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The Conference Board Review® Article
Old Questions
We've studied older workers to death. How come we know so little about them?
By Mary Young
Mary B. Young is a senior research associate at The Conference Board and author of the Board report Strategic Workforce Planning: Forecasting Human Capital Needs to Execute Business Strategy.
Everybody knows that the aging workforce is the preeminent HR issue of the coming decade. Management gurus and researchers have been working overtime, churning out a torrent of new studies that are supposed to help companies deal with older workers. So how come so much of the advice we're getting is either redundant or dubious? And why do so many research reports seem hell-bent on proving, a priori, that aging employees are, without exception, an unmitigated bonanza to employers?
Even blindfolded, it's easy to hit on new topics that deserve to be studied. Because the aging of the workforce is unprecedented in management history, it's hard to imagine an area that won't be impacted: strategic planning, risk management, facilities planning, supply-chain management, innovation and new product development, sales and marketing, and every conceivable aspect of HR management.
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What Managers Want to Know A group of senior managers from a cross-section of companies came together recently to discuss the challenges of a mature workforce. Their conversation began with a litany of structural barriers, like ERISA regulations and retirement plans, to keeping retirees on the payroll. Then it moved into other areas, such as talent shortages for hard-to-fill jobs, capturing company knowledge and passing it on to younger employees, rehiring retirees, and flexible work time. These are the kinds of challenges to which many AARP-award-winning employers have found at least partial solutions. But eventually the conversation veered off in another direction, raising a number of provocative questions. Who are these mature workers? What do they want? How can we motivate and retain the best of them and ease the exit of those we ought to be rid of—without inviting an age-discrimination suit? Mature workers wind up in self-directed careers, observed one executive. They become project managers or work on special assignments, more on an ad hoc basis than as a result of the company's talent-management plan. "People find their own path," he said. "They're not heavily managed." There were nods throughout the room as another business leader bemoaned older employees who lose their motivation and simply retire in place. "When does that happen?" he asked. "Do we do it to them?" "Something gets out of whack in the employer/employee relationship," offered another executive, "sometimes as early as age 45. We don't hold mature workers accountable, and we don't develop them." Perhaps lowered expectations of older workers become a self-fulfilling prophecy, suggested another. "How do we break that cycle? How do we make them as productive as possible?" By now, everyone was raising questions. "How do we develop a culture where older workers recognize that they, too, need to keep learning, instead of a culture where they feel entitled?" How do we help mature workers become effective in transferring knowledge to younger ones? "They need to learn how to do that without sounding like a wet blanket." How do we encourage employees to give us advance notice before they plan to retire yet not penalize them for doing so by making them lame ducks? How do we encourage some employees to retire, when that's in the company's best interests? Like players in a game of blind man's bluff, these seasoned executives were groping in the dark for clues about workers who have been in the workforce thirty, forty, or even fifty years. "It's like a black box," one executive concluded. As this conversation progressed from a discussion of known issues to an exploration of the unknown, it revealed a gaping hole in management science. Few, if any, of the established models of careers, motivation, rewards, work/life issues, high-performing teams, performance management, or training focuses on older employees or examines what, if any, impact employees' age might have. Generations of industrial/organizational psychologists, organizational theorists and management gurus have never addressed these issues because they never had to. As a result, just like the business leaders who took part in this discussion, employers and organizational theorists are also in the dark: We don't know what we don't know about this new segment of the workforce. Yet listening carefully to both employers and mature employees will point researchers to the research questions that matter. —M.B.Y. |
Yet many researchers ask the same tired survey questions and get the same tired answers, providing managers with little help dealing with the toughest issues: How can companies keep their older workers motivated, engaged, and productive right up until they leave? How can they rid themselves of slackers who have "retired on the job" while also avoiding charges of age discrimination? How can they encourage employees to tell them when they plan to retire, yet ensure they don't become lame ducks in the interim?
Coming up with interesting research questions on the mature workforce should be like shooting fish in a barrel. So why do so many "new" studies miss the mark? Why all the redundancy and skirting of the toughest issues? The answer may lie in who's doing the research and how it's produced.
Name a major player in the HR/human-capital/workforce-management consulting space: Accenture, DDI, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Hewitt, IBM Global Services, McKinsey, Mercer, Towers Perrin, Watson Wyatt. (Plus AARP, the mightiest of them all.) Every one of them has thrown its hat into the ring, brandishing new, proprietary research to demonstrate its expertise in helping companies grapple with mature-workforce issues.
A sizable chunk of these mature-workforce studies were designed primarily to build market share in the burgeoning field of mature-workforce solutions. All a firm need do is focus on some area where it might conceivably build expertise—employee engagement, or knowledge transfer, or inter-generational issues. Throw together an online questionnaire. Survey their current clients. And then promote the findings with great fanfare, using that platform to establish itself as a savvy solutions-provider.
As a business researcher, I've read a mountain of such studies on hot management topics, not just on the mature workforce. I've conducted more than a few myself. There's a comfortable living to be made producing research whose findings will grab some headlines, earn some speaking invitations, and achieve for the researcher—or, more typically, the study's sponsor—the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. With the help of memorable statistics and a pretty good PR agency, hot-topic research can take a consulting firm from obscurity to thought leadership. If it generates enough media attention and speaking gigs, research can be a powerful positioning tool, securing prominence, long-term competitive advantage and new clients.
That's what's been happening in the mature-workforce field for the past five years, and with growing intensity over the past two: Everybody and his brother has fielded "new" research on the topic, and the news-feeds from PR Newswire continue to pump out mature-workforce statistics right and left.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that. The aging workforce does, in fact, present to both employers and employees a mare's nest of new challenges. For the first time in modern organizational history, the youngest employees may work alongside others who may be as much as four times their age. As a result of past growth spurts, downsizings, and hiring freezes, some companies now find themselves with a workforce that is predominately over age 45. In certain industries and for certain jobs, the current pipeline of younger workers seems too small to meet future demand.
Department of Redundancy Department
The problem is that too many of the organizations feeding this torrent of data-analysis, best-practice case studies and "research-based" recommendations are opting for me-too studies. Countless surveys—including ones distributed in 2000 and 2002 by The Conference Board—have asked mature workers at what age they expect to retire, whether their "retirement" might include paid work, the kinds of work they'd like, and what factors might induce them to work longer. These questions, initially useful, have become less so with repetition. Time and again, employers, too, have been asked virtually identical questions: How big a challenge do baby-boomer retirements pose for your company? What, if anything, are you doing about it? By repeating the same been-there-done-that questions, such studies fail to deepen our understanding, root out new challenges, or generate practical solutions.
There are plenty of under-explored directions to try. Initially, research could quantify and describe the challenges and current practices in each area: How significant are the issues? Which industries, regions, or functions are most affected? What, if anything, are organizations doing about it now? What impact has that had? How do they know? What else could organizations be doing?
Comments? Write a letter to the editor.
Return to the November/December 2006 The Conference Board Review® issue.
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