encore careers should start thinking about the things that matter for them. What sort of activities would they volunteer their time for if they knew they could make a difference? The can also look around to find people their age who have reinvented themselves and organise a coffee with them, just to chat and find out how they did it.
There are sectors that will provide a large number of encore careers. In Australia, the booming sectors are in health care and education. Potential encore careers in health care would include registered nurses; home health aides; personal and home care aides; nursing aides, orderlies and attendants; medical assistants; licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses; and medical and health service managers). In education, there would be openings for teachers, teacher assistants and child care workers. Other jobs are in nonprofits and government, including business operations specialists; general and operations managers; and receptionists and information clerks. Then we have clergy and social and human service assistants. All of these are growing areas that will provide work.
So areas worth considering include healthcare, education, green jobs, government and non-profits. Healthcare in particular offers lots of opportunity because of the ageing population. It doesn’t matter whether they have a medical orientation or not, what’s needed here is a willingness to help people.
The encore career is a great opportunity for older workers, providing they have the right mind set. It allows them to age as well as they can.
Encore career tips:
1. 1.The transition might take longer than expected.
2. 2.An encore career often means trade-offs. People might settle for reduced income and reduced power in order to engage in activity that’s more meaningful.
3. 3.Make sure financial circumstances can afford the change.
4. 4.Learn to live with the uncertainty. Get a career coach or mentor
5. 5.Investigate fields where the jobs are. These would include healthcare, education (particularly in special education and maths and science), social services, counselling, mentoring, coaching, green jobs and the non-profit sector.
6. 6.Bus driving is always a good option. Very few young people apply to be bus drivers and bus drivers can keep working into their 70s and maybe beyond.
Mentoring and training
With an ageing workforce, older workers have a distinctive role to play. Companies, particularly in the new growth industries, can use people who are there and transfer them into those roles or hiring older workers to mentor and train younger managers and employees.
This can produce a number of positive results:
· •New perspectives: the older worker would stop defining themselves according to their position and would focus more on the skills that they have built over the years. Their insights would help younger workers understand what lessons they have learned and how careers are often not that linear and can often take lateral moves. Their perspective would provide some guidance and support for those who contemplating what’s ahead or stressing out from what they’re finding. This not only helps people’s career development, it also creates a more stable workforce.
· •Skills development: mentoring actually changes the mentors by introducing them to other levels in the organisation, people that they had not worked with before. This broadens their perspective, increases their wider corporate network, increases their visibility and gives them a deeper understanding of the company. It helps them understand the attitudes of younger generations. It also gives them the opportunity to practise and develop their own managerial skills. And the upside is they could possibly pick up skills from younger workers in areas like technology and social media. They also pick up coaching skills, all part of their career development.
· •Consolidating company values: the experienced mentors are able to pass on the values of the company and its history. And because of their experience, they are able to do it in a credible way. Done well, it could potentially help align more employees with the values of the company.
· •Enabling knowledge transfer: the baby boomers have years of experience and information. A good mentoring relationship will ensure that this institutional knowledge isn’t lost when the mature worker retires and this will in turn facilitate faster, more effective transitions of people into senior positions and increases the prospect of the company retaining the services of quality staff. It is also a more cost-effective way to enhance staff development as it cuts the costs of off-site training.
So how does a company develop a culture where older workers will mentor younger ones? Chip McFarlane, a director at the Institute of Coaching, says measuring the return companies get from mentoring can be complicated. “It depends on what you look for the return in,’’ he says. “You look for a return in people who will give their discretionary effort to the business so they’re trying harder. But if you’re looking only for a bottom-line result, there is no correlation to adding in mentoring efforts. It has to be bigger than that. It has to be part of the overall fabric, the overall approach.”
And companies need to do it carefully. Mentors need to be trained, which can come at up to $20,000 per executive, and it should not be forced on them. “It’s not a silver bullet to solve everything,’’ he says. “Sometimes the problem is coming in where the mentors are sometimes mandated and the individual who is the mentor hasn’t been vetted, they aren’t taught mentoring skills and so they fumble through the relationship.
“When it’s not set up well, we find you can create a wonderful mentoring program but people stumble, it’s haphazard, it’s not as focused and not as successful.”
Margaret Harrison, who runs Our HR Company, says the way to measure the success of a mentoring program is to check the HR metrics such as staff turnover, absenteeism, productivity, sick leave, team efficiency and people seeking out training.
