By Will Novosedlik

In a business culture that’s youth-obsessed, it’s often difficult to find grey hair. And yet, that grey hair sits on top of a body of knowledge and experience which, if properly leveraged, can render far more value per hour than a junior.

This is something Patti Temple Rocks, chief communications and brand officer at Dow Chemical and former chief reputation officer at Leo Burnett, is making some noise about. She says she’s enjoyed a long and rewarding career in marketing communications – but she’s also experienced one of its dark sides: ageism.

In fact, it inspired her to write a book, entitled I’m Still Not Done: It’s Time to Talk About Ageism in the Workplace.

In business, there are hidden costs to letting senior practitioners go. “One of them is that employees are watching everything you do,” says Temple Rocks. “So even if you’re looking at laying off older workers, it would be a mistake to think that your 20- and 30-something workers aren’t noticing that. And so either consciously or unconsciously, they’ve just lost a little bit of trust in that employer because they feel like that could be them next time,” says Temple Rocks.

Another not-so-hidden cost is that the price of hiring someone new vastly exceeds the cost of retaining someone who is still contributing value. Looking at a senior salary often prompts managers to consider them too expensive, and HR will typically respond by offering early retirement or downsizing them, thinking that they can hire a younger, more inexpensive employee. But more often than not, employers realize that the older workers they let go were actually doing more than the job description indicated, leaving their estimated savings less than anticipated.

Not only do newer, younger hires need to be trained, but the older ones an employer has let go walk out the door with a plethora of institutional knowledge, a wide network of relationships and the operational efficiency that comes with decades of experience.

Temple Rocks shines a light on this with an example. The high-end office furniture design company Herman Miller conducted an employee census to get a handle on the ages of their employees. It discovered that the brand had a high number of people who were going to be eligible to retire at the same time. If everyone left, it readily concluded, the brand would be in hot water based on the amount of institutional knowledge it would lose at once.

At the same time, it conducted a survey with employees who were close to retirement, and discovered that a majority of them were not ready to leave yet. But nobody was talking about it, whether at the manager, employee or executive levels, for fear of spending their resulting years with menial labour or missed opportunities as they played the waiting game. “They don’t want to tell the boss they’re thinking about retiring in a few years because their boss might just say well, I don’t have to worry about her anymore, or I don’t have to give her a year-end bonus, or any plum new assignments,” says Temple Rocks.

Herman Miller decided to break the silence and created a phased retirement program, with a goal to make everyone more comfortable with the conversation. The end result was positive. By consciously managing the transition, the brand saw higher levels of employee satisfaction and engagement.

On the issue of knowledge transfer, Herman Miller borrowed from Indigenous culture: the concept of the “water carrier.” It’s the idea that water is so important to the community that only the elders are entrusted to carry it. So Herman Miller created the Water Carriers club for older employees. If anyone in the company was experiencing a problem they needed help with, they could take it to a “water carrier” for advice and mentorship. The senior workers got the satisfaction of having their experience respected and of providing value. And the younger workers learned from it.

One of the overlooked advantages of older workers is that their engagement and retention scores are generally much higher. Employees over the age of 50 are more committed to the job, and are less likely to go looking for another one because they’re a lot harder to get after 50. These could be considered underleveraged assets.

Temple Rocks has some tips for employees over 50. One is what she calls “reverse mentoring,” and it involves senior employees being open to learning from juniors, rather than vice versa. Her advice to the seniors is to listen as much as you talk, especially when it comes to learning how to adapt to new digital platforms, since younger cohorts are much more comfortable in these worlds.

Another is to stay relevant. Older workers need to keep up with what’s happening in the world, in their industry and in their company. She also recommends staying invested in physical fitness. You don’t have to run marathons, but there is truth in the Latin saying, “mens sane in corpore sano” (“healthy mind in a healthy body”). To add value every day means staying as physically and mentally active as possible.

As for employers, she advises them to do the “mirror test.” In other words, don’t be afraid to take an honest look at your company’s behaviours and policies regarding ageism. It’s an unconscious bias, and therefore prone to microaggressions that might slip under the radar.

Last but not least, employers can put more thought into job postings. You might be posting a job that requires 10 years of experience, but the right person for the job might have 30 years under their belt and are willing to take a lower salary. The easy way to deal with this is to say, “all ages are welcome to apply.”