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20 Aug 2015
by Debi O'Donovan

What constitutes age management for an HR professional?

The term age management has been around for some time now.

So I got to thinking: what would need to be included if an HR person was responsible for age management within an organisation?

To set the scene: we are fast approaching a world where many people may never retire or will, at least, work part time well past conventional retirement age. This is the 'ageless workforce'.

This has several ramifications for HR, both obvious, and not so obvious.

A few weeks ago I sat in on a workshop run at a City firm for their staff aged over 50. These were all staff that the HR department expected to work past age 65.

This firm needs to find a way to help these staff make realistic financial and career decisions as they get older, while also managing a way to allow these employees to pass on their knowledge and experience to younger staff.

A potential threat to the firm is that an entire cohort of older staff will retire within months of each other leaving a gaping talent hole. 

Learning, development and coaching are key streams to their age management programme. Older staff need to learn about their retirement finances, they need to develop new skills via coaching and training in order to continue working for longer than they originally expected, while also passing on what they do know by mentoring other staff.

But it is not simply older staff who need to keep training to update skills. We will all need to do this in a world where we have 50 year careers.

There will be skills needed in just a few years from now that we can’t even envision today. Will we rely on young, inexperienced graduates to fill all those posts?

Surely some of the jobs that need those skills will also need experience and maturity? We can’t rely on education systems to step in to deliver all the newly-skilled employees.

Fifty year careers mean that learning and development from employers will have to take the front seat. A good friend of mine is a careers teacher, and he was telling me that he no longer advises his pupils on specific careers. Instead he focuses on skills that can adapt over their working life.

His pupils today expect to keep learning and growing as the years go by in their careers. So employers will need to adjust to offering more training, mentoring and coaching than ever before in order to keep up with the pace of change as well as to keep talent.

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Another crucial area of age management is that of dealing with employees who are carers of older dependents.

Over the years UK employers have generally become good at supporting parents of young children, partly spurred on by EU legislation.

But employers seem to have a blind spot when it comes to helping staff who are getting older who also care for elderly dependants who are getting even older.

Dealing with a child needing day care is relatively straightforward. Dealing with an 85 year old ... well you can’t just pop them into day care. Adults don’t appreciate that. They also don't like being cared for by a variety of 'babysitters' the way a child may be.

Professional carers are often less willing to work with adults than children so the churn of carers is much higher in the eldercare field. And elderly adults that need care tend to deteriorate over the years.

All this makes the caring responsibilities of staff in the workplace a complicated and stressful challenge.

One in eight paid workers in the UK is a carer of an elderly person, that is 12.5% of the workforce. And that proportion is predicted to grow.

It is no wonder that the flexible benefits research from Employee Benefits magazine last year found that the benefit employers most wanted to introduce was that of eldercare vouchers.

But the problem is, even if eldercare vouchers had a tax break, where and how would you spend them? All the difficult reasons mentioned above come into play here.

Talking of employee benefits, what has still to be resolved is how to mitigate for the fact that group risk benefits will fall away from older employees' packages as they hit 65 or State retirement age. Whatever the reason, to these employees this will represent a loss to the benefits package.

Another element of age management is the impact of the physical and mental toll of working longer.

When I have raised this issue in front of employers I am surprised at how many haven’t thought about it.

It will be interesting to see, in years to come, whether it will become law for employers to adapt workplaces to meet the needs of older staff, just as we have seen in the ruling to adapt workplaces for obese staff.

The 2007 example of BMW adapting its workforce for older staff is well known. They made a number of workplace adaptations, including making the print bigger on screens and tilting computers so engineers could see them more easily.

But that was nearly 10 years ago. And it is still a rare best practice example.

Just this spring I was speaking to the reward director of a well known high street retailer which employs lots of older workers.

Although she was aware older staff needed more help than younger staff to get to grips with the digital aspects of their jobs, she admitted that they hadn’t considered the physical toll yet.

And if that nationwide favourite store which is well known for looking after staff hasn’t considered it, we can assume the majority of employers haven’t.

It would be extremely helpful to see insurance companies get this message across more clearly.

They probably have enough data and management information from health and risk claims to start to be able to educate employers and employees about the impact of work: deskbound, physical and mental.

Because the message isn’t out there yet.

I was researching an article on this topic last year, and while a few group risk providers were on the ball, many brokers had quite some catching up to do (possibly because of how this insurance is sold).

My next area of age management is that of protecting the grey matter inside our heads for when we go grey on top of our heads.

On the mental health front, employers do seem to be starting to take note, but I am not sure many HR people have yet taken on board the importance of achieving good mental health in a world where we might be working for 50 years.

The stigma of mental illness is still firmly in place and it seems that any focus on getting staff back to work quickly is more of a stopgap with the main driver being tackling anxiety, depression and stress. It is relatively short term thinking, not long term.

I also rarely hear of employers being truly concerned about the impact of the ‘always on’ culture (facilitated by our digital devices) and working 24/7 on our mental health in the long term.

Although as one HR expert pointed out: generation Y and Z are used to being digitally available 24/7. So not being ‘always on’ could be more stressful to them.

So perhaps we need to be reevaluating employee assistance programmes, how they are used … or in some cases not used. There must be a way we could be making more of this valuable, but often underused service.

Age management is a new discipline that needs lateral thinking because it affects many parts of the HR toolkit, and all ages of the workforce.

Done well, it can drive business productively and avoid workforce planning disasters.