Yesterday, Angela was pleased to be able to attend the ILC-UK/renEWL/Uncertain Futures conference ‘Overcoming Inequalities: Addressing barriers to extending working lives’. The day included presentations from a large and impressive line-up of speakers, from the research project team, employer and third sector representatives and including a personal review of his last year’s work by John Cridland. Here she picks out some of the key issues.
Structural inequalities
Health and socio-economic inequalities, as well as ethnic and family structures, underpin many of the inequalities observed in achieving extended working lives. And the foundations for these inequalities are likely to have been laid in early careers and sometimes in youth and childhood. Inequalities can have a spatial dimension, and a North South divide can be observed as well as urban and rural differences.
These problems are complex and temporally deep-rooted. The challenge is to both achieve long-term change but also deliver improvements to cohorts already at the end of their working lives, as well as those who have already exited early and might want, or be encouraged to return to work.
What can be done to address matters now?
It was agreed that the burden for action in current strategies lies with employers. Unfortunately, the researchers took the view that employers have still to work through the full implications of the task at hand.
Potential employer interventions that were identified included improved flexible and agile working, better job design – including to create jobs that fit the people rather than the other way around, better support for carers and more general improvements in workplace environment and conditions.
Novel solutions to issues, such as burnout and later life problems with shift working, could be developed, such as switching experienced staff to roles as apprentice mentors – or perhaps we could better see them as coaches – which would have the additional benefit of providing for knowledge and skills transfer pre-retirement. The researchers stressed that employers need to continue to discuss retirement options with employees and not feel that such discussions are precluded by the removal of the default retirement age.
Evidence shows that the potential for such actions will vary according to occupations, and that employers and employees may have different views on what is, or is not problematic. It was also noted that such interventions may be ‘more topical than typical’ – spoken of but not necessarily happening as yet.
Skills and training
Evidence indicates that there are issues around perceptions and communication of the value and competency of older workers. A Fitness to Practice exercise for NHS midwives was given as an example. However, older workers who do not feel appreciated and valued had been observed to make earlier work exits.
Good practice quoted focused on adapting work to suit the capabilities of employees. But there remains an issue about training – essential to maintain and update skills and competencies but generally observed to fall off as workers age. The example of telephone engineers was noted, where the move from copper wire to fibre-optics required a year of training, and employers struggled with the question of the appropriateness, and economics, of offering this to skilled employees who might be about to retire. But we were also reminded of the earlier well-publicised research into B&Q and McDonald’s, which showed the observed commercial positive impact of older workers.
Final thoughts…
Many positive things were said about older workers during the day. They were described as a ‘rich pocket of resource’, and it was acknowledged that productivity is not really an issue for them. But there were also worrying reflections on occupational obsolescence and the need for a sea-change around flexible working. There is clearly much still to be done.
For myself, I felt that, although we benefited from the expertise of academics, employer representatives and sector experts, the voices of older workers themselves were somewhat missing. We need to find them and provide a platform for them to tell us what they really need and want.