How employers can keep experienced older workers from retiring

Experienced older workers will retire eventually, but a new study suggests how employers may persuade some of them to stick around for a few more years.

It all comes down to offering a specific type of work environment – one that includes autonomy, participation in decision-making, information sharing, training opportunities and good compensation and benefits.

The nine-year study of more than 750,000 federal workers over the age of 50 found that that employees with high-quality work environments were especially likely to delay retirement if they didn’t have a college degree and weren’t managers.

What the researchers say: “As people age, research shows that they have a stronger preference for autonomy and control in their jobs, they want to feel respected and listened to,” said the lead author of the study. “Jobs like that may be especially appealing to those with less education and who don’t have managerial experience because they may feel the need to keep high-quality jobs more than others

The findings were published in the journal Personnel Psychology.

Results showed that older employees were less likely to contemplate retirement after the Great Recession of 2008, especially if they had these high-quality jobs. That may offer guidance to employers struggling to find and keep workers after the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers noted.

“After the Great Recession, older employees were more interested in continuing to work, especially if they had a high-quality job, probably because they experienced more financial pressure and uncertainty surrounding their retirement plans,” they said. “The COVID-19 pandemic may have the same effect on workers.”

The researchers used data from 754,856 employees aged 50 and older from more than 360 U.S. government agencies participating in the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.

In addition to answering various demographic questions, employees rated their employers for “high-involvement work practices,” such as offering autonomy, training opportunities and other workplace conditions viewed as evidence of high-quality jobs. They also indicated whether they planned to retire within a year, between 1 and 3 years, between 3 and 5 years, or not within 5 years.

Employees with less education and who were not managers were especially likely to want to stay at high-quality jobs and delay retirement, findings showed.

“They often don’t have as many opportunities to retire early or pursue other options before retirement as those who are more educated and have managerial jobs,” the lead author said. The same was true for older men (versus women) and those aged 50-59 (versus those older than 60). “If they have a high-quality job, they want to stay and are willing to work for at least a few more years.”

“But if they have a low-quality job, they seem to be more likely to want to retire from their current jobs, possibly to search for a ‘bridge job’ that can take them to retirement.”

One strength of this study is that it looked at how job characteristics and individual characteristics jointly affect workers’ retirement intentions. Most studies only look at personal characteristics, such as a person’s financial situation, in predicting when an employee will retire.

Another strength was that it examined retirement intentions over time, including before and after the Great Recession, to show that the recession made high-quality jobs even more attractive to some older workers.

That finding may be especially relevant now as organizations struggle to find and retain workers since COVID-19 pandemic restrictions have eased.

“Post-COVID, organizations may need to invest more in the high-involvement work practices that we found can retain older workers,” the researchers said.

So, what? This is a useful study and deserves close attention by employers.

However, it has one drawback that most similar studies have and that is the assumption that chronological age and real age is the same. Each one of us ages at a different rate. Part of this is genetic, part of it is experiential (the amount of stress you have been subjected to since the conception) and part of it is to do with the length of your telomeres—those bits of DNA which prevent cells from exhausting their capacity to divide, the longer the telomeres, the longer you live.

My own studies have indicated that there are three kinds of aging: cognitive, biological and perceptual (the age you feel yourself to be). All of them are, of course, related but we are affected by each differently.

We have been brainwashed into believing that being over 70 is “old.”  If we believe this to be the case, then we will act as if it were so—many studies have shown this to be the case. This is our perceptual age. Your body and your mind will adjust themselves to fit in with the belief.

Our cognitive abilities naturally decline with age to a limited extent—but not nearly to the extent that popular myth has it. We age mentally at different rates depending on our experience, our education, our job, our genetics (to a very limited extent), the amount of exercise we have in youth and middle age, and our overall stress level. Someone of 40 can have a cognitive age of 80 and vice versa.

My own experience of living with and studying hunter-gatherers showed that they cognitively aged very little despite frequently living into their 80s and 90s. In our present lives we are pushed so far from our design specs that cognitive and biological decline can be speeded up. H-Gs do not suffer from dementia.

Our biological age is determined by our telomeres—as I mentioned—and also our lifestyle. This includes what we eat, how we sleep, the diseases and the accidents we have had, the amount of exercise we get, the stress level we have and our genetics (again to a limited extent).

Each of these is a determinant as to whether we can continue working in what is loosely called “old age.”

For more information on aging click here.