The Value of Including Older Tech Workers
As the Tech Sage Age finding shows,
companies are missing out if they don’t consider the age composition of
specific teams, departments, and business units and how managers can build
diversity and take advantage of the maturity and experience of older workers.
Legal issues aside, designing a recruitment
strategy around younger generations can be shortsighted from a business
perspective. Older workers tend to be more loyal, and an over-representation of
millennials in the workforce can impact retention. A 2016 Gallup report reveals
that “21% of millennials say they’ve changed jobs within the past year, which
is more than three times the number of non-millennials who report the same.”
[1]
A workforce of job-hoppers can have a big
impact on the bottom line. As HR expert Josh Bersin writes in
this post[2],
“The total cost of losing an employee can range from tens of thousands of
dollars to 1.5 – 2 X annual salary.”
Studies have also found that diverse teams
are more innovative, which is critical in an era when competitive threats loom
large. Hiring people “who do not look, talk, or think like you, can allow you
to dodge the costly pitfalls of conformity, which discourages innovative
thinking,” write the experts in this
HBR post[3].
What Businesses Can Do?
There are some important activities you can
do to root out the risk of ageism in your workforce and ensure you acquire,
develop, and retain the best and brightest talent available, regardless of age:
● Review your workforce data to understand the current state of age
equity within your organization to find any signs of potential bias in hiring,
promotions, salary levels, turnover, and performance ratings. If you work in
People Analytics, you can play a role in warning of incipient ageism in your
organization and support your own organization to outperform your competition.
You can uncover and root out intentional and unintentional bias in your hiring
practices that might be limiting the Gen X and older workers or potential
hires.
● Set objectives and develop a plan with manageable steps (and a way
to monitor your progress) that helps your organization achieve an inclusive
work environment.
● Keep in mind that, as with ethnic and gender equity, age equity is a
cultural issue — if pockets of ageism exist within your organization, you will
need to devise plans to address them not only via better HR practice and policy
rollouts, but through culture change.
● Consider implementing a version of the Rooney Rule[4] for
age, specifically for teams or roles where the workforce is less diverse in
age: for every position you have open to fill, consider one or more older
candidates (or candidates that will help create a more diverse team, in general).
● Develop hiring practices that reduce the potential for intentional
or unintentional bias in the screening out of older applicants.
● Develop hiring practices that specifically do not screen out
candidates based on the length of their unemployment — while this report
focused on systemic ageism, many individual stories suggest older unemployed
workers struggle to get hired, and studies indicate recruiters screen out
candidates that have been unemployed for longer periods of time.
The Bottom Line – Attitude, Passion, and People Analytics Successfully Combat Ageism
What can you do? For individuals, it’s
about maintaining self-confidence in your competence and passion for your
activities. If you don’t love your job, perhaps you should consider another.
But if you do, show it, and, if I’m any indication, you can continue to work
for as long as you want.
For organizations, if you have not already
deployed people analytics, the capabilities will help you identify if ageism
exists today or will in the future. And you can assess where in your hiring,
developing, and retention of your talent you need to improve to maintain your
competitive advantages into the future.
What one organization is doing about ageism
SAP is employing all five generations in its workforce –
Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y (Millennials) and now Gen Z. While
ageism, unconscious bias and pre-conceived expectations can often deter
individuals and companies from seeing the value add of a single generation,
companies also underestimate the benefit of generations working together to
achieve common goals.
To address bias, SAP advocates for inclusion for
all and actively seeks to bring people together to support different life
stages while improving cross-generational collaboration. We encourage
learning between generations by raising awareness about unique working
styles, strengths, and attributes of employees across generations through our
Focus on Insight training, as well as virtual and face to face training
sessions. We also offer a popular cross-generational mentoring program
which allows employees to learn from one another and reduce bias.
In addition, SAP supports education from the top
down by teaching senior leaders to celebrate multiple
generations. We encourage our leaders to help new employees integrate with
other members of the team – for example, by conducting open and appreciative
communication within teams, aligning on goals and reserving time for knowledge
transfer. By addressing challenges, surfacing unconscious bias, seeking
communication and awareness and creating a community of trust and respect –
leaders can play a large part in cultivating an inclusive culture.
The beauty of cross generational intelligence is understanding what
is most appealing to the other generation; the way we communicate and respect
each other for our uniqueness and
differences. Embracing commonalities and similarities to build
camaraderie while respecting generational differences creates an
inclusive environment that fosters innovation and creativity in the
workplace to continue building a culture of inclusivity, teamwork and
respect.
Lexy Martin is a respected thought leader and researcher on HR technology adoption and their value to organizations and workers alike. Known as the originator of the Sierra-Cedar HR Systems Survey, she now works at Visier continuing her research efforts, now on people analytics, and working closely with customers to support them in their HR transformation to become data-driven organizations. Lexy is Principal, Research and Customer Value at Visier. Connect with Lexy at lexy.martin@visier.com or personally at lexymartin1@gmail.com.
[1] How Millennials Want to Work and Live, Gallup,
May, 2016. http://news.gallup.com/reports/189830/e.aspx?utm_source=gbj&utm_medium=copy&utm_campaign=20160512-gbj
[2] Employee Retention Now a Big Issue: Why the
Tide has Turned, Josh
Bersin, August, 2013, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130816200159-131079-employee-retention-now-a-big-issue-why-the-tide-has-turned/
[3] Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter, David
Rock and Heidi Grant, Harvard Business Review, November, 2016.
https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter
[4] Rooney Rule, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule
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