The obsession with how to manage millennials is obscuring another potentially larger problem: how to manage their parents. It is reassuring, then, that a group of UK businesses, including Barclays, Boots, Aviva and the Co-op, have started to measure the size of the skills gap that they could fall into as many more people retire from the workforce than join it.
On Tuesday, these companies and others set a target of increasing the number of over-fifties they employ by 12 per cent by 2022. As in other areas where business awakes to its social responsibility — from staff wellbeing (healthy workers are more productive) to environmental policy (clean factories are more efficient) — an underlying self-interest is driving the concern. Even if automation can cover some of the looming skills deficit, businesses that do not learn how to attract and manage older workers will lose out. They lose access to a valuable pool of experience and lack inside knowledge about how to handle their older customers.
Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, authors of The 100-Year Life