Ageism or sageism?

Q : It always makes me feel a bit melancholy. Grand old war ship. being ignominiously haunted away to scrap... The inevitability of time, don't you think? What do you see?

James Bond : A bloody big ship. Excuse me.

Q : 007. I'm your new Quartermaster.

James Bond : You must be joking.

Q : Why, because I'm not wearing a lab coat?

James Bond : Because you still have spots.

Q : My complexion is hardly relevant.

James Bond : Your competence is.

Q : Age is no guarantee of efficiency.

James Bond : And youth is no guarantee of innovation.

Q : Well, I'll hazard I can do more damage on my laptop sitting in my pajamas before my first cup of Earl Grey than you can do in a year in the field.

James Bond : Oh, so why do you need me?

Q : Every now and then a trigger has to be pulled.

James Bond : Or not pulled. It's hard to know which in your pajamas.

Masako Wakamiya, 77, from Japan, is the oldest IPhone App developer worldwide. Her specialization consists in adapting smartphones interfaces to the needs of older users, and her company considers her contribution irreplaceable in order to achieve its goals. In her own way, Mr Bond too emphasizes the fact that age may not be a determining factor in filling a role, or not in filling it.

Susan Wilner Golden of Harvard Business Review calls today's world "the era of no retirement," and the facts seem to prove she’s right. In a recent episode of The McKinsey Podcast, Mona Mourshed, Global CEO of the non-profit organization Generation and Roberta Fusaro, Executive editor of McKinsey highlighted some of the findings of the Generation Report, dedicated to the state of midcareer workers. The survey involved 3,800 employed or unemployed people, as well as 1,400 hiring managers in seven different advanced economic countries, including Italy, questioning them on the relationship between companies and their older workers. The intent was to investigate the age factor as a professional element that limits or even penalizes the categories of workers aged 45-50 and over. What is not too surprising is that the answers were substantially uniform, a sign that the topic offers a transnational value. And the age discrimination, the so-called ageism, risk to become a relevant problem if we consider that according to the data of the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and development) 70% of the unemployed today are over 45 years old. And 63% of them take more than a year to relocate, compared to 36% of 18-34 year olds.

The research offers several interesting insights on the subject of ageism:

·????????The cliché has it that senior workers are essentially unmotivated and only interested in reaching retirement age. This is a mistake, or worse still a misunderstanding, because most of the time they are nowhere near retirement. A fifty-year-old worker in the most advanced economies is at least seventeen years from retirement age; Elon Musk's SpaceX Probe plans to go to and from Mars thirty-four times in the same amount of time, so their colleagues are bound to see them pass in full shape down the corridors, or behind a camera, for quite a while;

·Older workers, as highlighted by HR and Recruiting Manager, cost more and pay less than younger workers. This reasoning is based on the common belief that wages and benefits for seniors are higher than those reserved for young people, and that seniors provide a lower level of commitment. In reality it is the opposite. In proportion to the accumulated experience, the salary tends to be underestimated, while the emotional, affective, belonging and even caring part of other colleagues, especially the younger ones, is completely not recognized. Anyone who has been lucky enough to have an older colleague who took care of him as soon as he arrived at the company knows what we are talking about (I, my first boss Peppino, still visit him today, and I recognize that he was one of the three most important of my entire career). Finally, obviously, they have lower turnover and therefore allow training costs to be fully amortized;

·Today's 50-year-olds represent the most prepared, and best fit 50-aged generation in history. They are largely baby boomers, who have been privileged to enjoy adequate school systems, a stable business system, and even an improved lifestyle over time. Anyone at this age who compares with their parents will notice the incredible improvement that has occurred in a few decades. The physical and mental freshness that they are able to release is elevated, and supports rather than knocking it down, the experiential curve. Giving up this type of biophysical combination, or even not valuing it adequately, appears decidedly insane;

·As for professional performance, older people contribute significantly to innovation for the simple fact that they are the most profound connoisseurs of the processes and tools to which innovation is applied. No one could apply AI to a process without relying on those who know that process, practice it and have often built it themselves;

·Seniors are the best experts and representatives of the largest market in the world, that of senior consumers. Warby Parkers was a company specializing in fashion eyewear for young adults, which was not having success. Then internal contest for new products was set up, and the seniors developed an idea of innovative, fashion and low-cost lenses for seniors. Today the company is a leader in that segment. The cliché of the big, beige and boring senior had been dismantled within the company;

·The relationship of seniors with technology has dramatically improved compared to the past. Consumers over 50 love technology, which they often learned to appreciate when it was far less glamorous than it is now. Raise your hand to a music lover born in the sixties who does not adore the ease with which Spotify makes available for a few euros a catalogue of records that when he was young he could never have afforded. Furthermore, the pandemic has played the role of a global accelerator of the IT skills of generations who were previously less exposed to modern tools, favouring a simply unimaginable colonization of entire IT sectors by seniors. And where there are still gaps, they can be filled. Older people want to use new technologies. Maybe they will not be the early adopters, but they constitute an impressive critical mass capable of moving quickly in eliminating the differences in the capacity of use. How many chats of grandmothers passionate about Burraco (a kind-of-Bridge card game) do you think there are in Milan?

