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source from:ft
https://www.ft.com/content/c4861b0c-3f88-11e7-82b6-896b95f30f58
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Companies need to develop flexibility to keep older workers Premium
The arrival of a multi-stage life brings challenges for managers, writes Andrew Hill
YESTERDAY by: Andrew Hill
The obsession with how to manage millennials is obscuring another potentially larger problem: how to manage their parents. It is reassuring, then, that a group of UK businesses, including Barclays, Boots, Aviva and the Co-op, have started to measure the size of the skills gap that they could fall into as many more people retire from the workforce than join it.
On Tuesday, these companies and others set a target of increasing the number of over-fifties they employ by 12 per cent by 2022. As in other areas where business awakes to its social responsibility — from staff wellbeing (healthy workers are more productive) to environmental policy (clean factories are more efficient) — an underlying self-interest is driving the concern. Even if automation can cover some of the looming skills deficit, businesses that do not learn how to attract and manage older workers will lose out. They lose access to a valuable pool of experience and lack inside knowledge about how to handle their older customers.
Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, authors of The 100-Year Life, about the challenges and opportunities presented by increasing longevity, found that, with few exceptions, most companies were doing very little to tackle the problem. “Most have kept with the traditions of recruitment and development that were created more than 50 years ago,” they write.
To profit from the wisdom and experience offered by older workers — and accommodate their needs — companies will have to develop two skills that they are traditionally quite poor at: flexibility and a willingness to deal with complexity.
In parallel with the mass-production techniques that underpinned the growth of big business in the 20th century came a standardisation of worker development that served large companies well for decades. In this three-stage life, age was a rough, but reasonable proxy for employee needs. Companies could predict that sometime in their sixties, workers would retire, their departure lubricated by generous pension arrangements.
But staff currently in the workforce — and many older workers who would be willing and able to rejoin it — are increasingly expecting a multi-stage life, where education, work and retirement no longer follow a strictly linear course. Simultaneously, the corporate retirement benefits that once eased the transition to old age have disappeared. Companies, write Ms Gratton and Mr Scott, “will increasingly see offering more diverse employment policies as a major strategic advantage, especially in high-value-added industries where human capital plays a crucial role”.
Some workers — particularly those in senior roles — will also have to accept that if they are to continue in work, their status will change. The value of part-time and on-demand contributions to the company should increase, while the simplistic idea that people achieve “seniority” through continuous service, followed by abrupt departure, breaks down. Measurement and targets, in other words, are just a start.
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