Investment in older workers pays dividends for supermarket chain
'Life begins at 55' recruitment campaign boosts number of over-55s employed in the company
Date:
01 December 1989
Source:
Page:
23
Tesco has reaped enormous benefits from its campaign to recruit older people to work in its stores, a seminar on the implications of demographic change was told.
Retail personnel director Pat Lennon told the seminar that, following a 'Life begins at 55' recruitment campaign, the number of over-55s employed in the company had risen to over 2,000 last year and would reach about 5,000 by the end of the year.
As well as attracting people in the target age group, a large response had also been received from people in their 40s and 30s and, unexpectedly, from people who were past retirement age.
As a result the company now permitted employment up to the age of 70 and had equalised its normal retirement age at 65, though an existing employee would be re engaged at that age and provided with continuous service into the future, subject to an annual health check.
Lennon identified three specific advantages to be gained from employing mature people. The first was that they hardly needed customer service training, since they had been customers for so long that they knew what was expected.
Secondly, they hardly ever took time off – "because they were born in an age where it just wasn't done to have a day off when you had a bad cold".
Thirdly, they had an impact on the stability rates of other age groups, since younger employees could go to 'Uncle Fred' or 'Auntie Freda' with their questions and felt far more comfortable doing that than going to a supervisor.
Suggesting that employers who failed to provide some form of childcare would "fall by the wayside", Lennon disclosed that Tesco would be experimenting with creches at three of its southern stores and would conduct simultaneous experiments with childcare allowances at three other stores to test which avenue would be the more appropriate.
In addition to these initiatives to attract and retain older workers, Tesco was bolstering its youth recruitment efforts by improving junior rates of pay, supporting local compact schemes and improving its links with the education sector, he said.
However, the number of companies taking such a broad-ranging approach was very much in the minority, according to David Parsons, manpower adviser to the National Economic Development Office.
Reporting the results of a new NEDO survey (see last month's 'News'), Parsons said that, while 69 per cent of companies surveyed had said they were changing their strategies in response to demographic changes, "most seem to be going down the wrong path and placing their faith in their ability to compete in a shrinking youth market".
Parsons also pointed out that even an innovative approach such as setting up a workplace nursery carried no guarantee of success: he knew of one company which had spent £250,000 on setting one up, with operating costs of £200,000 a year, only to find that it could not fill the places. This, he suggested, was because it had failed to consult with the workforce on how the nursery could be tuned into the flexible working practices that would be needed.
The folly of concentrating on recruiting young people was also underlined by Ian Johnston, the Training Agency's deputy director general. He pointed out that, rather than reducing, the labour force was likely to increase by about a million by the year 2000, with the increase being mainly accounted for by women returning to work. However, warned-Johnston, such projections were risky, and employers needed to ensure that their strategies were flexible. For example, AIDS could lead to a million fewer people in the workforce, while developments in Hong Kong could increase the workforce.
Transport and General Workers Union national secretary George Henderson suggested that one of the worst culprits in placing too much reliance on youth recruitment was the construction industry. Although it had to be recognised that construction work was for the most part a "young person's game", there were many thousands of adult labourers who for one, reason or another had missed out on apprentice training.
"That is where we should be looking," said Henderson. "These workers already have experience of the industry, and many are familiar with tools of different kinds. It would be relatively easy to adapt these workers to perform skilled and craft employment."
Ageism
Another Harrogate seminar was told by John Robertson, head of special needs and programmes branch at the Department of Employment, that ageism was now the subject of hundreds of letters received by the department.
Ageing of the population, he emphasised, was not a "blip" but a change that was going to be around for some time. It had led to a significant change in Government strategy. In the early 1980s the emphasis had been on youth and easing older workers out of the labour force.
This was no longer appropriate, and the change had been seen with the closure of the Job Relief Scheme in January 1988, the switch in emphasis from the Youth Training Scheme to adult Employment Training and the Budget decision to abolish earnings rules for pensioners.
