In our final 2024 newsletter we again take a snapshot of the year and reflect the extent opportunities for the older worker and age inclusive workforces have improved over the past twelve months. Unfortunately, in Australia, the evidence suggests little progress has been made in practical terms.

This month, we explore whether the effective operation of an age-inclusive workforce is well served by segregating it by generational descriptors? Certainly, there are business consultants making a good living by deliberately emphasising differences between generations and advising how best to manage them as a collective.

To mark this yea's Ageism Awareness Day, instead of focusing on all the reasons ageism is a blight in our community and specifically the workplace, we will instead celebrate the benefits older workers offer. In doing this, our contribution to tackling ageism is helping overturn many of the negative stereotypical myths attached to the older worker.

Does anyone else find it odd when wisdom is extolled as a positive workplace contributor until it is associated with an older worker and suddenly it becomes a potential obstacle to new knowledge development and organisational adaptability?

What will the labour market look like in the year 2030, the end of this decade? Two analyses grabbed our attention this month, forecasting two very different perspectives. The one thing they agree on though is that workforce dynamics will shift dramatically. With this change just five years away, why aren’t businesses urgently priortising how they will meet it?

We are being myopically led to believe an anticipated ‘silver tsunami’ of older age people is going to negatively overwhelm our future national finances, economy, living standards and quality of life. This is why a recent book by Professor Andrew Scott, ‘The Longevity Imperative: Building a better Society for Healthier, Longer Lives’ is a welcome antidote to the narrative of ageing as a crisis.

Advocates pushing for improving older worker employability opportunities correctly identify the need for HR professionals to revise existing company recruiting practices.

Well, if we ever needed proof of the accelerating population ageing trend within Australia, newspaper reports were happy to provide it. The proportion of people over age of 65 has reached a record high of 17.1% whilst the proportion of people 17 or younger, which in the late 1970’s was 31% has fallen to 21.6%.

We are seeing increasing examples of older workers being embraced in front line roles across hospitality, retail and service industries. However, this positive trend is not translating into the managerial and professional space. Anti-ageism advocates and diversity professionals argue…

Over our Christmas break we had a chance to catch up with two major research studies of last year examining global predictions surrounding the evolution of older workforces and the ongoing business change resistance to the trend.

In our final post for the year, we reflect on whether 2023 has seen encouraging progress towards age-inclusive workforces. Any move in this direction will suggest a loosening of ageism’s grip on business thinking.

September saw the release of a major Government initiative to address our nation’s growing social inequality with a focus paper on the creation of sustainable work for everyone who in the future wants a job.

Often ageism is singularly associated with personal bias. Overcome a personal bias towards ageism so conventional wisdom goes and issues of age -based discrimination become a distant memory. Yet

we know this is not true.

In workplace settings the idea we carry within us a variety of preconditioned biases regarding sex, race and age has given impetus to the growth of the ‘unconscious bias’ training industry.

The training pitch argues that in helping us become aware of our hidden biases, we create more diverse and inclusive workforces that deliver improved business performance.

While a laudable objective, most of this training is proving ineffective.

We are beginning to witness an increasing interest in the popular book industry of the social impacts of the global ageing population trend. Yet, this apparent discovery of a new global issue requiring some form of government and business response is misleading. The issue of population ageing has been well-known for over thirty years and largely ignored by governments of all persuasions.

Old men have sure being occupying media headlines over recent months.

Joe Biden seeking re-election as US President at age 82; Trump in Court at 78; Rupert Murdoch continuing to deeply influence Fox News at age 92; 80-year-old Harrison Ford going around again as Indiana Jones and now Robert DeNiro a father at 79. Not to forget Charles becoming King at the relatively young age of 74! Who thought a career as a gerontologist could suddenly make you a media celebrity and ‘life of the party’!

Have you ever stopped to think that an organisation’s focus on ‘busyness’ is a clever way to distract us from questioning the way it might behave? The answer is ‘probably not’ as you don’t have a moment to take a breath!

You, like us, might remember the original ‘Perfect Match’ TV show now getting an updated rerun on Netflix. In the search for romance, an individual participant would ask a series of questions to three other hidden participants…

January 2023 saw louder signals emerging - reinforcing the global demographic trend towards ageing populations. We need to overturn the institutionalised view that an ageing population is a social and economic negative and instead explore how an older demography can be a source of opportunity and value.

Reconciling ‘organisation fit’ with diversity and inclusion practices is challenging.

Whilst diversity suggests workforce difference, ‘organisation fit’ emphasises workforce sameness.

For some time now many large organisations have complicated the hiring process by not just being satisfied with an evidence-based analysis of a person’s skill sets and ability to apply them, but adding highly subjective labels including ‘potential’ and ‘organisation fit’ into the recruitment decision-making process. Does this improve hiring decisions?

The corporate equivalent of a Goldilocks and the three bears scenario seems to exist, in which younger workers have too little experience, older workers have the wrong experience, with those workers between the mid-20s and 40s having just the right experience. Yet, in the worlds of…

Employers believe that the cut-back in Government-sponsored skilled migration programme is the primary cause of our labour crises. Yet, the potential recruiting of younger and older workers as part of the solution remains overlooked.

Another misconception about older workers is the characterisation of older workers as “hard to get along with” and “lacking resilience”.

As we have learnt in our articles exploring older worker misconceptions, false impressions abound which ignore the research evidence about the positive business opportunity represented by the older worker.

Welcome to our EncourAGEEQUALITY quiz. What do instant noodles, bifocal glasses, the Victa lawnmower, KFC and Roget’s Thesaurus all have in common?

Lost in the translation is the complexity of work roles older workers may be performing, the experience needed to perform these roles, the belief that older workers retain significant labour market bargaining power and the disregard off business cost offsets the older worker provides.

There is a large gap between the perception of older workers as stuck in an ‘ancient world’ and the reality of their change capabilities and behaviours. Once more empirical research is helping paint a far more accurate picture of the older worker which is a world away from the change-resistant myth dragging down their workforce reputation.

Talkback: Is now the perfect time to end workplace ageism?
With Hilary Harper on Life Matters

If you’ve ever hit the job market later in life, you’ll know it’s not an easy experience to have to go through. But with unemployment rates low, and many businesses crying out for workers, are there new opportunities for older jobseekers?

Are older workers less productive than younger workers? A very popular myth is that older workers can’t compete with younger workers when it comes to productivity and delivering results. However, research evidence reveals this myth as either greatly exaggerated or completely wrong. Want to find out more about how you can bust through the Productivity Myth in your organisation?

The term ‘talent’ is one of such ubiquity these days that it seems now both simultaneously generic and meaningless. Yet, despite the hollowness of the term, most businesspeople are convinced that ‘talent’ is a critical ingredient in the recipe for organisation success.