Preservation & Purpose - The Future of Work

What is it?

If you were at the Future of Ageing safari, you would have heard Dr Eliza Filby drop the bombshell that Millennials probably won’t retire until they’re 80. If they retire at all.

Globally, people are working longer, both in terms of years accrued and hours in the day. In Europe, 50% of 55-64 year-olds continue to work, compared to just 37% a decade earlier. While in the US, the number of people who say they retired after the age of 65 rose from 8% in 1991 to 14% in 2015.

Gone are the days of allotments and cruises at 60 and a life of leisure and hobbies. But why? If we’re living longer, why are we spending an increased proportion of that time in work, rather than enjoying an extension to our ‘golden years’? Well, in an overly simplistic nutshell it comes down to two core drivers: purpose and preservation.

We’re working longer because we need to financially. One in six over-55s have no pension savings, and pensioner poverty is in an increasing spiral with nearly one fifth of UK pensioners living in poverty. Add to this the looming unknown that is the cost of care in life and people are having to work in order to survive - preservation.

But people are also choosing to work. Older people are healthier, more active and don’t necessarily just want to retire. People are looking for ways to continue to be connected, productive and engaged. Not put out to pasture. People are looking for purpose.

Why should I care?

We need to take a fresh look at employment - both as employers but also as ageing individuals. We need to take action on the last acceptable prejudice - ageism.

Throw out old stereotypes about cognitive ability, ambition, and appetite to learn and re-skill. Instead, see the benefits from a more diversified workforce, with a range of experience and perspective. The benefit to all of more flexible approaches to work. Workplaces that enable us each to live now, not later, through flexible approaches to careers. Workplaces that are designed for inclusion. Workplaces that deliver answers to the drivers of preservation and purpose.

The benefits of an age-inclusive workforce

Although memory and processing speed become impaired with age, other capacities, such as judgement, pattern recognition and decision-making, improve. These improved skills are well suited to the roles and tasks that require a knowledge-based approach, rather than manual labour.

Older workers take, on average, less sick days than younger workers. A survey in the UK by insurance company RIAS found that only one quarter of over-50s had taken time off sick during the previous twelve months, compared to half of those in their twenties.

A 2019 report from the World Economic forum found that an age-diverse labour force also leads to better performance. According to a study by AARP and AON Hewitt, the 50+ segment of the workforce continues to be the most engaged age cohort across all generations. They demonstrate the emotional and intellectual involvement that motivates employees to do their best work and contribute to an organisation’s success. Moreover, it only takes a 5% increase in engagement to achieve 3% incremental revenue growth.

Recruitment

There’s also a massive economic benefit to supporting an older workforce. Putting aside the recent ‘Great Resignation', by 2025, people aged under 30 in the workforce will fall by 300,000, while those aged 50 and over will increase by over 1 million according to Office for National Statistics UK Labour Market statistics (March 2018) and Mercer Workforce Monitor analysis.

Globally, the reduction in labour force over the next 50 years could reduce GDP by up to 40%. We urgently need to develop new approaches to recruitment and new inclusive working practices and policies to support older workers to want to stay in work.

In Sweden, employers can qualify for a subsidy of up to 75% for employing older workers; Germany is opening up sabbaticals for its older workforce and the Dutch government has introduced age discrimination legislation and policies to promote flexible working. Japan, having been one of the first ‘super aged’ societies, provides part-time options for older workers and encourages them to be mentors. [Future Agenda]

However, over a third of 50-69 year olds still feel at a disadvantage applying for jobs due to their age, and a 2021 YouGov survey showed that employers in England aren’t making the necessary changes to introduce policies relating to age, with the majority (51%) not planning any changes in the next 12 months.

Older workers are frequently being held by subconscious biases in recruitment practices, such as the requirement of specific qualifications (which frequently excludes women or immigrant workers). Or conscious biases, such as excluding candidates due to an assumption of over-qualification simply based on age, or assumption of salary or responsibility expectations. Simply put - ageism.

According to a poll of 2,000 workers aged 45-plus by Working Wise, 44% admitted altering their age on their CV to make them seem more attractive to employers. [HR Magazine, 2021]

Labora Tech is a new Brazilian startup that wants to ‘retire the CV’. They want to revolutionise recruitment by reducing bias and supporting career changes and flexibility at work. Their answer is an end-to-end HR technology that helps include workers of all ages at scale, by delivering large-scale recruitment drives for companies based on people’s soft and hard skills, matching people to jobs based on these skills, and providing the training, re-skilling and mentoring environment to help people thrive in new roles.

