Kate Ellis, Minister for Employment Participation

Sageco is thrilled to announce that we have been successful as a provider for the expansion of the Corporate Champions program for 2013 – 2016. As a Corporate Champions provider, we will be assisting employers (with 200+ employees) to recruit and retain mature age workers.

“The objective of the program is to build workplaces that value the experience of older Australians and increase the recruitment of mature age job seekers. This is to be achieved through the provision of advice and support to help individual employers realise the value of a diverse, flexible and loyal workforce.” DEEWR

With Sageco’s track record in ageing workforce planning and implementation, we encourage all employers to take this opportunity to become a Corporate Champion. Our impact data collated over five years shows that even small interventions can make a profound difference to your organisation.

As the Hon Kate Ellis MP, Minister for Employment Participation said in Hobart last Friday:

“There are many benefits for employers that join the Corporate Champions program. Corporate Champions are eligible to receive a program of tailored assistance from an industry expert, valued up to $10,000 (for SMEs, $20 000 for larger organisations). You get a professional assessment of your organisation’s workforce demographics and recruitment and retention practices and help to develop an action plan to improve in any areas you identify as a priority.”

This is something that Sageco has been passionately committed to for the last nine years. It is our hope that many more Australian employers will become Corporate Champions and use the associated start-up funding to implement programs that create a positive and productive future for their mature workers. The Sageco program will also include a consultation with mature age specialists Adage on recruitment.

We look forward to delivering a tailored, leading edge service to Corporate Champions who will rise to the challenge.

Employers are encouraged to register their interest in the Corporate Champions program. We’d love to discuss this exciting opportunity with you further.

More resources

Investing in Experience Employment Charter – this could be you!

Experience+ Corporate Champions resource page

Starting Point – use this inventory to get you started with Sageco

Read on for these five top tips:

• Don’t assume retirement
• Encourage honest conversations
• Provide flexibility
• Use workers’ experience and be pro-active about knowledge transfer
• Provide tailored benefits eg health insurance, financial planning

Are you on LinkedIn? Why not LinkIn to Sageco’s Wisdom Circle .

Twilighters, people aged 63 and above, have emerged as the fastest growing workforce segment group according to the May 2012 MyCareer Employment Forecast.

I’m not sure I would ever want to be called a ‘twilighter’ – but we’ll gladly add it to our wonderful list of euphemisms for ‘mature age workers’. What’s interesting about this report is the changing face of the workforce. The number of working people aged 63 and over has doubled in the last 15 years. It would seem that ‘twilighters’ aren’t simply a group of people ‘waiting to retire’ or trapped in a ‘work forever’ cycle. People are choosing to work longer and differently – for all sorts of reasons. This is THE fastest growing workforce segment group – faster than the Gen Ys!

So – five questions for employers might be:

1. What are you doing differently in your workplace to ensure that you employ your fair share of ‘twilighters’?
2. How would you attract a ‘twilighter’ to your workplace?
3. What training ,development and support would you provide a ‘twilighter’?
4. How will you retain your current employees so that they share the ‘twilight’ of their career with your organisation, rather that somewhere else?
5. Is it age or attitude that matters?

Organisations that have planned and invested in mature age workers already will be the ones that benefit from this dynamic workforce segment.

Here are some of the questions we ask:

• What’s the business imperative for setting up an alumni? Is it a potential talent pool or living, walking knowledge base? (If it’s just about doing a nice thing for older people then it’s dooooooomed.)
• How are you engaging your mature workers now? How do you support their decisions about work and retirement? Maybe you could start with pre-retirees for the alumni. (There’s often quite a pause before people answer that question – if they can.)
• Do you have a transparent and defined process for re-engaging or re-employing  people who have retired? (The answers here are more miss than hit.)

The Washington Post Capital Business recent article on a graying workforce cites some good examples of how organisations are engaging retired workers.

The Agriculture Department is working with the National Older Worker Career Center to encourage people 55 and older — many of them retired federal employees — to come back to work on a specific project or be a temporary or part-time worker.

Joel Reaser, senior vice president at the Arlington-based center, said the program benefits older people who don’t want a full-time job but still have experience and knowledge as well as a government agency that’s facing an impending wave of retirements.

The effort is “not just a nice thing to do for old people,” said Reaser. “It’s absolutely critical that all employers, including the federal government, learn how to … retain [employees] further into their lives, extending their work lives and finding creative ways to bring them back.”

We couldn’t agree more.

“…In the resources sector, we’ve had to be quite creative in actually keeping older people on-board. We see them as a wonderful source of experience and knowledge. The labour demands in our sector are massive – and the skilled talent pool is actually drying up…” Senior HR Director, Resources Sector.

The topic of discrimination is of course very serious. But it intrigues me that over the eight years that Sageco has focussed on mature age workforce solutions, we struggle to find anything new under the sun. Except, of course, the fabulous new Age Discrimination Commissioner, Susan Ryan.

