Aging is a universal factor that can affect a variety of health conditions and outcomes, including the likelihood of injuries at work. With this in mind, simple changes on your working schemes and dynamics can go a long way to ensure your workplace will be safer for all ages. After all, an excellent
workforce safety plan must cover all factors that will keep everyone healthy and productive. Here’s some tips on how to better handle an aging workforce.
Know the value of a mature workforce. Losing the expertise of your most experienced professionals could create several negative impacts on your company’s productivity. Which is why it’s important to accommodate the skilled and matured workforce (who represent some of your best and most productive workers) to ensure that your day-to-day operation will have a
balanced and productive output.
Engineering workplace solutions for comfort. It’s important to design the workplace in relation to the capabilities and limitations of the workforce. The goal is to modify jobs and tasks to remove incompatibilities that may hinder safe and productive work. In essence, this step could prevent injuries, illnesses, and mistakes as well as improve the overall worker health and performance.
Provide easy but impactful training programs. It may somehow get overlooked, but some of the matured employees may need more time to adjust to digital training programs which are very useful today. Select training programs that offer great visuals and video content, so that the aging workforce will have an easier time digesting content. As an example,
360training.com has an impressive library of all things about workplace health and safety, which also feature engaging digital content that have been designed for all types of learners.
Consider having a virtual work environment. The revolutionary set-up should allow employees to stay connected while balancing customer/company privacy and operational risk. Furthermore, home-based tasks, even if done occasionally will give older workers the freedom they need to live their lives while keeping them connected with their colleagues and career goals.
Plan ahead and identify the needs of your workforce. Study your workplace demographics and plan in advance. With this, you can easily develop policies that should meet the needs of your employees, regardless of age. If you have a large population of retirement-age employees who would like to stay in a lesser capacity, then you might consider adding flexible options that will let them ease into retirement. More importantly, this will help you get succession plans in place by the time that employees in leadership positions do begin to retire.
Summing up. The demographics of the U.S. workforce says that 10,000 workers turn 65 every day, and some of them might as well be your most steady and productive employees. The mature workforce will always be valuable since for most organizations, they represent the workers with the most knowledge and skill. In turn, the management should be mindful the small things which can affect their workforce’s confidence and productivity level. Simply put, as long as you make it work for them, your aging workforce should also be willing to stay and put their best effort for you.
