Valuing Experience

Health and Wellness

A strategy that employers are increasingly using to recruit and retain older workers is a comprehensive health and wellness programme. Their aim is to equip people to make informed and healthy choices. These programmes need to be targeted at all employees, but deliberately inclusive of older employees.

Medical checks
Some employers are providing access to medical checks for their employees. Medical services might be selected and paid for by the employer, with employee’s results being sent to the employee’s own doctor for follow-up as needed. These can be useful in helping employees assess what they need to do to maintain their health and fitness as well as if and when they may need to adjust their work patterns.

O-I New Zealand is an organisation which has found this useful, although they caution that it can take time for employees to build trust in the process being for their benefit rather than used to restrict or terminate their employment.

Gymnasiums and fitness programmes
These can be useful for older employees as well as other employees. To ensure they work for all it is important in the design of the gymnasium or fitness programme to ensure that deliberate consideration is given to the needs of older workers. At least some of the programme or equipment available needs to be relevant to them.

It is also useful to monitor uptake of these services. Are older employees using these? If not, what might be discouraging them? Possibilities include:
• Perception that this geared at younger employees
• People who run the programmes not understanding or being sensitive to the needs of older employees
• A culture that makes older workers feel unwelcome
• Lack of information or support for adapting programmes safely for individual health and fitness levels.

Comprehensive health and wellness programmes
Southern Cross is half way through a three-year project to assess the impact of wellness programmes on the participation, tenure and retention, absenteeism and employee satisfaction and engagement of their employees. As part of this project on older workers, they have analysed their results to date to examine the experience of older workers participating in the programme.

The programme covers fitness and sports, nutrition and weight management and personal wellbeing. It provides access to a range of health and wellbeing providers on site during work hours, with subsidies and paid time to participate. This includes seminars, sports, weight loss, smoking cessation, doctor’s visits and more. It also incorporates a rewards programme. All permanent staff can receive rewards for taking part in the programme determined by their participation levels.

Their results to date show:
• A high level of participation by older employees, particularly when the programme was broadened out a little more in the second year in response to evaluations and feedback on the first year’s programme
• All participants aged 50 – 59 believed that the programme is an influencing factor in their retention at Southern Cross. This did not come through in the same way for employees aged over 60.
• All participants aged over 50 report that their job satisfaction was increased through feeling fit and being involved.

Of all ages, the older workers participated the most in the seminars. The subjects included: stretching, posture and breathing; motivation; nutrition; stress and heart disease; diabetes; and cancer. They also participated to high levels in the 10,000 steps programmes, flu jabs, health expos, health checks and GP visits. Younger workers were more involved in touch rugby, netball, Round the Bays and marathon events.

Accident prevention and absenteeism
One of the most important things employers can do to retain older workers is to have a good health and safety programme. Accident rates and absenteeism are areas where there are sometimes negative stereotypes about the experience of older workers. The experience of employers involved in this project did not match these negative stereotypes.

Genesis Energy found that there is no significant difference in the accident rate between their older and younger workers. They found, however, that older workers may have different types of accidents and their safety awareness differs. In their experience, older workers are better at using safety equipment such as eye protection and gloves and have fewer injury accidents than younger workers. The older workers are more likely to have degenerative issues such as hearing and arthritis.

Many of the employers we talked with found that their older workers took less sick leave than their younger employees, particularly when the one or two exceptions that distorted the picture were taken out of their analysis.

It is useful for organisations to monitor both accident rates and absenteeism, so that if differences do emerge they can be explored and responded to.