Thanks.
The Workplace Institute has been focused on older workers since 2004. We've been putting together the best employers award for Canadians aged 50-plus. We've been working with organizations to help them adapt their workplace practices to look at incorporating the skills, talent, and experience of older workers.
In my presentation today I'm going to talk about some high-level concepts that we discuss with employers and ways to help employers understand that there is a really great business case for continuing to employ their older workers, as well as recruiting them.
The first thing is really about linking them to the business strategy. What is their pressing business issue? So often it's about talent and management issues, such as having the skills for their workplace, and linking it to bringing value to the business. Turnover is often a big issue, and training younger workers who are coming into the workplace but often don't have the skills and experience they need to get up and running as quickly as organizations would like.
We've really identified to employers that there's this period of time between the ages of 50 and 80 that they really need to be considering instead of looking at the time between 50 and 65 as a time for people to be transitioning out of the workplace. Because of the repeal of mandatory retirement and the great health of many individuals, we're looking at the period of time between the ages of 50 and 80 that we call the “kabooming years”. It's a period of time where baby boomers want to continue to make a contribution and have an impact. There are many different ways that organizations, because their needs are different, can do that.
The first is really about engaging older workers. The number one way to do that is through flexibility in the workplace. All employees want flexibility, but it's a very important piece for older workers.
Everybody wants to have a career path until the day they decide they're going to leave the organization. Everybody wants to have training and equal opportunity to apply for positions until the day they leave.
There are adaptations in the workplace, such as when we worked with the construction sector to help them develop an older workforce tool kit that helped them understand that heated cabs and joysticks were a way to extend the working life of people who are doing physical jobs. In health care, we helped nurses work with orderlies or have more equipment so that they're adapting the way they're working and redesigning some of that.
Recognition is also very important for individuals in the workplace, especially for older workers. As well, it's a great strategy for not-for-profits, where there may not be other kinds of financial incentives.
Financial guidance is really important throughout a person's career in the workplace. We know that if they are not getting that kind of education, then in fact people may be staying much longer than they would normally have done. A lot of people are in the position of not retiring not because they don't want to but also because they can't. We don't want to get into those kinds of situations in the workplace.
Total health is also important, meaning the relationships that people have with their managers, their co-workers, their physical health, as well as their mental health—which is another focus for some organizations—and work-life integration. Just as younger workers might want work-life balance because of where they are in their life stage in parenting, older workers certainly are interested in that same thing, but maybe for different reasons. They don't necessarily want to work full time, or they have caregiving issues, or they want to explore different kinds of opportunities.
There's caregiving support in the workplace and cycling retirement, which is a little different from phased retirement, and what more organizations have looked at who have defined benefit plans. It's having the opportunity to be in the workplace but to retire and to come back into the workplace, and having meaning in your work.
Then there are a number of strategies that are important for organizations to consider. The first and most important one is workforce planning. It's really a risk management strategy to help them understand how to mitigate the risks of losing those individuals who are providing a great deal of value to the business goals that an organization may have.
In hand with that is succession planning. We know that only about 20% of organizations actually do succession planning and, of those, most of them are focused on the most senior levels in the organization. But the individuals concerned are not necessarily only ones providing value within the organization. In fact, we know that in many organizations and industries there are some key workers whom it's important to continue to have available, even for the training of younger workers. So we see strategies like engagement, recruiting baby boomers, adapting the organization and helping the generations to work together and learn from each other.
For baby boomers themselves, having a career path and helping them develop a professional passport are important, so that they are actually tapping into their strengths and using them to be able to contribute to the organization and understanding what their transferable skills might be to do other things, helping them to learn how to teach other people. We know that mentoring will be a big part of what older workers are going to be tapped to do, but it's not a natural process and people need to learn how to do those things.
Helping people to understand social media and the new ways we are communicating, including everything from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn, and understanding how those mediums are being used, is an essential social and workplace skill.
As for understanding how to create your life after work, that might involve starting your own business, or continuing to make a contribution to your community through volunteering and helping businesses to understand how to make links for people. People are sometimes afraid to leave the workplace, because they don't know what else is out there. Being able to link into the community may be very helpful and rewarding—or perhaps selling your services back into an organization or its competitor.
There are a number of key strategies that organizations can use. We have a process for that, so it's really important to structure opportunities to have a dialogue early on with older workers and to give them alternative work opportunities and transition planning. This will be a whole new way for organizations to innovate in the workplace, in the same way that we needed to innovate when women came into the workplace. Baby boomers, now aged between 50 and 80, are going to change the way workplace practices happen, integrating their initiatives into the diversity plans in the workplace. This is often where organizations already have a diversity plan, and developing an older workforce strategy is one place where they can do that, as well as establishing and supporting a connection to retirees.
We've actually presented to a number of organizations and government bodies about a customized video training and online resource tool kit that we have for employers to help them understand how to do this. It's really customizable for employers, and we're thinking that it will be really useful in targeted initiatives for older workers, organizations like Third Quarter, and other programs. We're not re-inventing the wheel. We know there's an issue about hiring and keeping older workers, and there are some very specific types of practices that would be really helpful to organizations in that regard.
That's my presentation.
Thank you.