Abstract
Life expectancy is increasing at a pace that may sustain beyond the actual age of retirement, and some people will not be ready to retire until an advanced aged. In addition, today even if recruiting all of the young people out of school, we will still have a shortage of workers.
What does this mean for employers? Older workers will stay longer at work. Benefits such as knowledge retention are a plus, but some of these workers will present multiple complexities; they may need to care for their progenitors and/or children, may have chronic conditions, and may be feeling slow as an effect of aging. Pride and work values can be impacted when older workers are not able to function wholly, and mental health strain may add to this situation. Some workers will require the employer’s support or accommodations to be able to continue working.
The employer has a big role to play – not just to remediate but in prevention as well. This chapter has key recommendations on how to prepare as an employer to face these circumstances; what types of accommodations are the ones that are likely to help; how to prepare to support these workers, and when the conversations to help should be done; and using best practices to ignite the discussion in your organization on how a collaborative approach between managers, human resources departments, and unions can improve your organization’s outcome in decreasing the struggle at work, improving absenteeism, and decreasing long-term disability for an aging workforce.
We don’t stop playing because we grow old.
We grow old because we stop playing.
—George Bernard Shaw
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Herrera, M. (2018). Work and Aging: A Review from the Employer’s Perspective. In: Gatchel, R., Schultz, I., Ray, C. (eds) Handbook of Rehabilitation in Older Adults. Handbooks in Health, Work, and Disability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03916-5_15
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