Businesses must do more to take advantage of age diversity

New research from the CIPD has found that fears of intergenerational tensions within the workplace have been over-egged and that employers see clear benefits from an increasingly age diverse workforce.

However, the research also found that many businesses are still ill prepared to capitalise on the opportunities that an age diverse workforce can bring:

• Nearly a third (31%) of employers say that they react to issues relating to the ageing population as they arise rather than having a strategy in place.
• Indeed, rather worryingly employers are most likely to say (34%) their organisation does nothing to ensure it has access to enough skilled and diverse people of all ages.
• A fifth of employers say their organisation (22%) has no provisions in place to ensure employees of all ages develop and keep their skills up to date.
• Nearly half (46%) of employers said that line managers are not trained in managing teams of different generations and that their organisation has no plans to change this. This seems to be an oversight, particularly in the light of one in five employees believing their managers to be ineffective in this area.

Other key findings from the CIPD report include:

• People are planning to work longer.  The highest proportion of employees surveyed (38%) is expecting to retire between the ages of 66-70, while 16% are realistically expecting to retire after the age of 71.This is followed by nearly a third (31%) who are expecting to retire between the ages of 61-65 and 11% between the ages of 56-60. Very few employees are expecting to retire before the age of 55 (4%).
• The initiatives that organisations are most likely to be using to support the extension of working life include: flexible working options (42%) and a flexible retirement policy (30%). However, three out of ten (30%) employers report that they don’t offer any support for the extension of working life.

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