Robertson pointed to discrimination which persisted against older workers in job advertisements - a MORI survey had shown 70 per cent of vacancies closed to the over-40s and at Jobcentres, where 14 per cent carried a bar on people over 50.
Recruitment agencies, he said, had preconceptions that older people were rigid and set in their ways, slower thinkers and prone to illness.
Yet there was a substantial supply of older people in the labour market. Almost 400,000 unemployed were over 50, and a 1988 European workforce survey had shown 653,000 people aged over 50 and not currently in jobs would like regular work.
A Gallup survey had indicated that 70 per cent of retired people aged up to 70 were interested in returning to paid employment, many on a part-time basis or as "reservists" returning to their old firms to meet temporary staff shortages or provide training for other employees.
Employers, Robertson urged, should include older workers in their strategy to meet demographic change. This meant examining their recruitment, training and retirement policies.
Older people, he said, need positive encouragement to apply for jobs because they assumed that they would be rejected. Ministers were opposed to legislation on the subject but had decided to encourage the removal of age discrimination as part of the campaign to urge flexibility in meeting the demands of demographic changes along with pressing the case for women, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities.
The Government was also providing an example to outside industry by changes in Civil Service recruitment and retention and was helping employers recruit older workers through Jobcentres, Jobclubs and the provision of planned work experience.
Setting out a nine-point agenda for management, Michael Day, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, told the seminar that ethnic minorities currently formed about 4.5 per cent of the workforce. But they were about 7.5 per cent of the 5 to 16 age group, and this meant that in areas like central London and central Birmingham up to 25 per cent of new entrants into the labour market would be ethnic minority.
First, he warned companies not to assume that direct, basic and unsubtle discrimination was not happening in their organisation. First-level recruitment staff needed to be encouraged from the top not to turn away ethnic minority candidates simply on grounds of race or colour.
Companies had to use all the resources they could muster to get over a positive image to applicants, including those ethnic minorities who might not be reached by traditional vacancy channels. Recruitment literature, points of public contact, general advertising and corporate image all had to be involved.
Thirdly, selection processes had to be examined thoroughly to make sure they worked fairly and efficiently to bring through the candidates who really were suitable, without outdated criteria such as an arbitrary set of school qualifications or tests which bore little relation to the job to be done.
An essential element in eliminating unconscious discrimination in selection, said Day, was the training of all staff who participated in the recruitment and selection process.
Appraisal and report writing, for example, were fertile breeding grounds for subjective or stereotyped judgments, and the way in which promotion opportunities were made known, or eligibility criteria, could be indirectly discriminatory.
His fifth agenda point was the use of training and development programmes so that those with other wise full abilities and potential could catch up on the skills and qualifications needed. It was important to ensure that ethnic minorities had access to all the mainstream training programmes.
Sixth, for good business sense and equal opportunities positive action developmental training for all staff at all levels had a key role to play. Seventh was the need for grievances and particularly cases of racial abuse or harassment to be dealt with firmly and sensitively.
Day said his eighth point was perhaps the most relevant to all good business sense. This was the need to identify objectives, set targets and measure progress towards them.
Increasingly, employers were recording the ethnic origins of their workforce, job applicants and successful candidates. Yet even when these figures showed under-representation, very little was done to follow up.
Finally, said Day, there was a need for a strong lead from the top of the company, with regular reinforcement and questions about the progress made.
Too many employers were still at the early stages of issuing good practice guidelines and establishing processes designed to counter discrimination. The CRE's objective for the 1990s was to move employers on from this emphasis on procedures and policies to an emphasis on outcomes.
Joanna Foster, chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission, welcomed the IPM's decision to devote a full day's seminar to the subject. She warned that sexual discrimination was still "alive and well" throughout the country, with only a few employers taking positive initiatives.
