Integrating Seniors into Your Workplace: The Challenges and Opportunities
By EmployDiversity
Learn how hiring and investing in a senior workforce will help build your business.
In 2019, more than 20-percent of Americans aged 65 or older are searching for work or are already employed. Not since 1962 have so many seniors been in the job market in one fashion or another. The statistic is also double what it was in 1985.
Why the Change?
Two kinds of retirees are reentering the job market: those who must for financial reasons and those who wish to remain busy with work. The first group of “work to live” seniors may have insufficient funds to make ends meet, even with social security benefits. Most of the cohort do not have college degrees but have the energy, the will, and the motivation to work.
The group of seniors who work because they want to may want to top off their income or enjoy working or find it an important way to stay in touch with friends and associates. Typically, “work to stay busy” seniors have college degrees and higher incomes than the work-to-live set.
Whatever group of seniors under discussion, though, one demographic truth is bearing down fast on organizations: people are living longer. They are outliving their retirement savings — if they had any to begin with — and they are remaining vibrant later in life than any preceding generation. The trends are presenting significant opportunities and challenges for enterprises and non-profits.
The Challenges
The most significant challenge facing organizations at a macro-level involves integrating what is effectively a subculture within the greater corporate culture. Seniors will have social, cultural, and even personal references between themselves that only they get. The differences between seniors and non-seniors can be as pronounced as that between Millenials and their middle-aged counterparts.
Other characteristics that define seniors and younger generations in the workplace include:
Diminished physical strength and dexterity
Not digital natives
Not up on latest corporate speak, abbreviations, etc
A lack of strength and dexterity may present seniors barriers to effectiveness in logistics, warehousing, transportation, and manufacturing. Diminished physical strength is not much of an issue in an office setting, however.
Digital technology defines the modern office. While upwards of three-quarters of seniors are comfortable navigating the internet, they may not be as familiar with spreadsheets, databases, and digital communications enablers like Slack.
Similarly, seniors may not be familiar with the abbreviations, acronyms, and subtle signals of the corporate world. They may also have difficulty meeting the pace of 21st-century office work, which can be frenetic.
It must be said, however, that employing seniors and integrating them into the workplace may actually be no more challenging than hiring Millennials, who come with their own predilections. Instead, potential employers have to weigh the opportunities for growth and development seniors offer enterprises.
Opportunities for Employers
Seniors have a great many attributes Millenials do not and cannot offer because of their age and lack of real-world experience. Some of the benefits seniors bring to organizations include:
Know-how
Avoiding recurring mishaps
Not reinventing the wheel
Face-to-face communication is natural
Hard workers who value work
Seniors have decades of experience they are gasping to share with the world. Work is one of the best channels through which they feel they can improve an environment.
Given well-defined means of communication in a team setting, they can suggest where approaches to problems may lead to dead ends or be expensive misadventures. They can also offer more efficient solutions that can help workgroups avoid starting endeavors from scratch.
One of the greatest strengths seniors bring to bear in a work setting involves their sociability. Whereas younger generations that grew up with social media tend to avoid social interaction, seniors tend to seek out and develop positive relationships. They like engaging others. They also learned long ago that solving problems with others face-to-face is far more effective and efficient than corresponding through email.
Moreover, seniors have learned the value of work. They work hard and will work as long as the job requires as long as they are physically able. This ingrained characteristic benefits organizations immeasurably when projects require a long-term commitment from employees.
Emphasize the Benefits, Train to Overcome the Challenges
Hiring seniors into the workplace and integrating them into the corporate culture certainly present challenges. However, the benefits of hiring seniors far outweigh the time and expense involved in getting them productive. By some measures, the investment involved in acculturating seniors is less than that for Millennials.
Millennials tend to have very strong views on how they should contribute to the organization and the impact they are destined to make in the world. The attitudes can sometimes impede a team’s productivity instead of enhancing it. Training alone is not sufficient to bring the younger generation into the corporate fold. Seniors, though, feel they’ve made their mark in the world, they’ve taken their shot, and now they just want to contribute positively to others.
Training seniors on corporate-speak, database and spreadsheet technologies, and other nuts-and-bolts of navigating the modern workplace is a trivial investment compared to the rewards they have to offer.
