Valuing Experience

Part B - Deliberately positioning your organisation to employ older workers effectively

The organisations which have had the most success in working with older workers to meet their company’s needs have followed a very deliberate approach.

1. Identifying what they wanted to achieve
2. Understanding what the specific issues are for their organisation
3. Getting leadership commitment to address the issue
4. Working in partnership with their employees and/or their union to explore the issue
5. Developing a practical response to the issue that was relevant to their organisation
6. Implementing that response
7. Checking the results, and when necessary adapting the response
8. As necessary, repeating steps 2 to 7 either to develop the response further or to spread it wider in the organisation.

In some cases, such as ACC, this has been part of an organisation-wide strategy. In others it has been tightly focused on a specific part of the organisation, such as in New Zealand Post when it addressed issues for some Post Shop managers as a preliminary step to across-the-board changes in the organisation.

In all cases, however, organisations were clear that a deliberate and comprehensive approach was needed rather than just responding to the needs of individuals, or putting a band-aid on specific problems.

This section of the guide provides ideas for working through these steps.