To do it effectively, companies should identify the senior and experienced employees in key areas with the skills that they would like to see passed on to the next generation. They should not only ask them if they want to participate but also if they want to help develop the program, keeping in mind that not everyone wants to be a mentor. But once they come on board, the process would give them some ownership over the company’s strategy of developing the next generation of leaders. The relationship that follows could last for years so the commitment from the mentors is critical.
Mentors need to be trained well. They need to learn about providing guidance, advice, and career coaching, offering emotional support as well as transferring industry and corporate knowledge, steering around obstacles and leading by example. They should understand that they need to have the interests of the mentee at heart. They are embarking on a long-term professional relationship. They need to decide whether they want something that’s formal and well-defined, or something more informal that does not require as much planning and organisation. They should also realise that they may not hit it off straight away with the mentee and that these sorts of relationships might take some time to develop. They need to learn that caution on the part of the mentee is not the same as rejection.
They should also know that while the career matches might not be ideal, they can serve as a resource by offering advice on report writing, networking skills and interviewing techniques. The mentor needs to learn that the relationship also has a spiritual dimension as it is very much about personal growth, getting new insights and overall development that could be life-changing. The mentor should also come to understand that not everyone learns in the same way.
In their initial meetings, the mentor should try to establish some common ground and find out as much as they can about the mentee’s childhood, background and goals. They should discuss expectations about the relationship, what they expect to get out of it, how they can share their knowledge and skills in a way that benefits both parties and look at how to contact each other. All up, they have to reach some sort of consensus about what the relationship should look like. They should also allocate time for their next meeting.
There are different ways to develop the relationship. They could easily develop a range of new ways of working together. These could include:
· •Spending time learning about each other before commencing a formal mentoring relationship. It is important that the two get to know each other really well first.
· •Negotiating ground rules for the relationship which would include meeting times, and issues of confidentiality. Meeting times need to be allocated and the appropriate venue needs to be identified. This can include anywhere from the workplace to more informal venues like cafes.
· •The meeting times have to be part of the standard workflow.
· •Before each meeting, the two need to create lists of things to be discussed.
· •The mentor should not be driving the relationship; rather they should be in the passenger seat. The mentee should be the driver, setting the pace and goals. The mentor is there to provide guidance and direction.
· •Work on the assumption that the best mentor-mentee relationships are reciprocal. As with marriage, there has to be mutual respect for each other’s strengths and contributions. Both parties have to be getting something out of it.
· •Being clear about boundaries. The mentoring relationship is about guidance, no more. Acting as an advocate, gift-giving, lending money, sorting out personal relationships or disputes at work are all out of bounds.
· •The mentor needs to know about deep listening. They should know how to suspend judgement and ask powerful questions, not too confronting but couched in a friendly way but which draw the mentee out and address issues that are most important to them.
· •Exchanging and discussing ideas relevant to each other’s professional role. That could include looking at new challenges ahead
· •Attending seminars and briefings together, exchanging ideas about what they’ve picked up and the insights they have drawn from them. Chances are they will be very different.
· •Discussing career options.
· •Discussing problems that are emerging and looking at potential solutions. The discussion itself would draw the two closer together and create more of a bond.
· •Reviewing the company’s annual report and its financials, and discussing its future, taking into account a range of issues such as market forces, workforce issues and environmental factors. The aim here is to identify the factors that will be crucial to the organisation’s success and how the mentee can position themselves in that milieu.
· •The mentor and mentee working together to develop a list of personal and professional goals.
· •Introducing the mentee to people and materials that might provide some career development opportunities and skills. These could all sorts of areas such as time management, performance appraisals, job interview style, organising meetings and job search.
· •Sharing meals and attending social functions together. The insights gained from these times will help create a more professional relationship.
· •Sharing career stories.
· •Discussing the mentee’s personal vision. What would they like to be remembered for? How do they see their contribution?
· •Reading the same books together during the year, preferably on career development, and discussing them.
· •Conducting short but highly structured phone conversations. The agenda has to be set before hand and there has to be a time limit. However, an intense one-on-one phone conversation is completely different and can provide new insights and perspectives.
Case study: Training and mentorship
The National Australia Bank’s academy provides a university-style learning environment for all its staff. Older workers use it for the Create My Future Program.
Antoinette Totta, the NAB’s Diversity and Inclusion network manager, says the program is designed for workers in the mature age category — for those over the age of 50 to look at the next stage of their career. For some, it could be involve talking about their retirement. For others, it could mean looking at moving into a new area and developing new skills.
