Make way for mature workers - or else

By Matthew Heimer

 

Ideas carry more weight in corporate boardrooms once they show up in the Harvard Business Review, the journal of that august CEO factory, the Harvard Business School. So it’s noteworthy that the HBR blog recently gave some space to an editorial by David Bloom and David Canning, economics professors at the Harvard School of Public Health, called “How Companies Must Adapt for an Aging Workforce.” (Hat tip to the Wall Street Journal’s At Work blog, which recently referenced the article, as well.) Their message: Businesses that don’t move fast to accommodate their most mature and seasoned workers in the talent pool will be at a huge competitive disadvantage.

 It’s widely known, of course that the average age of the industrialized Western workforce has been steadily growing. But Bloom and Canning believe that most of today’s businesses underestimate, and are under-prepared for, just how far that trend will extend. “In the near future, employees in significantly growing numbers will likely be able to work productively into their eighth or even ninth decade,” they write. (One hopes that the septa- and octogenarians will be working by choice, not because they’re broke.)

Preparing for that older workforce will mean a host of adjustments, say the Harvard profs—not just familiar ones, like flexible scheduling that lets older workers arrange a semi-retirement, but a wider rethinking of health-care benefits and pay. “Wellness programs produce healthier employees at all ages,” they explain, while “on-site clinics save workers time and focus care on prevention and early disease detection, which also lowers costs.”

And folks who stay in the workforce can’t expect their pay to automatically keep climbing all the way to the end of their careers. “Seniority-based pay sometimes exceeds performance at the latter stages of the life cycle,” Bloom and Canning write, unsentimentally. “Bringing pay and performance (properly assessed) into closer conformity would likely ease corporate norms surrounding age at retirement.” In other words, the young guy down the hall might not take your job; but if you aren’t measurably better than he is, he’ll get paid more than you.

http://blogs.marketwatch.com/encore/2013/01/09/make-way-for-mature-workers-or-else/