Yet hiring managers, or people managers, are not willing to recognize or monetize this value. Only 15% of candidates over 45 are considered suitable for the positions they are applying for, although statistics show that 87% of them perform in the same way if not better than their younger colleagues. And it's not about the effect of cultural, industry-specific or geographic elements. There are no reasonable explanations, it is a real cognitive bias.

And here is the definition of ageism that is stated: ageism is the denial of the professional contribution obtainable by a worker over the age of 50.

But what are the remedies, what must companies do to be age-ready? The company literature to date does not provide precise answers, but the discussion between experts and managers is starting to get really interesting. Here is a quick, small and useful list of ideas for companies wishing to fill the ageism gap in their organizations:

1.??????Acquire awareness of the performance of employees, dividing them by age group and using statistics – not bias - for intergenerational evaluations;

2.??????Link hiring and promotions to statistical evidences, sterilizing CVs from personal details if necessary and structuring selections based on the analysis of previous career paths rather than on the characteristics of the position sought;

3.??????Understand that socio-demographic evolution is moving into the company. Therefore, programs aimed at improving the work experience of this part of workers will be increasingly useful and necessary. For example, by equipping the company with the right physical and logical infrastructures. A soccer table and a ping-pong table, if the over-50s represent the majority of workers, makes less sense than building a parking space for bicycles or electric vehicles, or even making an internal medical office available. Enhanced health fund, adequate welfare, support for the care of elderly parents and long-term caring assistance for employees are some of the benefits that will support the valuable contribution needed by the company to survive;

4.??????Stop focusing on training as such and focus on that training that empowers elder population. BMW, Best Buy, Salesforce and Google, for example, offer courses to over 50s to keep their digital literacy in step with the times, both inside and outside the company;

5.??????Be serious and transparent about redevelopment projects, which in many cases involve a downsizing of the work and salary aspect;

6.??????Add Ageism to inclusion policies. Today only 50% of the most structured companies do this;

7.??????Train seniors and middle managers to work in mixed contexts and / or oriented towards a senior population. Today, dealing with elder report can be a nightmare for managers, and specific techniques need to be provided in order to fill the generational and hierarchical gap.

8.??????Work against age discrimination (highlighted by more than nine out of ten workers) and equip oneself with tools to combat it, not unlike what has been done for the other diversities present in the company. Even one wrong joke can permanently jeopardize the relationship with an older colleague who does valuable work, even if it's not 007;

9.??????Create mixed shadow boards between old and young people to overcome the generational divides, composing mixed work groups that support the C-levels in the most important decisions.

But now let's try to change perspective. On the contrary, what can a mid-worker do to improve his stay and his contribution in the company? Also in this case it is possible to provide some interesting guidelines:?

a)?????Realize that corporate and technological evolution makes roles that have existed up to now no longer indispensable and that they are most likely fulfilled by them. Understanding the lack of prospects and proactively promoting one's professional retraining without waiting for events must be part of one's personal strategy. If you are the best in the world at putting coal in the boiler of the locomotive, and have just invented the electric locomotives, it is better to start studying how they work now;

b)?????Be open to change and training. 58% of mid-workers are reluctant to undergo retraining, whether in the company or unemployed. The reasons are related to the lack of prospects, and to the lack of confidence in the effectiveness of the redevelopment, but this doesn’t not justify a passive or renouncing attitude; a move proposal, if formulated seriously, can be a useful lifesaver for the consequences of a storm that is not yet glimpsed on the horizon;

c)??????Overcome the opposite bias about new generations. New hires, and young workers in general, are not the devil and do not embody an older version of themselves. They are people with humanly understandable ambitions and needs, belonging to a different era and for this very reason they are useful to the company, and must be valued. They are not necessarily passionate about table soccer, they do not always reject emails in favour of chats, they do not necessarily want to change jobs every two years, they are themselves victims of bias and prejudices. Understanding this means starting to build an intergenerational bridge that cancels a divide that is dangerous for everyone;

d)?????Build a plan B, especially when a plan B is not needed. One of the best investments is to devote free time to alternative activities that can be transformed, if necessary, into emergency work solutions. Indulging one's talent while keeping an eye open on its business implications can be an element that makes a difference when all other strategies have been tried. Giuseppe Crippa, born in 1935, became rich at the age of 87 thanks to a business that began with the money obtained after retirement. Now he has been included in the Forbes list of billionaires, and to those who ask him how he did it he replies that the idea of setting up his own business using the skills of a lifetime came to him while he was working, when he was a mid-aged professional.

Longevity experts encourage people to "transform ageism into sageism". It seems to me a wonderful project, and a fascinating challenge. It will be a good idea to try, before becoming… too old!