Pledge Connections 2024: Harnessing the power of face-to-face

When the Centre for Ageing Better launched the Age-friendly Employer Pledge two years ago, we wanted to bring together like-minded employers who felt passionately about the value of older workers and who wanted to help spearhead real change. 

In that time since our launch, the programme has grown enormously and we now have more than 450 employers incorporating around 800,000 employees.  

We have employers large and small, from all walks of life including construction, health and social care, charity, arts and entertainment, local government and financial services. 

The Pledge community has grown so much and it has been wonderful to have had opportunities through our webinars, LinkedIn, sector-specific peer group and case studies to share learnings amongst businesses and organisations who want to maximise the potential of older workers and who understand the benefits that doing so brings to them. 

As the Pledge has grown, we have developed new opportunities to connect, share experiences and support employers to take actions towards becoming more age-friendly.  

This week we hosted our first ever Pledge Connections, an in-person event with more than 30 representatives from Pledged employers coming together.   

We designed Pledge Connections as an opportunity for Pledge employers to meet, chat, inspire and motivate each other face-to-face, as we continue our age-friendly journey together.

What is so nice about the Pledge community is the range of voices and experiences. 

Pledge Connections participants heard from the enthusiastic and high energy Christine Armstrong, of Armstrong and Partners, a researcher, speaker and author whose mission is to help us understand the new way of work.

Christine admits, she is ‘obsessed with researching how we work’ and one of her favourite topics is ‘attracting and retaining good people in a tight labour market.’   She took the Pledge Connections audience on a ‘journey through time’ encouraging us to think about our past, present - and future selves in the world of work.

A high energy session of ‘Speed Connections’ saw our Pledged employers getting to know each other, taking those new connections into an extended lunch break to continue the networking.

The group all came back together in the afternoon to support each other on workshopping solutions to suggested issues around culture, recruitment, learning and development and how to think outside the box, when considering the actions that can be taken each year as part of their commitment as a Pledged employer.

It was great to see how everyone was sharing their experiences and ideas to support each other, with discussions between attendees from a variety of sectors and different sized organisations really helping to shine a light on new ways of approaching the issues that Pledged employers are facing.  

We heard about new ways of gathering employee voice anonymously, about how to encourage early disclosure of health conditions, and the genuine power of having staff of all ages represented in recruitment materials. And we were reminded that ‘age-friendly employment’ isn’t just about the ‘baby boomer’ generation: it’s about creating workplaces that are fit for all of us as we age.

Finally, we rounded off the day with a panel event, focusing on ‘what is an Age-friendly culture?’ Ruth Richards from Human to Human, Tom Bentley from Sanofi, Aktarun Chowdhury from The Independent Office for Police Conduct and Sally Blake from Zurich delved into what age-friendly culture actually means, and how they support age-friendly culture in their own organisations.  

Sally reminded us of the resilience and adaptability that anyone who has been in the workplace for decades has already shown. If you started your work in an era of fax machines and phone calls, and moved into the world of email and zoom calls, there’s no reason you won’t be able to keep adapting to new technologies.

Ageing Better’s Chief Executive, Dr Carole Easton OBE, closed the event with a rallying cry we could all agree on:

that tackling ageism is an imperative for all of us, and the event attendees were leading the way.

We have had lots of wonderful feedback from attendees, who found it a wonderful opportunity to meet, and reconnect, with members from across the network.  

The energy and shared purpose within the room exemplified everything that is good about the Pledge network. 

We hope we will be able to meet face-to-face again in the future and offer up further opportunities for Pledged employers to meet across the country.  

As we move into our third year of the Pledge, we will look to continue to grow and grow our Pledge network, and making sure our tools make it as easy as possible for employers to take action. 

We’ll be continuing to focus on culture as the enabler of all the changes we need. 

And we’ll keep looking for more ways to build on the success of Pledge Connections, to maximise the opportunities our employers have to learn from each other. 

So watch this space......