Cover Story: ‘Til death us do part

Desperately seeking workers. This company will take anyone with the faintest whiff of reliability. Prefer someone who can string together a few sentences. Work skills a plus. Over 45 year olds need not apply. You’re too old, can’t learn and just don’t get it.” In a more honest world, lots of job ads may as well read like this. For some workers, crashing through the age barrier means doors slam in your face just when you’ve amassed a handsome package of skills and experience. For the very unlucky ones, it means no work at all. ‘Past your use-by date.’ ‘An old fart.’ ‘In the twilight of your career.’ Undervalued and sidelined. Passed over for training opportunities. Ignored. Bullied. Socially excluded. These are some of the findings of an EEO Trust Work & Age Survey which, although conducted in 2006, remains one of our nation’s best snapshots of the current state of play. We’ve all heard the stories. Mature candidate scores a job interview only to see the recruiter’s face drop as a grey-haired person walks in. Long silence ensues. The role has been filled by ‘somebody else’. There is no one set definition of an ‘older’ or ‘mature’ worker, although it is true to say that there is now less emphasis on hitting 40 than, say, ten years ago. Various studies focus on the age milestones of 45, 50 and 55. Individual commentators often reveal more about their own age than they do about the nationwide situation. Definitions of ‘older worker’ seem to grow as individuals age. Forty year olds reckon anyone past 50 is over the hill. Come 50 and the new deadline has shifted up to 55 or 60. And so it goes on. Sometime in the future our working population will bulge so full of older baby boomers that we’ll pop at the seams. That future is not far away. In just three years’ time, the first of our baby boomers hit 65 and can start downloading their pensions. In four years’ time, over half of all the New Zealand workforce will be over the age of 42. We ignore them at our peril. Small and medium business owner/managers wanting to focus solely on younger employees will have their work cut out finding them. In doing so, they turn their back on one of our nation’s richest resources. Reliability, good customer service, communication skills, commitment to their careers, skills in training people, initiative and an ability to create a good atmosphere – those, in descending order of significance, are the strengths that older workers bring to the workplace. That’s according to the EEO Trust survey. With employment levels at an all-time high and over a quarter of baby boomers stating they have no plans for retirement, business owners and employers need to know how to make their older workers stick around a bit longer. Employing mature workers Jane Kennelly is a director at Frog Recruitment. She knows from practical experience that a very high percentage of employers in New Zealand are worried about their staffing for the future. “But such a small percentage of companies have actually taken the time to build employing mature workers into their strategies for the future,” she says. “So there’s a real disconnect between reality and theory.” Big business is starting to connect the dots. It’s hard to get past the example of Westpac New Zealand. At the bank, older people are employed as part of a wider package of programmes designed to weave together the business and private lives of workers. Flexible work arrangements, for instance, cover for times when someone may want to study, have a family or ease up on their working hours. Employees can try working part-time, do temporary or casual work, opt for flexi-time, work from home or have a stab at job-sharing. Westpac even has its own diversity manager, Colleen Bermingham-Brown, who champions difference in the workplace. At the retirement end of the spectrum, the bank gets its people thinking well ahead. Bermingham-Brown says workers can start phasing in retirement from age 45 by choosing to put in fewer hours at the bank. Westpac holds in-house retirement planning sessions to help people think through what they’d like to do and – being a bank – how they can afford to pay for it all. These measures are hitting the spot. Westpac’s annual staff review at the end of September last year revealed more workers aged 45 to 54 compared with previous years and an especially ‘marked increase’ in those aged 55-plus. Out of a total workforce of 5597 people, says Bermingham-Brown, around 1800 are on the high side of 45. Six hundred of them have already celebrated their 55th birthday. Most of these older people are in frontline positions where they can put their well-practised social skills to good use. Then there are IAG, EDS, IBM, Auckland City Council, New Zealand Post and Kiwibank: all looking at diversity issues including how to leverage off the value that older workers can bring. Or there’s Bluebird Foods which, just like Westpac, has a policy on diversity inclusion in its workplace. The average age of its workers, says HR manager Karen Duffy, is 40-plus. And