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Chapter 16

Managing the Ageing Workforce

John Hicks, PK Basu and Richard B Sappey

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Overview

• Age and labour force participation• Legislation and generational change• Generational change and diversity management• Diversity and HRM• Management, work organisation and age• Implications for organisational practice• Conclusion

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Age and labour force participation (LFP)

• Labour forces are becoming more diverse.• Managers are moving towards systems and cultures for

effectively managing diversity. • Populations in western countries are ageing.• Governments are trying to increase LFP in older age groups

to reduce welfare (e.g. age pension) and health costs.• Strategies include delaying retirement, extending working

hours, encouraging re-entry and targets for employing older workers.

• Recessions are likely to reduce employment of older workers.

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Legislation and generational change

• Legislation is the main method for changing workplace practice to address discrimination.

• Main forms of age discrimination are:– direct (e.g. only people of a certain age will be employed)– indirect (e.g. all employees need a specified level of IT skills

without paid training).

• The Age Discrimination Act 2004 makes it unlawful to discriminate at or after the point of offer.

• Legislation in several countries sets boundaries and has reduced overt discrimination but evidence of ‘subtle’ practice persists (e.g. job ad language, promotion, behaviour).

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Generational change and diversity

• Social and economic forces are preserving attitudes to ageing workers.

• Mead (1970) identified generation gaps reflected in ways of learning (children learn from adults, children and adults learn from peers, adults learn from children).

• Sources of change and conflict: expectation of mobility, technological change, need by organisations to adapt to market change, attitudes to work ethic and authority and pace of change.

• The literature identifies differences between ‘Baby Boomer’, ‘Generation X’ and ‘Generation Y’ generations.

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Diversity and HRM

• HRM policies, systems and practices are used to counter age stereotypes.

• Four main aspects:

1. Identification of differences and similarities of characteristics between generations (Hutchings 2006)

2. Optimising benefits and minimising costs in employing people to perform different roles

3. Employing older workers in Australia needs more research (e.g. costs of training, injury, absenteeism, retaining/substituting skills, knowledge and adaptability)

4. Developing HRM to ‘match’ people (e.g. older worker to older worker and younger worker to younger customer) or integrate (e.g. workers from different age groups in work teams with different roles)

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Management, work organisation and age

• HRM operates in a wider context of managerial decision-making, market pressures, production systems and cultures which it seeks to influence but has limited control over.

• Management ‘sets the scene’ for HRM (e.g. perceptions of older workers through taken-for-granted assumptions can be negative). Positive outcomes include more flexible work hours, working from home, more equipment and more time to complete tasks.

• Generational conflict. Knowledge can become obsolete with rapid technological change which changes knowledge networks, occupational hierarchies and how skills and knowledge are transferred.

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Management, work organisation and age (cont.)

• How work is organised provides points where generations may have to work together (e.g. working in teams with different knowledge bases).

• Evidence of age-based decisions by management lead to uneven distribution of skills and knowledge development (e.g. equipment use, rewards and training opportunities, Brooke & Taylor 2005).

• Management strategy is moving away from ‘accommodating age as a legitimate difference’ and towards organising work to maximise efficiency (Roberts 2006), fragmenting patterns of social relations which result in conflict (Strangleman & Roberts 1999).

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Implications for organisational practice

• Some organisations wish to recruit/retain older workers with relevant knowledge and skills where supply is scarce.

• Knowledge transfer can be made through younger and older worker teams (e.g. swap older customer behaviour knowledge with IT skills)

• Mentoring is increasingly used to bridge generation gaps.• Quota systems can directly guide recruitment of

older workers.• Learning packages can be flexible (e.g. different training

techniques).• The goal is age-free practice.

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Implications for organisational practice (cont.)

• There are links between technological change and training on the one hand and market change and culture on the other.

• There is a continuation of age-based segmentation (‘old and young jobs’) and subcultures which support them.

• Management wants workers to be a ‘cultural fit’ with organisations.

• Increased workforce diversity indicates a need to produce a normative order through HRM.

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Conclusion

• A bumpy road for older workers seems to lie ahead. Challenges include providing adequate and practical legislation, providing working conditions without physical disadvantage, integration into work systems, assisting with adapting to new technology and developing systems and cultures for developing multigenerational workforces.

• Historically, workers will have to fit into management responses to product market and technological change.

• There is no strong evidence of which models work well.

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