“It runs for four hours and covers things like your career — a career health check if you like — on where you are at the moment and the kind of development and opportunities you want,’’ Totta says. “There is a development plan for you to think about, there are the financial aspects, things you need to consider from a financial perspective, there’s health and well-being so it’s very much an all-encompassing content.
“It’s definitely not a program where we encourage you to retire. Our intention is to retain our workforce. We need to, and we also want to retain the skills and the marvellous experience our people do have. It’s an opportunity for them to think about what it actually means for them.”
She says many of the employees at the bank stay on into their 60s and beyond. Indeed, the enterprise and services transformation area of the bank has a preponderance of older workers.
“One of the key requirements for the bank is retention so we do want to make sure we keep our mature workforce.”
That said, everyone has to create their own future. Some might prefer retirement, or working part-time. “We are all individuals we may decide we want to change our arrangement. We want to encourage our mature age employees to think a little about what it means for them.”
She says that could also include further education. “It’s a business funded program. It’s an opportunity for people who are prepared to consider that transitional life.”
She says many choose to go into mentoring, imparting their skills and experience to others.
“It’s just about thinking about the skills you may need to consider developing or approaching people who are about to develop because you may in five years’ time decide to redirect from being a banker to being a mentor to our bankers. Or the skills you want to develop in later years that you may want to start developing now to redirect your career.”
“We have formalised mentoring programs but a lot of mentoring happens informally. You will naturally have an inclination from our mature age workers to pass on information they have gathered and we obviously value that experience. There is a lot of handing on of the tradition of information and experience and training aspects.
She says the company has guidelines to ensure the mentors deliver quality service and have the appropriate skills in communication and leadership. People put their names down as potential mentors and they are picked out. “That way, I can register my details on the academy web site and anyone who is looking for a mentor can go through those who have nominated themselves and their skills and experience.”
Volunteering and company strategies
Volunteering can be an essential strategy for companies in growth industries looking to employ older workers.
This group of employees well-suited for volunteering. Older workers tend to be more committed and give more time to their volunteering work. While many do it formally, many more give their time working with their community, neighbours and family on an informal basis. They volunteer for altruistic reasons and also for social contact and to be active. Volunteering is also good for health. Research by the Washington DC based Corporation for National and Community Services found that people with coronary artery disease who worked as volunteers after suffering a heart attack reported a reduction in despair and depression. That reduced mortality and added years to life. It would also be true to say that those who volunteer have fewer incidents of heart disease in the first place. They don’t have to put in a lot of time either. According to the research, 100 hours a year, less than two hours a week, were enough to produce tangible results.
Research from volunteering and training organisation Community Service Volunteers (CSV) and Barclays found that nearly half (42 per cent) of companies who allow their staff time off work to volunteer say it helps reduce staff sick days. The survey of companies, who cumulatively employ over 230,000 staff, also reveals that one in six employees feel healthier and take fewer days off sick since taking part in employee volunteering programmes.
This is an opportunity for companies. Volunteering programs are a good way to make a company stand out and attract the best and the brightest. Smart managers will use volunteering programs to bring out and develop the real talents of employees. It’s an exercise that can result in better morale and loyalty, increased productivity and more creativity. It moves people outside their comfort zone.
The evidence for the positive impact of volunteering is overwhelming. A 2011 Deloitte Volunteer Impact Survey found that found that employees who frequently volunteer indicate higher levels of engagement with their employer and are less likely to leave in the next 12 months. Added to that, a 2012 Red Balloon/Altus Q Employee Engagement Capabilities Report suggested that volunteering was the “cream in the middle” that made the biggest difference to employee engagement and was as important as coaching and buddy programs. It found that volunteering offered learning and development opportunities for employees.
More to the point, volunteering is a technique that promotes a company’s good name in the community. Volunteer programs also help companies connect with customers, who will see and respect a business’ efforts to improve the community.
Volunteering programs are a relatively inexpensive way to meet expectations of corporate social responsibility. And more smart companies are cottoning on to this. A survey of the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 by the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy in the US found that in 2010, 89 per cent of companies had a formal domestic employee-volunteer program and 52 per cent had a formal international volunteer program.
Volunteering is also an effective way for companies to manage staff retention. Highly motivated employees, including older workers, who are investing their time volunteering are more likely to stay. It’s also a good tool for attracting quality talent. Research from the Centre for Work-Life Policy, again in the US, shows that high-potential employees want to give back to the world. As a result, they seek out employers that allow them to participate on company time.
