Turning grey into gold: Employer-employee interplay in an ageing workforce

The unprecedentedly large share of workers aged 50+ provides major challenges to organisations and older workers, such as being motivated to work longer and maintaining productivity. Personnel policies potentially help organisations to adapt to these challenges, but their returns are often unclear. Moreover, these policies are often not implemented or used, due to decisions made by employers, by employees, and their interaction. Therefore, this dissertation studies the employer-employee interplay: How do employers and employees deal with an ageing workforce?
Two theoretical frameworks explain employers’ and employees’ behaviour. Firstly, they are driven by cost-benefit considerations, including the human capital approach: personnel policies are used to reduce costs and maximise benefits. Secondly, they are also driven by attitudes: discriminatory stereotypes and norms related to age and gender. The research relies mainly on the European Sustainable Workforce Survey: quantitative data collected in 2015-16 among 259 organizations across Europe, and their employees. The dissertation yields four general conclusions.
First, personnel policies can help dealing with an ageing workforce, but only a limited share of older workers uses them. Willingness to work longer and performance are potentially higher among older employees who use phasing out, training and flexibility policies. Yet, these policies are not implemented everywhere, and many workers do not use policies available to them.
Second, attitudes related to ageism and gender hamper organisational efforts to prolong productive working lives. Employers’ ageism disadvantages older job candidates, hinders the implementation of training and other activating policies, and the uptake of such policies (if offered). Ageism does not influence the implementation and use of phasing out policies. Additionally, older women and the ‘oldest’ older workers are most strongly hindered by ageism. Finally, gender attitudes reduce uptake among older women.
Third, employers’ desires to minimise the costs and maximise the benefits of their older workforce influences hiring decisions, policy implementation, and policy use. This theoretical frameworks appear to work independently from attitudes, unlike expectations by, for example statistical discrimination theory. Older workers are neither ‘shielded’ from negative attitudes by their human capital; nor does ageism ‘taint’ their human capital gains.
Fourth, the common practice of studying all 50+ workers as a single category overlooks the great age-related variety within this group, in the behaviour of both employers and older employees. Among older workers, a higher age is still associated with discrimination in job applications, a lower uptake of training and a higher uptake of phasing out policies. The impact of personnel policies on older workers’ productivity and retirement intentions also depends strongly on their age.
To conclude, some older workers are supported by personnel policies; some are not supported; and some are hindered by their managers. These differences are shaped by different cost-benefit and attitudinal considerations of the employers, midlevel management, and older workers themselves. These three actors can influence each other’s attitudes and cost-benefit calculations, even though an individual actor’s attitudinal and cost-benefit considerations do not influence each other. Whether personnel policies help turning grey into gold depends on the interplay between employers and older employees.