2023: A continuation of the age-inclusive workforce drought
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. Certainly, the Australian Bureau of Statistics presents some good news with increasing local labour participation for the 55 years to 64 age group as well as the 65 year and over group in the past two decades. The professional and managerial work space is where this labour participation trend is observed with a relatively even split between permanent and part-time activity.
Whilst this trend is to be celebrated, Australia in 2023 global terms is no world beater when it comes to age-inclusive workforce best practice with Iceland leading the world in this space. Unfortunately, Iceland does not appear to be on the ‘must visit’ radar for many of our politicians and local business leaders with much of big business remaining to be persuaded of the benefit of age-inclusive work practices and our Federal and State governments in no hurry to hasten change in this space.
The positive local developments in 2023 encouraging age-inclusive workforces are limited but include:
The release of a major Federal Government initiative to address our nation’s growing social inequality with a White Paper on Jobs and Opportunities focusing on the establishment of a dynamic and inclusive labour market in which all Australians have the opportunity for secure, well-paid jobs.
The more regular appearance of media stories highlighting companies benefiting from creating age-inclusive workforces (often more from necessity due to labour shortages than a deliberate strategic innovation – but who’s complaining as the sub-text is these companies and their workforces are both benefiting from the initiative).
Divergent research in demography, medicine, science, social psychology and health aligning around a general view that the ageing process has a lot more upside than we have been led to believe and a global demographic ageing trend will not lead to the collapse of Western civilisation as has been the constant refrain of conservative politicians over the past decades.
An increasingly strong and active social media presence of many anti-ageism advocates providing evidence-based information on the nature of the ageing process and challenging of embedded ageism stereotypes and causes. Take a bow Ashton Applewhite, Jeanette Leardi, Tracy Gendron, Carl Honore and Chip Conley in the international space and Natasha Ginnivan of the University of NSW and Ageing Futures Institute here in Australia.
Barriers continue to exist
Yet despite more success stories, the beginning of government policy development to hasten inclusive workforces and a developing anti-ageism social movement, significant barriers continue to exist to a normalisation of the age-inclusive workforce.
Corporates continue to prioritise reducing gender, racial and disability disadvantage with age bias seldom on the radar.
Older job applicants are up to three times less likely to be selected for interviews than younger ones. A disturbing US statistic is that workers 55 and older made up nearly 20% of those living in homeless shelters in 2021 with thousands more living in their cars or on the street.
Companies in the United States pursuing workforce age diversity programmes that target younger workers in hiring and promotion decisions are increasingly being fined over perpetuating ageism. Notable examples include Eli Lilly and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (as if their corporate reputation could be further smashed!). IBM also finds itself in protracted litigation from dismissed older workers claiming discriminatory treatment.
A weakness in Corporate Board governance that sanctions senior leadership ageist decision-making. Take as a recent example Fischer Connectors, a Swiss-based national manufacturer supplying medical device componentry. In early 2019, the company hired a new president, and under the direction of the president and chief executive officer, the company made plans to eliminate all older management and sales employees and replace them with a new, younger workforce. When the 67-year-old HR Director questioned the companies’ actions and refused to participate, she was fired and replaced by two younger individuals, ultimately resulting in 2023 of a $US460,000 age discrimination fine from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
A ‘fluffy’ issue?
At encourAGEEQUALITY our research and observations indicate establishing age-inclusive workforces is hindered by the positioning of ageism as primarily one of personal attitude. Change a person’s outlook, so the logic goes and the ageism problem is overcome. Increasing personal awareness of the issues surrounding ageism remains a critical contributor to tackling this problem. Yet the failure of much Unconscious Bias training within industry to change ageist operating practices suggests organisation factors impacting on individual decision-making processes are a greater contributor to maintaining ageist business thinking.
Our research has revealed that HR professionals who privately champion workforce inclusivity are often making decisions in their workplaces that reinforce ageism. The organisation operating environment is somehow turning non-ageist professionals into ageism enablers. Developing positive industry attitudes towards people of all ages is further compromised by allowing ageism to be positioned as an issue of social justice rather than elevating the issue of population ageing to a critical business strategic consideration. The issue of age in the eye of business leaders is then potentially relegated to one of those ‘fluffy HR issues’ and not one of significant business consequence requiring leadership attention.