The CSV and Barclays research found that 92 per cent of employees say that they would prefer to work for a company with an employee volunteering project than one without; 90 per cent felt that employee volunteering had improved staff morale; about 59 per cent felt that volunteering makes them feel more energised and productive at work; and 42 per cent said they were less likely to leave a job where there is an employee volunteering scheme.
Older workers contribute experience and as such, are ideally placed to work as volunteers. Their experience and know-how can add value to communities. Senior volunteers are much sought after by organisations thanks to their skills and life-experience. Older people contribute much time and energy as volunteers. In turn, there are health and social benefits associated with volunteering as it makes people feel more involved and provides them with a greater sense of purpose.
A volunteer program is also perfect for companies looking to manage older workers reducing their work hours, change their roles to new lines of work, working part time, going back to study. Organisations need to ensure that they encourage and support older people as volunteers, doing this as part of their strategy to address ageist policies and practices.
Avenues open to volunteers
There are a variety of things older workers can do if they wish to volunteer. There are volunteering opportunities in animal welfare, arts and culture, museums and heritage, community service, disaster relief, education, emergency response, family support, health, homelessness, indigenous rights, migrant support, environment and conservation, recreation, seniors, community sports groups, veterans and ex-service people, drug and alcohol support and young people.
There are also opportunities with virtual volunteering. Dedicating your time and the benefit of your knowledge and experience need not mean leaving home. Older people with access to a computer can volunteer by translating documents, offering consulting advice or developing designs. There are all sorts of areas they can focus on from health, education, migrant support or helping develop community organisations and local sports teams.
If they have carpentry or plumbing experience, they could also help communities build homes and villages in third world countries or with indigenous communities. Retired or self-employed business people could also use their valuable skills to help educate communities worldwide on how to successfully manage budgets, projects and how to get the best price for their efforts.
Company policies and volunteers
Companies need to celebrate the achievements of these volunteers. But they also need policies that will make it easier for older workers to do it.
First, they need to have clear guidelines for volunteering. When volunteers are being asked to design and develop community activities, the companies should support them to do so based on their interests, skills and experience and to further develop their activities over time. The company should provide structured support in the form of induction, essential procedures, and guidance on the boundaries of appropriate behaviour and training which responds to volunteers’ needs. This will probably require the company to work with the organisation to which the volunteer is devoting their time.
Companies should also provide appropriate training, and support volunteers to systematically build on their skills and experience, ensuring there’s a sufficient number of volunteers to avoid placing too great a burden on an individual volunteer.
The Australian Institute of Practice and Governance says the organisation’s budget should include provision for volunteer out-of-pocket expenses, funding allocations necessary for the salary and benefits of paid staff with responsibility for supervising volunteers, appropriate space for volunteers to work, tools and equipment, uniforms if required, volunteer recognition, appropriate insurance coverage, training and professional development costs and evaluation costs.
“The person designated to manage the volunteer program is responsible for an essential element of the organisation’s human resources, and they must work collaboratively with other staff and consult them when before considering any new directions within the volunteer program. If staff members work with volunteers, their own position descriptions should specifically include their key functions and responsibilities related to volunteer involvement.
“Volunteers should receive levels of supervision appropriate to their task. Many volunteer assignments require minimal supervision, but some that are more complex (or involve higher risks) requiring a higher degree of supervision.
“As with paid staff, volunteers need to hear how they are doing. If volunteers are performing below requirements, or putting themselves or others at risk, they must be told. Regular, as well as informal, performance reviews also provide an opportunity to commend and to thank volunteers for their efforts.”
They might also have to restructure work schedules. Options may include flexible schedules, part time, job sharing, telecommuting, extended leaves of absence and phased retirement.
Handing multiple generations
For the first time, we are entering an age where there will be five generations in the workplace: veterans, boomers, X-ers, Gen Y and coming up, Gen Z or what I call the i-natives — kids now in their teens who grew up with the Internet, tablets and mobile phones. Each generation will have different perspectives and priorities. Different generations don’t share the same work styles. Each will have perceptions of the other, and each will go about their work in a different way. Older workers, for example, might be used to more meetings, younger ones might be content to sort things out over email or messaging. Older workers will have different views about their career paths to young folk. Boomers are more likely to expect people to pay their dues and do their time, Gen X are more sceptical and independent-minded, Gen Y tends to prefer more feedback and teamwork. And IT departments now are dreading the arrival of technologically in-tune kids. All this could potentially create tensions in the workplace.
