The forthcoming abolition of the default retirement age has real implications for employers, particularly those with an older age profile of workers. There needs to be 3 clear strategies to deal with workers 1.staying beyond state pension age, 2.leaving and 3.incoming. All will be needed to ensure that employers maximise the performance of the talent available.
For those staying, employers will need to ensure that they have an effective performance management process in place, that their learning and development encourages on-going learning for all workers to update their skills and that inter-generational working and communication is maximised.All greatly benefiting all parties.
For those leaving, putting in place an employer supported retirement readiness programme will help workers to plan for a fulfilling older age encouraging them to think more positively about leaving, helping with workforce planning issues.
And the area which is often forgotten,making sure that the potential for older to come into the organisation is not ignored as many will the right skills and experience to improve the organisation's competitive position.
Showing posts with label Older workers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Older workers. Show all posts
Wednesday, 13 October 2010
Monday, 7 June 2010
Vision of the future workforce
Friends Provident and the Future Foundation have recently released their "Visions of Britain- The Workforce 2020" report. In it, it states there are currently 5.14m "older workers" (defined as aged 55-70). This will increase to 7.16m in 2020, a pretty significant increase.
It has concerned me for some time that when older workers retire,and their will be significant numbers doing this over the next 15 years, that companies lose both tacit knowledge and corporate memory, both areas you can't easily document in a procedural manual for future workers. I was therefore very interested to read that the "recent recession has made business leaders appreciate the merits of retaining experience, placing older workers in a more powerful position than ever before". This has been partly triggered by the fact that most/ a lot of today's key managers have never had to deal with a recession before and the ones who have the experience are either no longer in the workforce or have been marginalised.
The other key point from the report was that older workers' contribution to productivity for example cannot be easily measured and that the "value of experience needs to be calibrated on a separate scale".
I hope this report helps us to focus more on the need to retain older workers in the workforce both for the mutual benefit of the employer and the individual employee.Both parties can win.
It has concerned me for some time that when older workers retire,and their will be significant numbers doing this over the next 15 years, that companies lose both tacit knowledge and corporate memory, both areas you can't easily document in a procedural manual for future workers. I was therefore very interested to read that the "recent recession has made business leaders appreciate the merits of retaining experience, placing older workers in a more powerful position than ever before". This has been partly triggered by the fact that most/ a lot of today's key managers have never had to deal with a recession before and the ones who have the experience are either no longer in the workforce or have been marginalised.
The other key point from the report was that older workers' contribution to productivity for example cannot be easily measured and that the "value of experience needs to be calibrated on a separate scale".
I hope this report helps us to focus more on the need to retain older workers in the workforce both for the mutual benefit of the employer and the individual employee.Both parties can win.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