Sexual equality was now in the mainstream of debate and, while talking about it was very welcome, the EOC was concerned about what happened after the talk.
By 1995, said Foster, 70 per cent of the skill shortage would be among professional and knowledge workers and over half the workforce would be women. Eighty per cent of new jobs in the next five years would be taken by women, most of them working part-time while looking after pre-school children.
But part-time workers – the 'pink-collar' majority of women – were unprotected by comparison to full-time workers, and the pay differential between men and women was getting wider.
There was a huge increase in two wage-packet families because of the economic needs for both partners to go out to work, yet so many assumptions about pay were on the premise that women were not the bread-winners.
Turning to the current work of the EOC, Foster said there was a sharp increase in cases involving dismissals during pregnancy, sexual harassment and recruitment or promotion problems arising from age bars. She said that 25 per cent of the cases were from men.
Some of the advantages of job-sharing were identified by Pam Walton, joint co-ordinator of the consultancy New Ways to Work, at a sectional meeting on the subject. It made part-time work possible without a drop in status, it provided sharers with support from their job-share partners and it usually involved better conditions, more job security, more career opportunities and more responsibility for the individuals involved.
It had been growing rapidly in the public sector, but, said Walton, her company was now experiencing a "huge increase in inquiries".
For a scheme to be successful, said Walton, it needed to have an overall policy statement, trade union involvement, a central person in the personnel department with responsibility for it and good publicity both internally and externally.
Job-share teachers
Stephen Ward, executive director, management and personnel at Birmingham City Council, said that his authority had adopted job-sharing from an equal opportunities motive. Initially posts suitable for job-sharing had been identified by heads of department, but since 1987 all jobs had been open to job-sharing unless chief officers were able to put forward operational reasons for them being exempted from the scheme. The authority had recently taken the "controversial move" of extending the scheme to school teachers, but a typical reaction had been that the "benefits outweigh the disadvantages", said Ward.
There had been some resistance to the scheme from the manual and craft trade unions where full-time men predominated. They had seen it as an attempt by the authority to 'get people in on the cheap' who were not as likely to join a trade union as full-time workers. There were also some conditions of service which were difficult to divide, such as bank holidays.
Nevertheless, job-sharing had permeated the whole organisation in breadth, said Ward, and was beginning to permeate it in depth too. Birmingham had, for example, recently advertised its financial director's post as being open to job-sharers. John Wykes, director of personnel (retail division) of Boots, said that one of the reasons that his company had recently adopted job-sharing was to stem the loss of supervisors from stores. Only 24 per cent of women at this grade returned to work after maternity leave.
The scheme had only been launched at the end of last year and although it had been well-received so far Wykes thought it too early to say whether job-sharing worked for a private sector employer. He believed there would be a slow build-up to it, with the long-term aim of having job-sharing at store manager level.
Job-sharing, he concluded, was "not simply a question of equal opportunities, but one of sound commercial and personnel practice".
'Knowledge workers' will be increasingly important to companies in the 1990s, according to members of the London Human Resources Group, which was recently set up by personnel specialists working in the City.
They defined the knowledge worker as "an individual possessing intellectual skills, higher educational qualifications and using discretion to make decisions on non-routine tasks".
Amin Rajan, author of Create or abdicate, outlined the reasons behind the recent increase in knowledge workers and told delegates that one key to, successfully using such employees was training. He said that the "wide repertoire of know-how and multiplicity of skills" of knowledge workers would put an increasing premium on their effective use.
Ron Collard, personnel director of Coopers and Lybrand warned delegates that one of the most difficult aspects of managing knowledge workers was the fact that most managers were themselves knowledge workers who had been taken out of their technical role to help "run the business".
"Their experience of management is often very limited, and their training is minimal,” he said. "They are just expected to get on with it. He called on companies to give such workers responsibility, making them "intranpreneurial managers" and said that there was no point in promoting people to management positions if they could not show both technical ability and support for the development of others.