Yet generalising about age groups is always dangerous. Like a lot of dogma, there is an element of truth to the claims of generational differences. But it’s not the real world. Most people, for example, would agree that men, on average, tend to be taller than women. But it’s not true to say that every man is taller than every woman.
The same applies to generations. Some gen Y people are conservative and old before their time, and there are people in their 70s and 80s who seem to be forever young. And that’s not even talking about differences that might come from geographic location, gender and cultural background.
Research by Jennifer Deal, a scientist with the Centre for Creative Leadership in the US, found that the so-called generation gulf is a myth. Her 2007 book, Retiring The Generation Gap, analysed the working patterns, behaviour and attitudes of 3200 respondents born between 1925 and 1986.
It exposed a number of misconceptions. For example, the one about the younger generation having no values, or having a set of values very different from their elders.
The research found that people of all generations had similar values and that family was the one chosen most frequently. Also, it found that values and behaviour were not the same thing. People can behave differently and still have the same values.
It found that people of all generations want respect; they just define it differently. People in positions of authority want their decisions to be respected, older people want people to respect their experience, and younger people want their ideas and suggestions to be respected. And asking questions is not a sign of disrespect.
Similarly, the research found that no one really likes change. Analysis of the data showed that resistance to change related much more to people feeling threatened about the loss of power or resources, than it did to their age or generation.
When it came to job-hopping, there was little difference. Indeed, between the ages of 36 and 40, people changed jobs more frequently than younger generations did and younger workers were no more likely to job-hop than the older ones.
Whatever differences there were related more to attitudes than to substance.
When a younger person, for example, left an organisation for anything other than family reasons, they were seen as crass and disloyal, whereas older people who had been around for years were spoken of more kindly. Behind this difference is the underlying assumption that younger people should be grateful for having a job at all, while older people have earned their stripes.
According to Deal, the generation gap is blamed for conflicts that have nothing to do with generational differences. Bad and good behaviour exist in people of all ages.
But the conflicts, she says, have everything to do with organisational power dynamics. “Most intergenerational conflict shares a common point of origin: the issue of clout — who has it, who wants it.”
With that, managers need to know how to handle those issues. One of the most common manifestations of this is the phenomenon of younger managers in charge of older workers.
Indeed, demographics are reshaping management. The managers are getting younger. Demographers say Generation X and Nexters make up about 45 per cent of the workforce. As a group, these 18-to-41 year-olds equal the same percentage of the workforce as the Baby Boomer category. The difference is that the boomers are more likely to be retiring over the next few years.
The result: more boomers will be working for younger managers. Some of them might end up working for managers young enough to be their children.
This can lead to tensions. A 2009 study by Mary Hair Collins, Joseph Hair and Tonette Rocco found that older workers expect less from their younger supervisors than do younger workers. Older workers also don’t think much of their management skills and leadership.
Peter Cappelli, a professor at US business school Wharton, found that older workers are more likely to get discriminated against by younger managers. “If you look at the research on older workers, you see an incredible amount of discrimination against them, bigger than race, bigger than gender,’’ Cappelli said in an interview with the Wharton newsletter.
A case in point is Allan Gibson, a 65 year old male who retired from full-time employment. Gibson had a career that spanned 47 years across three of the major financial institutions — principally Westpac for about 34 years, eight years with the ANZ and then four years with the CBA.
“It was probably not until I reached the age around about 50 that I started to encounter a shift between working for older managers, older than me at the time, to what then emerged as a changing workforce in terms of younger managers in positions,’’ Gibson says.
“I have to admit it never worried me although at times I sensed a degree of immaturity by some of those managers. That immaturity often came out in terms of not being able to understand there was a bigger picture in terms of the events or circumstances that were prevailing but rather, seeing a short term benefit without a long term appreciation or assessment of what else needs to occur.
“They were being driven by a marketing desire to achieve a desired outcome, usually with a sense of personal gain by way of bonus or incentive, and making them look good at the expense of good management and proper standards and compliance.”
One example was a marketing manager who could not comprehend Gibson’s approach to work.
“There were times when I was in a lending role and exercised my delegated authority in terms of making decisions on credit assessment. I was challenged by a younger marketing manager who was only looking at the marketing benefit of doing that deal as opposed to the credit risk involved through doing it.
“I had the benefit of being able to draw from a wealth of background knowledge of past events. That other person didn’t have an appreciation for it.”
The result: Gibson was sent into Coventry. “I was seen as not being a team player and part of the gang,’’ he says.
There were other incidents too. “I can recall one situation where I knew something was wrong with a particular deal and I pushed back. I finished up being carpeted by a younger manager on the basis of me needing to be more commercially-focused.”
