In his Budget speech earlier this year, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt highlighted there were 3.5 million people between 50 and retirement age in this country not part of the labour force – giving the UK the 23rd highest inactivity rate for over 55s in the OECD.
If we matched the rate of Sweden, he went on to say, we would add more than one million people to our national labour force.
It was an important moment for the Chancellor to recognise the value of older workers and he was equally right to point out that improving recruitment and employment support are absolutely essential to reducing those economic inactivity statistics.
But there are also more than nine million people between 50 and 64 in this country who currently are working and it is equally vital that steps are taken to ensure these workers are retained in employment for as long as they wish to and need to.
Support and incentives to remain in work can be driven by external factors outside of employers. The recently passed Carers’ Leave Bill requiring employers to provide a week’s unpaid leave for carers, which will come into force next year, could make a real difference in helping older workers to balance work and caring duties. But there is a significant role for employers to play here too.
Six months ago, the Centre for Ageing Better launched our Age-friendly Employer Pledge, in part to help employers to respond to the Chancellor’s points and help them to fill their own skills and labour shortages. It has been a whirlwind few months with more than 150 organisations and businesses signing the pledge and interest received from dozens more.
We have now reached a significant milestone of our first six-monthly review calls with our earliest group of pledged employers. The review call provides us our first touch point with age-friendly employers and is an opportunity to find out what they are doing.
Importantly, it is also a chance to identify any early challenges employers may be having in taking action on their desire to improve the retention, recruitment and development of older workers and what support we as an organisation can provide.
The calls are an essential communication tool between us and the network of pledged employers. They will provide us with a rich source of information as we discuss what progress they are making on implementing changes, what is working well and where are they experiencing any challenges. We’ll also be drawing out the good practice that can then be shared more widely with the network.
We will use these calls to identify insights and trends that will inform our work and influence the type of support we develop for the network, making sure it is even more relevant to employers’ needs.
We’re already excited about what we are going to learn. While it is too early to confidently comment on common themes and trends, there are intriguing hints of what is to come. When we asked about current priorities, retention was the theme employers spoke most strongly about.
As the Chancellor’s Budget comments indicate, older workers have been having their moment in the time since we launched the pledge. The government priority focus on older workers and the media interest in supposed trends of the Great Unretirement have arguably never been higher.
But when we reflect on how much discussion there has been in the news about encouraging older workers back into the workplace, we were interested to hear that employers acknowledge the importance of retaining older workers to fill skills needs rather than focusing on solely on recruitment.
Given the high costs of recruitment, it makes sense to focus efforts on keeping the great people (and experience) you already have, rather than losing these workers. We know that three key reasons older workers give for leaving employment are because they need adjustments for caring responsibilities, changes in their health or indeed they just want to reduce their hours as they phase into retirement rather than stopping work all together.
Against this background what does good practice in retention look like? Employers will have different resources available according to their size, sector and other characteristics, but not every solution will require extra resources or capacity. The basics are important. The quality of relationship and communication between line manager and employee can often lie at the heart of finding out about the needs and motivations of all workers.
We do know though that flexible working arrangements, such as offering variable working hours, is a significant factor in encouraging workers over 50 to stay in jobs. Workers with either long-standing health problems, or more often acquired health conditions, may prefer (and be able to stay in work) with more flexibility and relatively simple adjustments to accommodate their changing needs.
Employment patterns differ for people in different circumstances and should be personally tailored wherever possible.
While it’s too soon to draw definite conclusions, it’s given us a spring in our step to have listened to the experiences of our first group of age-friendly employers. Establishing a vibrant network of like-minded organisations is a key objective for us at Ageing Better as it will be our main platform for gathering information and will be used to inform plans for the pledge in Year Two and beyond.
A central question for the programme delivery of the Age-friendly Employer Pledge will be how well we remain agile and responsive to need.
The challenges that older workers face, and the opportunities for growth they present to employers and the economy, are not going away anytime soon. That’s why we will continue to look to grow and adapt the pledge.
Tracy Riddell is senior programme manager for age-friendly employment at the Centre for Ageing Better
