Aging workforce issues
My friend Eric Lessor at IBM’s Institute of Business Value has recently launched a report, “Addressing the Challenges of an Aging Workforce in EMEA (ie. Europe).” Here are the main conclusions described in an interview Eric did for leMarchedesSeniors.com:
1. Redirect recruiting and sourcing. Companies are quickly facing worker shortages from labor pools where they normally would draw younger employees. To reach mature workers, companies can conduct over-50 workshops at local job recruitment centers, offer targeted benefits such as unpaid grandparent leave and look externally to identify retired professionals desiring part-time or short-term work.
2. Retain valued employees through alternative work arrangements. While some companies are recruiting aging workers, others are developing alternative work arrangements, such as part-time schedules. Companies should also explore, when appropriate, the use of telecommuting as a way of retaining mature workers.
3. Preserve critical knowledge. One approach elicits employees’ experiential, or tacit, knowledge through detailed interviewing or documentation, explicitly capturing and storing these insights. Mentoring arrangements and communities of practice can also encourage mature workers to pass knowledge down to the next generation.
4. Provide opportunities for workers to continually update skills. Executives are recognizing the need to refresh the skills of workers whose formal training may have ended years, if not decades, earlier. Companies are seeking to actively transfer informal skills that have not been taught and that are necessary in the working environment.
5. Facilitate the coexistence of multiple generations. Often overlooked as a facet of diversity, the viewpoints of different age groups can present significant barriers. Organizations must balance the needs, interests and work styles of all. By pairing senior managers with junior employees, each can mentor the other in different areas.
6. Help mature workers effectively use technology in the workplace. A common misperception is that older workers have more difficulty learning and adopting new technologies. While multiple has studies have shown otherwise, accessibility requirements and strategies for application rollout and training are needed to support all potential user groups, including mature workers.
Suggestions 3 concerns me because once again there is this notion that tacit knowledge can somehow be documented, especially if you use detailed interviewing. I think a better approach it to gain evidence, using narrative techniques, of where tacit knowledge exists in your organisations and then develop interventions to better harness that knowledge.
I like the balanced nature of the report in that it not only examines the scenario of baby boomers retiring en masse but considers ways to get the best out of the entire workforce. In my current projects the organisations are facing the opposite to baby boomer retirement problem—they are staying on into their seventies. As a result there are few places for the next generation to take on senior leadership roles.
[via Organic KM]
Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:
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Shawn:
I guess suggestion 3 is well balanced in a sense. Augmenting mentoring,COPs and perhaps narrative based approaches with detailed exit interviews and documentation capturing insight(to the extent they can) would be a more complete ecosystem in my humble opinion.
Your right Dinesh. Mentoring and CoPs enable the organisation to build resilience by sharing all knowledge among a group rather than concentrate it in a few soon to be retiring individuals.
Shawn
Thanks for summarizing my article. I do agree that trying to capture tacit knowledge and transform it into explicit knowledge, by itself, can be a risky proposition and that storytelling is a needed technique to make this approach effective. However, in some situations, it provides individuals with the opportunity to discuss topics that they would not have a forum to do so otherwise. Further, when combined with other techniques, it can provide a more contextual record than simply relying on reports and other final documents to capture the insights of an experienced professional. Overall, companies need to look at a range of techniques to preserve and protect knowledge before it walks out the door