Juliet Bourke, a national lead for diversity inclusion and consulting partner at Deloitte, says managers, and for that matter the older workers, need to leave stereotypes at the door.
“People often relate to each other in terms of age and age is a proxy for something else,’’ Bourke says. “That something else being hierarchy, that is we assume if someone is older we should be giving them greater deference. It can also be the stereotypes around young and dynamic and creative versus ‘can’t teach an old dog new tricks’.
“The first thing is to try and see the person in front of you rather than seeing them through the lens of stereotypes and not the reality of the person. That first one is around changing your mindset.”
“The second one is around changing your behaviours and what I mean by that is trying to see it from the other person’s point of view.”
She says the older worker could actually take the lead here to reframe the relationship.
Bourke says: “In some ways, it’s easier for someone who has been around the block a few times to take that mature approach and say to the younger leader: ‘This must be hard, I don’t quite know what I would do if I were in your situation, I feel for you’ rather than playing the victim role and stamping your feet and go on about getting recognition and saying: ‘In my days this was how we did things’.
“To some degree, the person who is older and who has been around the block would have the level of maturity to take on a bit of a leadership role in establishing this more mature relationship because the person who has less leadership is just feeling their way.
“Really what you’re aiming for as the older worker is to become the trusted advisor, that’s why it could be golden. For a leader to have someone in their team who is a trusted advisor who has been around the block a few times, that’s a wonderful position to be in.”
Jo Smyth, who runs change management programs at the ANZ, says the older workers in her team have completely different priorities to the younger ones. “I’ve found that older workers’ priority for their job is not necessarily career driven. Certainly by contrast to the younger workers, it’s all about career and how quickly they can take over my job,’’ Smyth says.
Many older workers, by contrast, are more focused on issues like retirement, learning or doing the job really well.
She says it’s the manager’s job to understand that. She says managers have to get to know each worker on their team really well, regardless of their age.
“It is about the individual, and everyone has a different motivator coming into work and doing their job,’’ she says. “For some people it is about careers, for some it’s about a couple of years left, for some people it’s to pay the school fees or have a holiday every year.
“Understanding people’s motivations for work and then making sure everyone is on the same page in terms of the quality of the work that they need to deliver, gives people a different perspective on their role.’
“I think people in leadership roles come unstuck when they don’t take the time to do that.”
How to handle a multi-generation workforce:
· •Assess every person for what they are
· •Take time to get to know each person
· •Don’t stereotype generations
Case Study: Handling a mix of ages
The workplace at Ben Willee’s Melbourne advertising agency Spinach is a mix of Gen Ys, Xers and boomers. As managing director, Willee says it requires some effort keeping them working together.
“People are people and they should be managed according to the type of person they are, not the generation and that’s good leadership.”
He says the company’s HR managers play a critical role.
“We have a detailed HR process for each person and that involves sitting down and talking about that person’s goals as an individual — personally, professionally and financially. We have an annual review. We try to talk to them monthly but the reality is that never happens monthly, and with most people it’s every two months and at worst every three months. How they are tracking against these goals and whether they are happy and what they want to achieve.
“It’s a key part of us as a business. We are a small business and we have very little room for the insidiousness of one unhappy person in the business, it tears the place apart.”
While the advertising agency is predominantly young, and has young managers, 30 to 40 per cent of staff there are in their 50s.
The key, he says, is for the managers to show they are listening to the older worker. Much of it comes down to the changing nature of the industry.
“Our business has changed and some people will lament technology in the ad business because what it means is that anyone with an Apple Mac can make an ad and send it off. What happens is that that has commoditised a lot of the work. What that means in a lot of cases is we compete with people who want to do it in less detail and less consideration. The real issue that affects us is that younger people who have not had a lot of experience tend to be much more likely to accept that. The older ones won’t and don’t want to associate themselves with that work.”
When that happens, the younger managers have to talk it through with the boomer employees and look at the issue in detail.
“You sit down and talk about the commercial realities and what they want to do. The easiest way is to say: would you have us turn away this opportunity, would you have us adjust it, how do you want to approach it,’’ he says. “Occasionally we have a discussion internally with those senior employees about whether we should or shouldn’t do that work, and that’s a really powerful part of management. Most people are smart enough to know that if we only took the work on our terms we’d have very little work so they recognise the world has changed.”
The important part, he says, is to give those employees the opportunity to make their views known. They need to be listened to and acknowledged.
