The kids are alright but they need help
By Stefan Stern
Published: February 22 2010 22:24 | Last updated: February 22 2010 22:24
Paul Volcker is 82. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve was asked last month by President Barack Obama, 48, to advise him on the vital business of banking reform. Sir Brian Pitman is 78. The one-time chairman of Lloyds TSB has agreed to become chairman of Virgin Money, a new banking venture launched by Sir Richard Branson, 59. Kenneth Clarke is 69. The Conservative politician and former chancellor of the exchequer is seen by some as more credible on the economy than his colleague, George Osborne, 38, who may be chancellor in a few weeks.
As life expectancy has increased, so has career expectancy. The old concept of retirement, which was akin to falling off a cliff, is being questioned. It is no longer axiomatic that someone reaching 65 ought to stop working at once. In any case, under-performing pension plans seem likely to force many 60 and even 70-somethings out into the world of work for some time to come.
Is this a problem or an opportunity for management? Clearly, it could be both. Advocates of “age diversity” are certain that a multi-generational workforce must be a good thing. But until recently there has been little hard evidence, beyond the cheerful anecdotes, that a mixed-age workforce can help deliver better financial performance. Managers may have accepted the assertions of the diversity champions without being convinced that there was really anything in it for them.
But now we have some facts, thanks to research from McDonald’s, the world’s biggest fast food company, and Paul Sparrow, professor at Lancaster University’s Management School. At a conference in London recently David Fairhurst, senior vice-president and “chief people officer” for McDonald’s in the UK and northern Europe, revealed this data in full for the first time.
Mr Fairhurst already possessed extensive information on the performance of 635 McDonald’s restaurants under as many as 100 different measures. He also had a wealth of data on employee demographics and engagement levels covering the 26,000 people who worked at these locations.
Prof Sparrow crunched the data. Some initial findings were useful, if not startling: the sites where staff were mainly positive about their jobs received 66 per cent more visits than the negative ones. And sales at the happier McDonald’s branches were almost 30 per cent higher.
But then the demographics were factored in. And it became clear that, the higher the average age of employees in the restaurant, the better was the performance under a wide range of headings: customer satisfaction, service levels, cleanliness, the number of customer visits and sales.
So what was happening at these branches with a higher average age of employee? Digging a bit deeper into the research, the company found that interpersonal relationships, and in particular the sense that people at work were like a supportive family, lay behind the better performance.
Prof Sparrow’s team looked again at the figures, comparing the results at McDonald’s branches where nobody over the age of 50 was employed, with those where one or more person over 60 was working. In the stores employing one or more people over 60, customer satisfaction was more than 20 per cent higher than in the stores where no one over 50 was employed. The presence of grown-ups seems to encourage better behaviour.
So is it time, as some campaigners argue, to “retire retirement”? Do we need to keep more older workers from drifting away too soon? At this same conference, hosted by the Employers Forum on Age, the group HR director of the Nationwide building society, John Wrighthouse, explained that, after abandoning its former fixed retirement age of 60 some 10 years ago, employees can choose to work up to 75. His company had benefited from this, he said, not least in presenting a more user-friendly face to the 24 per cent of Nationwide customers who are aged 60 or over. But it was also important to be honest about the consequences of removing the earlier, fixed retirement age, he added. Some costs, not least in terms of employee benefits, could rise. These have to be managed carefully.
The workplace is “the original social network”, as Dame Joan Bakewell, the UK government’s “voice of older people”, has said. All life should be there. And where once it may have seemed that having a mix of age-groups was simply nice-to-have, that mix looks more and more like a must-have, as time goes by.
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