If your business is struggling to keep hard-working, talented, productive employees, you may need to change some of your thinking when it comes to recruitment and retention.
In particular, it’s likely time to focus on the second part of that two-pronged approach, especially when it comes to retaining older workers. And to keep them on the job, flexibility is key.
Keeping People in the Workforce Longer with Work Flexibility
That is one of the conclusions of a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “Older Americans Would Work Longer If Jobs Were Flexible,” published in November 2017, and written by John Ameriks, Joseph S. Briggs, Andrew Caplin, Minjoon Lee, Matthew D. Shapiro, and Christopher Tonetti.
“Older Americans, even those who are long retired, have strong willingness to work, especially in jobs with flexible schedules,” the paper says in its introduction. “For many, labor force participation near or after normal retirement age is limited more by a lack of acceptable job opportunities or low expectations about finding them than by unwillingness to work longer.”
The authors based their conclusions on the use of “strategic survey questions,” which allowed them to estimate the willingness of 2,772 respondents to a Vanguard Research Initiative survey to work in arrangements that aren’t prevalent now. In particular, they investigated the impact of flexible schedules.
Based on questions that offered the option to work shorter hours, the survey showed that many older workers would take up that option, even if it involved a reduction in earnings.
“About 40% of retirees, mostly in their late 60s or 70s, are willing to work again at the time of the survey if all the conditions are the same as their last job, including hourly wage, total number of hours, and type of job,” the report says.
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“Willingness to work becomes much stronger if they can choose hours flexibly instead of having to work the same number of hours as in their last job on a fixed schedule. About 60% of retirees would be willing to return to work with a flexible schedule. Furthermore, 20% of retirees would be willing to take more than a 20% hourly wage reduction to do so.”
Many people move directly from a full-time career to full-time retirement when they decide it’s time to leave the workforce. However, the survey showed that some of those people may be convinced to stay in at least a part-time work role if they believe they have the opportunity to do so.
“Among those who directly transitioned to complete retirement after their career jobs, only 11% (147 out of 1,336) report having looked for a new job opportunity,” the report says. “In contrast, 80% (657 out of 812) of those who had a bridge job actively looked for such an opportunity, while only 20% of workers received their bridge job passively.
“Thus, most workers who report having searched actively successfully found employment. This suggests either that most retirees are not interested in post-career employment or that they are not interested in the jobs they believe themselves likely to find. …We find further suggestive evidence that flexibility is an important characteristic for workers pursuing bridge jobs, with:
- 40% wanting flexibility in deciding the number of hours
- 31% wanting flexibility in how to allocate these hours
- 33% wanted less responsibility, suggesting pursuit of jobs that are less burdensome
- 30% wanted to be more of their own boss.”
As the researchers delved further into the survey results, they found that a willingness to stay in, or return to, the workforce was common among a broad range of older workers. It didn’t matter what age group or other demographic factor was involved.
But again, results showed that flexibility made those workers even more likely to consider continued employment.
“We also find that older Americans have a strong preference for having control of their own work schedule,” the report says. “A majority of retirees would work if they could find a job with a flexible schedule in what is otherwise the same job as their last job.”
So, if all of these older workers want to stay on the job, why aren’t they doing so? That question no doubt has many answers, but it appears one problem is that companies simply aren’t making the effort to keep them by offering flexibility.
“From these findings we conclude that older Americans’ labor force participation near and after normal retirement ages is limited more by a lack of acceptable job opportunities or low expectations about finding them, in particular jobs with part-time or flexible schedules, than by unwillingness to work longer,” the report says.
“Thus, demand-side factors…are likely to be important in explaining current late-in-life labor market behavior and may be an appropriate target for policies aiming to promote working longer.”
In other words, the evidence suggests that businesses can keep older workers if they really want to. The issue is one of demand, not supply. By offering a bit of flexibility, businesses can balance that equation and beat the looming worker shortage, keeping their best and brightest on the job even as they get older.
Photo Credit: bigstockphoto.com
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