“Very occasionally, you get people saying this is complete shit, I want nothing to do this, I will do this under sufferance,’’ he says. “That’s very rare. More often than not they will recognise you’ve turned away business to make their life better and easier so they see that compromise coming from up so the compromise coming from down is: ‘I’ll work on something that isn’t exactly my terms.’
“Most people are smart enough to know that if we only took the work on our terms we’d have very little work so they recognise the world has changed.”
The process of engagement is the key
“Giving people freedom of voice is the biggest part of management. Half the problem is people don’t feel listened to and they want to feel listened to,’’ he says. “More often than not you’ll say you’ll take on board that information, and that’s where you might have a second or third conversation. And that’s where managing more experienced workers is absolutely rock solid gold because you get to take on board the initial thoughts and go away and think about it. You can apply some rigour to the commerciality of it and go back and have another conversation.
“People start recognising that you are taking on board what they’re saying and you try to negotiate something in between that works for everybody. I think a big part about management is acknowledging, especially more mature workers, their great level of experience and what they have to offer a business.
“We talk about how to manage people and we talk about situations and the best way to manage different individuals through those tough situations, and more often than not, giving people an input and using their experience to help you negotiate an outcome is enormously valued.
“Most of the considered older workers will realise there is always a need for experience. You have to give them the opportunity to tell stories to explain how they got to where they got to, and storytelling is what our business is about.”
Every quarter, the firm has a dinner. It is specifically aimed at bringing staff closer together, bridging the generations.
“We all go out and have a few drinks. We go to a restaurant or pub, we try to move around so you’re not sitting next to the same people and try to get to know each other. That’s a good way to get to know each other’s desires.”
Health promotion in the workplace
With older workers, health and well-being is critical. Data shows that older workers are more likely to get injured than middle-aged or younger workers.
WorkCover data shows that older workers account for 800 more claims annually than their younger counterparts. According to WorkCover, this was particularly so for female trade professionals, male trades workers, females in the education industry and females in the health and community services industry. It also affected male labourers, males in manufacturing and males in personal and other services.
The costs associated with back injuries for older workers totals $31.7 million across all industries. Studies indicate that older workers tend to have fewer accidents. However, when older workers do get injured, the injuries tend to be more severe which means they take longer to recover. Also, the injuries tend to be different. Younger workers tend to get more eye or hand injuries. Older workers who have been working for many years report having more back injuries.
Many workplace injuries are the result of doing the same things again and again. Repetitive motion injuries will develop over time and older workers, who have been doing these tasks for many years are more susceptible. As a result, they may report more musculoskeletal injuries since they’ve had longer for the condition to develop. Health risks associated with repetitive work include carpal tunnel syndrome, tennis or golf elbow (epicondylitis), shoulder tendonitis, tension neck and lower back pain. Most of these conditions are difficult to reverse and develop over time.
The bottom line for many businesses therefore is that having more older workers may result in more workers’ compensation claims. And because older workers tend to have more severe injuries when they do happen, companies need to make adjustments to work stations or work patterns to make them as safe as possible. They also have to make sure each person is suited for a particular task and is safely able to do it.
This means the businesses need health promotion programs to reduce the likelihood of injury and increased workers compensation costs.
Companies could ensure that a person (regardless of age) is suited for the job, including the manual handling tasks, and can carry them out safely. They could also adapt duties to suit older workers. For example, an older worker with reduced physical strength might spend more time operating machinery or doing office work than manual labour.
Companies should also look at rotating physically demanding and repetitive tasks. Companies can also provide ergonomic work design tailored not only for older workers but everyone. This would cover areas like the design of placement of materials; providing sufficient space for equipment and functional movement; and using light weight, well–maintained equipment; ensuring the workplaces can be adjusted for different sized people with adjustable seats, arm rests and foot rests.
Companies need to ensure that workplace lighting is adequate for the job at hand. They should design workplaces and workstations to ensure safe, efficient movement and to promote correct postures and ensure that work processes and work items (such as tools and equipment) do not pose risks to workers. They could also brief designers and engineers involved in tasks and equipment about reducing or eliminating risks and purchase mechanical devices to reduce the need for manual tasks. Companies should also regularly assess levels of occupational stress and introduce stress management training if required. Stress management programs can teach workers about the nature and sources of stress, the effects of stress on health, and personal skills to reduce stress — for example, time management or relaxation exercises.