Often, we hear anti-ageism advocates acknowledge organisation practices contribute to ageist business outcomes. They recommend recruitment and hiring practices should be reviewed to remove potential ageist language and the implementation of age-friendly work policies. These are solid suggestions. However, like the belief in Unconscious Bias training as a ‘silver bullet solution’, these recommendations risk being ineffective if broader organisation operating factors influencing decision-making processes that perpetuate ageist work outcomes are ignored.
In simple terms an organisation’s desire for immortality drives a culture focused on achieving business longevity which is characterised by a preference for risk-averse behaviour and reluctance to change. The short-term is prioritised over the longer term, predictability is preferred in decision-making and group pressure is exerted on individuals to drive compliance around a shared identity by thinking in particular ways.
‘Talent’
Within this context, our PhD research reveals a fundamental barrier to implementing age-inclusive workforces within large organisations is an organisational preoccupation with promoting talent recruitment as a critical business success factor. This understanding of ‘talent’ meaning is exceedingly narrow and implicitly ageist. How individual recruiters have come to understand the term ‘talent’ and elected to behave in its management is revealed as a major age-inclusiveness barrier. Factors driving this research insight include:
The role of individual work experience acting as an instrument of social conditioning in embedding a narrow personal meaning of the term ‘talent’.
A behaviour repetition pattern practicing candidate exclusion in talent identification situations acting to over- ride a personal belief commitment to valuing inclusion.
The impact on talent recruitment decision-making of individual self-interest seeking to minimise personal risk and exposure often results in selecting candidates who mirror profiles of those already existing within the workforce.
The job insecurity attached to potentially missing short-term KPI targets encouraging recruiters to extensively hire in their own image.
The routinisation of organisation talent recruitment processes locking historical precedent into its operation discouraging adaption to changing operating environments.
Take action
So, in preparing for 2024 and beyond, what are some actions business leaders can take to accelerate momentum towards creating age-inclusive workforces? Our recommendations include:
Translating age discussion from a social justice cause to a business imperative allows an economic frame to be better established – a short-term language business leaders are more comfortable with and therefore more able to make decisions about. The goal is to engage leaders more effectively than has proven the case so far in this space.
Assuming some traction on our first recommendation opens the potential to reducing organisation barriers to older and younger person recruitment. These include:
Eliminating the language of talent in business. Talent decisionmakers make a deliberate distinction between notions of ‘talent’ and ‘experience’. When was the last time you heard an over 50-year-old described as ‘talent’? Why not? Corporates deliberately hire for ‘talent’ not ‘experience’ automatically establishing a barrier to older worker recruitment.
Redesigning reward and recognition systems to recognise building age inclusive workforces as an important business activity thereby allowing recruiters to adapt and innovate within a changing demographic operating environment.
Actively encouraging opportunities for contact between people of all ages within the workforce to continually build awareness of the nature of ageism. A great question for younger workers to reflect on is: ‘What kind of workforce do you want to age into’? With younger people realising they will be working for longer, encouraging them to make work changes sooner rather than later to make it easier for them to continue working as they age is not only in their interest but to the betterment of society more broadly.
A final and extremely ambitious goal is supporting senior leader teams develop the courage to begin transitioning away from an addiction to short-term quarterly management thinking and evolve into deep-time organisations (Refer Richard Fisher: The Long View. Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time. 2023). A defining characteristic of these organisations is that they are recognised as almost always delivering on a long-term public purpose that serves the common good- not just the shareholder, customer or high paid CEO. The age-inclusive workforce is a powerful example of a deep-time organisation initiative.
Make 2024 different
In 2024 encourAGEEQUALITY can practically assist you in advancing your age inclusion work agenda through:
Delivering a practical and engaging business primer seminar focused on helping your organisation understand the market opportunities of an ageing demographic, the benefits of employing older workers, tackling ageing misconceptions giving rise to erroneous negative age stereotypes, identifying embedded organisational barriers to changing internal attitudes to age and finally providing some practical steps to creating an age inclusive work environment. Our seminar is an engaging, interactive and fun experience that provides participants with evidence-based data and frameworks to help build age-inclusive workforce momentum within the workplace.
Helping senior leaders pinpoint where ageist practice and thinking may be embedded in everyday work practices that have become taken for granted using our research-based proprietary diagnostic. Surfacing hidden organisation impediments to age-inclusive workforces is an important activity in building a sustainable platform for change in this space.
Let’s work together in 2024 to make it a more substantive year for age-inclusive workforce development.