Gerontolescent entrepreneurs

Working longer doesn’t just mean staying within traditional or established businesses. A 2021 study found that entrepreneurs who begin while in their 50s succeed at roughly the same rate as people starting up in their 20s. And yet we still probably all still have the stereotype of a successful entrepreneur - 20-something, white man.

Innovation has no age limit. Benjamin Franklin was 76 when he invented bifocals. The founders of McDonald's, Coca Cola, and Kentucky Fried Chicken were all over 50 when they launched their empires.Even more interestingly, the same 2021 study found that older women were more successful than younger women.

In 2021 Forbes magazine launched the 50 over 50. Whilst in 2017, Barclays Business Banking revealed that the number of SMEs run by people over the age of 65 has increased by 140% over the last decade, making it the fastest-growing age group in terms of entrepreneurship and self-employment.

Retirement. What retirement?

At 91, Warren Buffett is still regarded as one of the most brilliant brains in the world of finance. His right hand person, Charlie Munger, is 98. Up until her death in 2020, aged 87, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was still serving on the bench. Age was not a factor in their appetite, ambition or desire to continue in their roles.

However for some, the necessity to work long into your ‘golden years’ is a necessity driven by preservation. The UK state pension provision is one of the worst in Europe, providing just 58% of previous earnings from work - below the OECD average of 62%.

1 in 8 (13%) of older workers said they had changed their retirement plans as a result of the pandemic. Of these, 5% said they would retire earlier and 8% planned to retire later. [Older Workers in the UK, House of Lords, 2022]

“A recent Oxford Economics report for the financial services firm Hargreaves Lansdown showed that just 39.7 per cent of working-age households were on track to have a retirement income of £26,000 per person in today’s money (deemed by Loughborough University to be the comfortable amount to cover the bills and give a decent quality of life). According to government figures just shy of 400,000 over-65s were in work of some sort back in 1984: now that figure is nearly 1.3 million. And that’s true for septuagenarians too, of which some 480,000 are in work today. That includes 149,000 men and women over 75, a figure that’s trebled since the early 1980s” [The Spectator, 2022]

Flexible working & the gig economy

Research has shown that flexible working is a major factor in enabling older workers to remain in the labour market for longer. In June and July 2020, older workers working entirely from home were more likely to say they were planning to retire later compared with those not working from home. [ONS, 2021]

The flexible work experience sought by older workers is becoming increasingly possible with the advent of new technology platforms and the ‘sharing economy’. Uber reported in 2015 that one quarter of their drivers are over 50; they have more drivers over 50 than under 30. 10% of Airbnb’s hosts are over 60, driven by the desire to generate additional revenue (which can serve as an alternative to a reverse mortgage) and to stay connected, social and active.

We’ve come a long way in introducing policies and guidance to make workplaces more flexible to the needs of parents. But what older workers who also have caring requirements? More than 2 million of the unwaged carers in the UK are over the age of 65. During the pandemic Gen X women became the squeezed generation - caring for teenagers but also caring for their parents. This caring squeeze isn’t going away and is expected to continue to impact millennials as their parents age and the burden of care falls to them due to cost.

A 2019 study by ARC Centre of Excellence in population found that nearly 80% of women over the age of 65 reported having been treated unfairly at work because of their age, and older workers are far more likely than their younger colleagues to have had an application for flexible work arrangements declined. The report also found that failure to create an inclusive work environment is likely to lead to older workers being less engaged and deciding to leave their organisation early.

Inclusion & accessibility

In order to support older workers to stay in work, join new organisations or embark on their next career path, we need to introduce policies and support frameworks to make our workplaces more inclusive and accessible.

For many women, the menopause can have a debilitating effect on them. However a 2019 survey of HR professionals found that just 1 in 10 organisations had any kind of policy, guidance or framework in place relating to the menopause. CIPD research also showed that only a quarter of women who had been unable to go to work due to menopausal symptoms had felt able to to tell their line manage the real reason for absence.

Sight loss and vision impairment is another barrier to staying in work. The 2019 WHO World report on vision shows that older people are often unaware that vision problems are treatable and therefore do not report impairments, driven in part by assumptions that these are a normal part of ageing. Given that 50% of sight loss is preventable, early detection is crucial to ensure timely interventions.

Retraining and up-skilling team members is vital to retaining great people. Helping people adapt to new technology can give them control and motivation. Re-skilling people over 50 to work in technology could deliver an additional 119,000 IT specialists to the UK workforce and provide "a significant step" in addressing the digital skills gap.