Employing older workers

As a first step in removing barriers to employing older workers, it is strongly recommended that codes of practice include age positive criteria, with special consideration given to the recruitment and retention elements of the policy. As a minimum, the code or age positive ‘charter’ should address good practice in six areas of the employment cycle:

• Recruitment advertising needs to be focused on role requirements, career, benefits,company profile and work-life balance benefits, without reference to age or experience.
• Selection should be based on a person's skills, abilities, competencies and potential needed to do the job advertised.
• Promotion based on the ability, or demonstrative potential to do the job.
• Opportunity given to all employees to take advantage of relevant training opportunities, including re-skilling, up-skilling and development.
• Redundancy and retirement decisions based solely on business objectives and the needs of the business,
  e.g. knowledge retention, knowledge share.

Age management framework

• Implement a range of culture and attitude programmes to ensure the majority of the workforce understands the values and expectations of each age cohort – young versus old and vice versa, i.e. intergeneration interventions.
• Introduce the concept of a buddy mentoring system to ensure age culture awareness and knowledge sharing.
• Provide effective measurement of the career life-cycle for each individual – different age cohorts often have different issues, needs and wants and career life-cycle management can help in reducing career conflicts.
• Avoid the use of age limits or age ranges in job advertisements.
• Major on skills, competencies and potential.
• Removal of D.O.B on application forms.
• Only ask for qualifications if it is relevant to the post advertised.
• Use jargon free language.
• Use mixed-age interviewing panels.
• Ensure that ICT training and development takes account of people who may need more time to grasp new ways of working.
• Ensure that age is not a criterion for redundancy and retirement.
• Ensure that promotion is based on performance and potential not age.
• Ensure that training and development budgets are set to provide training for all age groups.
• Implement health and well being programmes for all age groups, e.g. diet, healthy exercise, regular counselling, health screening, etc. A fit and healthy employee is usually a motivated and productive employee.

Post implementation business benefits

The business benefits are well documented and business can expect to gain real competitive advantage if the changes described are put into practice:

• Reduced recruitment and training costs.
• An improved public image.
• An increased pool of potential candidates.
• Improved staff retention rates.
• Lower labour turnover costs.
• Improved productivity as a result of resource stability.
• Higher staff motivation and morale.
• Improved organisation knowledge and sharing.
• Improved customer service.

Note: For most businesses, the most effective cost benefits are seen in the retention of older workers, where the need to recruit, train and develop new workers can be significantly reduced and optimised if the right steps are taken.