Exploring the many different ways that employers are becoming age-friendly
In less than four years since its founding, our Age-friendly Employer Pledge has attracted more than 600 signers including organisations of every size and sector.
Our new evaluation report explores the different journeys employers have been on since joining our nationwide programme, writes our Head of Age-friendly Employers Tracy Riddell.
When we launched the Age-friendly Employer Pledge in November 2022, it was a time of record vacancies with employers facing substantial skills and labour shortages as the economy tried to recover from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The labour market may have changed a lot over that period. But what has remained consistent is that more and more employers have found that becoming more age-friendly has benefitted them in a range of different ways.
We know this from the regular check-ins and reviews we have with Pledge employers. We know it through the process of gathering case studies of best practice.
But now that the Pledge is fully-established and widely used, we wanted to explore in greater detail what impact it was having on the employers who committed to taking action to demonstrate they recognise the importance and value of older workers and are committed to improving the recruitment, retention and training of older workers.
Our intention with the Pledge has always been to evaluate the impact of our work and adopt an approach of ‘continuous learning’, shaping the work as we go along.
Our ambition was to ensure that Age-friendly practices become embedded as the 'norm' in workplaces to help deliver what our economy needs, a population that is not just living longer, but, where possible and preferable, working longer too.
And so we commissioned the Institute for Employment Studies (IES), a leading independent centre for applied research and insight on employment, workforce, and labour markets, to evaluate
Today marks the launch of our initial evaluation where we examine why employers join the Pledge, what they do after signing, what drives or hinders age-friendly progress, and how age-inclusive practice is shaping older workers’ experiences.
You can read about our key findings in the exec summary and the full report here.
It’s an ‘emerging impact’ type evaluation, recognising that the longer-term impact, such as increased recruitment and retention of older workers, may not be fully realised in the evidence during this early period.
This ‘emerging impact’ gives us important information and feedback as to how the Pledge is being received, responded to, what is working and what doesn’t seem to be working for employers.
The evaluation will help us to understand what changes and improvements we need to implement to achieve our vision of ‘more employers taking action to embed and sustain age-friendly practices, that help to recruit, retain and develop people in their 50s and 60, supporting them to live longer, productive, working lives.
We’re not waiting until the final set of recommendations to get going with that work. By embedding a principle of ‘continuous improvement’ into our approach, we’re always taking a moment to pause and think about the options for learning and development of the programme.
Working with our evaluation partner, we set out from the beginning to seek out feedback on any ‘early insights’ from the evaluation work, that we could respond to.
Much of this feedback resonated with our own thinking and provided the impetus to prioritise resources to progress certain actions as a priority.
For example feedback about a ‘maturity curve’ (something that helps employers get a sense as to how well they’re progressing) to support the Action Framework led to ‘fast-tracking’ work that has resulted in a new Action Framework Guidance resource being developed, piloted and being launched later this year to our network of Pledge employers.
A recommendation to equip employers with tools to approach ‘later-career conversations’ also gave us the confidence to ‘green light’ our Mid-life Review work, that had been waiting in the wings and which will launch later this year.
But what about our ‘emerging impact’?
Well, you can read for yourselves in our report in more detail, but I would summarise the Pledge’s impact as acting like a catalyst, making employers focus on an area that has gone under the radar for too long. It has also given employers the confidence, and tools, to act.
The progress is not universal amongst all employers, but it can add value to existing work, strengthen in other areas and is starting to have some impact on ‘normalising’ the conversation about age.
And what about our learning?
Employers value the credibility and expertise of the Centre for Ageing Better, providing both an authoritative and practical approach to the work.
The support of the Pledge works best when employers are already motivated and so actions can be taken simply, or integrated into existing ways.
Sometimes progress along the age-friendly employment path is uneven and some employers might require more structure to support their journeys. This is where myself and my team endeavour to step in and help employers along their journey.
So what next?
Given that the evaluation covers the very early stages of Pledge implementation, we knew at the outset we’d only get evidence of the ‘emerging impact’ of the Pledge.
There are some pleasing signs of positive progress being made and things are moving in the right direction.
We’ll stay focused on our ‘continuous improvement’ principle and we will be introducing some exciting new developments later this year, to our Age-friendly Pledge network.
And we will not waver from our purpose of supporting businesses to build sustainable workforces in an increasingly challenging labour market.