there is Pfizer New Zealand which, according to HR manager Trudie Ward, surveyed its workers two years ago and found that 34 percent of its total workforce was over 40. Over in the clothing sector, Pumpkin Patch is said to be happy to employ older women. They are reputedly valued for their ability to relate to the grandmothers who can afford to buy the upmarket branded clothing for their grandchildren. And get this: Woolworth Ltd’s Progressive Enterprises – New Zealand’s largest private employer – employs more than 230 people who are over 65 years old. “They are in full-time and part-time positions and are both long serving and recently joined,” says general manager human resources Catherine Flynn. “We have a couple who are in their mid 70s.” So larger companies are learning to tap into the older workforce. The difference between the Westpacs, Bluebird Foods, IBMs and most SMEs (small and medium enterprises) is that big business can more easily sketch out specific policies for making the most of mature workers. Big business budgets can stretch to paying for dedicated staff to push for, measure and monitor progress. Big business can put out feelers into other organisations, join industry think-tanks and pool ideas. “It’s easier for large corporates to make such changes,” says Damian Sainsbury, chief executive of recruitment advertising specialists Haines New Zealand. “The smaller the organisation the harder it is. If you only have 20 people it’s harder to get cover.” How can a 10-man SME band afford such a luxury? By scaling down the thinking and taking off the blinkers when it comes to older folk fronting up for work. Many SMEs intuitively do this already. We probably all know of a small local company whose books are being totted up by a semi-retired accountant who balances bookkeeping with gardening, fishing or golf. Local economic development agency Enterprising Manukau has just 13 employees. Yet its oldest worker, Colin Aiken, is 75 and still putting in around 40 hours of work a fortnight on a permanent part-time basis. Arrangements like that will continue to spring up. The problem is they need to happen much faster and far more often if New Zealand is going to sidestep the looming gap in savvy and willing workers. SMEs are already feeling the pinch. They are struggling to find workers. Expect the problem to get worse over the next few years. And think again if you reckon government will solve this one for you. Sainsbury reckons it’s all about market forces. “The situation doesn’t need to be legislated.” Nor is it likely to be. In the words of Retirement Commissioner Diana Crossan: “It’s not a government thing. It’s a ‘New Zealand Inc’ thing. That’s why we try to do private and public sector joint initiatives. There is no legal discrimination. It’s more about attitude and behaviour.” Crossan is part of a public/private sector group working on initiatives to help businesses of all sizes better tap into the benefits that mature workers offer. The idea sprang from an ‘Employment of Older Workers’ summit back in September 2006. Since then, says Crossan, the group has been working with a number of companies to pinpoint key issues at an organisational level. “The idea is that out of it should come some kind of good behaviour guide which will include simple practical tools and ideas,” says Crossan. “By the middle of this year we will develop a document which hopefully could be turned into a DVD which could be distributed by Business New Zealand to SMEs and large businesses.” Connecting with older workers So what can SME owner/managers do to both attract and retain mature workers? At the recruitment stage, says Kennelly, they’d better front up with ads that chime well with older folk. For some, this will be a marked step away from the ‘energy and flexibility’ or ‘a high degree of fitness’ ads which contain the unwritten sub-text ‘we want younger people’. “It appears that older workers want to hear about security,” says Kennelly. “Equally, they want to know that they can make a contribution and that they will be valued and recognised. They don’t particularly like slang [in job ads]. They like information so it is best to outline the specifics of the job. Aim for realistic and authentic communication. And they enjoy conversation, so it may well be that somewhere along the recruitment pathway a conversation or a telephone call could prove to be quite a comfort.” Others suggest offers to help with medical insurance wouldn’t go amiss either. Kennelly also believes companies need to start turning their old passive and reactionary recruitment model into something more planned and proactive. Workforce planning, she says, centres around analysing the organisation and its need for staff, forward projecting and then forecasting what might be required. It pays to focus on areas where staff turnover is especially high or ones where it is difficult to recruit. The practice is not, by any means, new in the world but is not usually top of mind here. “It’s about moving away from recruitment by rote – which is still in evidence – towards a thinking which says, ‘OK, this year, I know we’re going to need 10 sales reps. They’re difficult to find so let’s put a strategy in place for the next 12 months that will help us meet our requirements. Let’s recruit when we might not necessarily have a vacancy because we know, based on statistics, that we’ll have one coming up….’ “It’s about lifting your head out of the sand like a meerkat, looking at the horizon and drawing some conclusions for the future.” When it comes to retaining existing workers, Crossan says employers need to negotiate the ‘quite tricky’ transition period as mature employees rethink their commitment to their careers. “Sometimes an older worker is dying to have a conversation about changing their job but the employer is careful because of the constructive dismissal issue. So they dance around each other a bit. We haven’t resolved that one in New Zealand yet,” says Crossan. “It might be that there’s a person in your organisation who is getting older and would want to work part-time but they’re too scared to talk to you in case they lose their job altogether and you’re too scared to talk to them in case it looks like you’re trying to push them out.” Crossan suggests companies open up the conversation in a safer time frame. “Talk about it ahead of time. [Say things like], ‘Let’s see what’s going to happen in the next three years for you’. “The good thing is there are more and more excellent examples and people are finding ways of having conversations with older workers.” Above all, offer mature workers what they want. According to the 2006 EEO Trust Work & Age Survey, this is quality part-time work, flexible working hours, the option of taking extended leave and then returning to work, higher pay, and being able to work from home. Stuff like this, say the survey respondents, would encourage current workers to stay on beyond their expected retirement date. Still further down the wish list come challenging, interesting or varied work; the ability to make a difference; having their experience needed and valued; and less stress. Dr Phillipa Reed, the EEO Trust’s chief executive, says that in small organisations, informal networks such as the buddy system [with older workers mentoring and teaching their newer counterparts] often work well. The bad news is that this same EEO report shows most companies offer absolutely no retirement initiatives to their workers. “The main initiatives offered by employers are seminars on retirement planning, part-time and flexible working options and using older staff to mentor new staff,” says the report, “but these were mentioned by less than 20 percent of respondents.” How NZ compares Despite all these sorry tales of underutilised talent, New Zealand is still outshining almost everywhere else in the OECD. Even Retirement Commissioner Diana Crossan admits she was surprised to learn New Zealand ranks second in the OECD for participation in the workforce of people over 50. Second, that is, to Iceland. “It’s because we don’t have a retirement age and haven’t had one for a long time,” she says. In most other countries the pension kicks in only when people retire. “But here, if you are eligible, at age 65 you get the super whether you are working or not.” Surprisingly, perhaps, an EEO Trust Diversity Survey last year revealed that smaller companies are more likely than larger companies to have mentoring or development programmes for people aged over 45. And there are signs that the tide is turning in favour of older workers. Or at least not running so hard against them. Triangle Recruitment director Sue Bennett says she doesn’t see resistance from clients to hiring older people. “Once upon a time we would have older people on our books and they wouldn’t be able to get work but now they can. They’re not on our books for very long. “In Auckland, anyway, we’re an awful lot more tolerant of one another than we used to be. That’s happened over the past five years as we’ve had more immigration. That applies to age, race, accent, gender, right across the board. But I don’t think you’d get that in Gore or Dunedin. With the greatest respect to them, I think there’s still that whole Kiwiana thing going on down there.” Dr Reed has what she calls a ‘totally untested’ theory on baby boomers. “This generation redefined quite a lot of things back in the 60s. The baby boomers may now be going through into retirement, but if anyone expects them to sit back and take things that are dished out to them, well, they haven’t before so why would they now? Market forces are with them. “Life can be a whole lot more interesting by remaining engaged. And work is part of our socialisation. Work defines a lot of our social networks. Plus a lot of people can’t afford to stop working and they want to keep learning and experiencing new things. So we’re beginning to see a redefining of work and of giving back to society.” Ruth Le Pla is an Auckland based freelance writer. Email [email protected] Relevant websites: www.eeotrust.org.nz www.retirement.org.nz