So, I asked myself the question, “What’s my attitude to workers (putting age aside)?”. Here’s my list as someone who has recruited and employed people for my various teams over the last 20 years.

I want ‘workers’ for my team who:

1. Keep themselves current - with skills, news, styles, professional associations and good coffee.
2. Keep themselves connected - team members who connect me with other great people. Is there a better way to network?
3. Keep managing their career - workers who grow their own career, invest in it and keep moving forward. The ones who can’t imagine not having a career in some way, shape or form.
4. Keep curious - I love workers who ask questions, challenge the norm and always want to find a better way.
5. Are confidently competent. Fullstop. I’ve come to believe that the description ‘highly competent’ is one to strive for. The cost of incompetence and a manager’s inability to deal with it is astounding.

Hand on my heart, I can say that I’ve employed 24 year olds and 67 year olds who get big ticks against all five characteristics. If you’re a ‘mature worker’ , this is a gentle nudge to check yourself against this list. How do you fare?

To employers – maybe you need to write your own list. And seriously ask yourself: What does age have to do with it?

PS Want to found out how over 10 000 mature age workers have started to Envisage their own future and move beyond the attitudes they face? Come and try in February and March.

In HR Daily today, I was asked ‘When should you talk to employees about retirement?’ It’s never too early, but we would recommend that by the time employees turn 50, their performance development review conversations should include the topics of future work intentions and retirement conversations. And organisations should be actively supporting their decision making about the future. Why?

1. Forward planning allows for enough time to transfer knowledge. There is an opportunity to shape a mature employee’s role to support knowledge sharing activities.
2. The more support a mature employee has in making work and retirement decisions, the more likely they are to experience a positive and productive career.
3. By having a timely conversation about future working intentions, you may retain that mature employee for longer. They may work differently, but you can reduce recruitment and training costs and minimise knowledge risk.

Just as 40 is the new 30, 65 ain’t 65 anymore

writes Greg Jericho in The Drum Opinion yesterday.

Last week the Daily Telegraph ran a front page story with the cheery headline “Graveyard Shift“, bemoaning that mature workers are being ‘forced’ to work longer. Not so, says Jericho. The facts support this counter argument, we are living longer healthier lives and mature workers have been steadily ‘working longer’ since 1983. A trend quite removed from the impact of the GFC and stock market fluctuations.

we should not be running front page stories about older people having to work, we should be running front page stories about what governments and employers are doing to encourage and help those over 65 to work

SageCo echoes these sentiments in an article published by Human Capital Online last week, sharing data gained from over 2500 mature workers in the past year on their future working intentions.

It comes down to individual choice (and of course ability) to continue working. For choice to occur, there need to be options available. For options to be available, organisations need to focus on reshaping the way we work and create space for the conversation.

81% stated they would continue to work, if they could work differently. The problem is that the conversation is not taking place, said Monroe

It is integral for leaders to be talking to the mature members of the team, and gauging their future work intentions, not their ‘retirement intentions’, which sends the wrong message to the older workforce.

Sageco always encourages employers to actively support mature workers in their late career and retirement decisions. Sometimes it is the ‘assumption’ of retirement that is the greatest barrier to this. If you manage mature workers, then follow these three easy steps to ensure that they’re not being overlooked:

• Have a conversation about their work and retirement intentions. Ask the questions, “What would you like the next ten years working here to look like?”
• Encourage your mature workers to think about taking charge of their own career development.
• Make sure that performance and development reviews are constructive and don’t assume that someone is ‘just going to retire soon’ because they are over 50.

In her new position of Age Discrimination Commissioner, Ms Ryan will be a dedicated advocate not only for older Australians, but also young people who might be affected by age discrimination

said Attorney-General Robert McClelland upon announcing the appointment.

Ryan is the independent chair of the IAG & NRMA Superannuation Plan, as well as honourary chair of the Australian Human Rights Group and ambassador to WomenAid Australia.

Ryan says her track record in the area of gender discrimination gives her confidence things will change, in legislation, culture and the workplace. On a personal note Ryan adds;

I’m 68 and want to hit the ground running!

Ryan takes the baton from Elizabeth Broderick, who has been at the forefront of keeping age discrimination issues firmly on the agenda.

Read more…

In this HCTV Big Story, we talk to Alison Monroe, managing director, SageCo, about what employers need to be doing to facilitate mature age workers in their workforce. As Catriona Byrne, director, SageCo, points out, often it starts with a conversation between manager and employee. Cindy Grass, HR director, Millward Brown adds that flexibility can work for all employees. As an example of how seriously the mature age challenge is being taken by many organisations, Rowan Arndt, head of diversity & inclusion for the NAB Group, talks about his company’s new mature age strategy.

Watch the video interviews here!