Companies can also introduce employee assistance programs to provide individual counselling for employees with both work and personal problems. They could train all employees in strategies to prevent injury. This means employees should be trained in how to perform the tasks safely, how to use the equipment and how to assess the risk and implement risk controls. Managers should have competencies relating to the supervision of manual tasks.
A successful health promotion program needs to have a leader. It needs someone with the energy to encourage management and the rest of the workforce to get on board, otherwise it won’t happen. It also requires total commitment from management. Where management is seen to be ‘walking the talk’, they are more likely to get workers involved.
Management doesn’t have to set up a committee or write a policy. However, it needs to communicate to the workforce why it’s important, both from the company’s perspective and that of the workers. For management, it would be about improved productivity and for workers, it could be about better lifestyles and work-life balance. In setting it up, it is also important to involve workers and get them to identify areas that need addressing and making suggestions about what needs to be done. In smaller workplaces, this might be as simple as asking workers what they would like to see happen.
Workers might have many ideas covering aspects of health and wellbeing. Managers might create a focus group and ask for input through regular staff meetings. Alternatively, they could put an anonymous suggestion box in the staff room or cafeteria. Whatever strategy is used, it’s likely that certain themes will emerge such as stress, extended sitting time, access to healthy food options and flexible work packages.
This will help ensure the program is relevant to workers and the workplace. The company should also look at what’s easily available. This would include flu vaccinations, an Employee Assistance Program, flexible working arrangements and smoke-free policies. All these initiatives could be put under the banner of workplace health and wellbeing. That gives the program a profile, and it engages staff while building momentum for further changes. In larger organisations, it would be necessary to conduct a more extensive survey, collecting baseline data about issues like diet, exercise and stress.
According to a study published in the January 2013 issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, workplace health promotion programs can reduce average worker health costs by 18 per cent. Savings are even larger for programs involving older workers, says the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM).
The study combined data from two major studies that estimated savings from reductions in seven risk factors or medical conditions typically addressed by workplace wellness programs: physical inactivity, low fruit and vegetable intake, smoking, overweight/obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and alcohol abuse.
“The results suggested that, if all heightened risk factors could be reduced to their ‘theoretical minimums’, total medical care expenses per person for all working age adults would be reduced by about $650, or approximately 18 percent. The possible savings increased with age: up to 28 percent for older working adults and retirees,” according to the ACOEM news release.
The potential medical savings would be quite large.
University of Illinois researchers found that older workers benefit most from a modest health behaviour program that combines a web-based risk assessment with personal coaching.
The researchers enrolled 423 participants into three study groups: a COACH intervention (basically a web-based risk assessment with personal coaching support); the RealAge intervention (a web-based risk assessment with behavior-specific online modules); and a control group that received printed health-promotion materials.
Susan Hughes, a professor of community health sciences and co-director of the UIC Center for Research on Health and Aging at the Institute for Health Research and Policy, said the results were striking.
At six and 12 months, participants in the COACH program reported eating significantly more fruits and vegetables than the control group, and also reported significantly more minutes of physical activity. They also reported a significant reduction in dietary fat intake at 12 months.
“What we found is that there were real differences in uptake between the two groups,” Hughes told Science Daily. “Ninety-five per cent of people in the COACH program actually used the COACH intervention, as compared to 59 per cent of people in the RealAge arm.”
How to promote health in the workplace
· •Make sure workers are suited to their jobs.
· •Adapt jobs to suit older workers.
· •Look at rotating physically demanding and repetitive tasks. Companies can also provide ergonomic work design.
· •Make sure there is a leader to run the program. It is also important to involve workers and get them identifying areas that need addressing and making suggestions about what needs to be done.
· •Studies have found that older workers benefit most from a modest health behaviour program that combines a web-based risk assessment with personal coaching.
Conclusion
The global economy’s tectonic plates are shifting with an ageing population. The trend is likely to create new pressures on government budgets around the world. It’s also likely to change workforces forever and create massive skills shortages. Fewer will be working and productivity could plummet. An ageing population will be the greatest challenge facing economies around the world.
On the other hand, it could transform the world economy by opening new industries and investment opportunities.
The challenge for companies is to create systems that will let them maintain the skills in their workforces and build new markets and industries.
There are of course a number of unknowns ahead. The pharmaceutical, electronic and genetic engineering technologies could change the economics of ageing. Add to that potential changes in fertility rates, not to mention macro-economic shifts like for example slowdowns in China and the BRIC economies.
One thing remains indisputable: the world will continue to age. Companies, economies and consumers will have to adapt to create an age-friendly backdrop for a seismic demographic event.