Although too many employers discriminate against older workers by focusing on potential decreases in physical and cognitive abilities, they should instead be harnessing their valuable emotional skills to help support younger colleagues.
Research from the Manchester Business School reveals that older staff members are generally more effective at coping with emotional stress and burnout than younger employees, particularly in customer service industries, where staff often face high levels of stress and conflict.
In this environment, older workers find their roles less emotionally draining and tend to have less cynical attitudes towards customers than their younger colleagues. As a result, encouraging older staff to act as mentors can significantly help to reduce the stress levels of the younger workforce.
Sheena Johnson, a professor at the Manchester Business School, said: “For the first time, our research focuses on the valuable emotional skills that older workers can bring to the work place. It showed that older employees tend to have specific strengths such as the ability to control their emotions, which help to overcome difficult situations when dealing with customers.”
Such skills were valuable because the attitudes of customer service staff who have become cynical about both their role and their employer inevitably spilled over into their treatment of the customers themselves, she added.
But the report also revealed that older workers still faced widespread discrimination as employers tend to focus on the potential for declining physical and cognitive abilities rather than the positive contribution that they could make.
The news came to light as research from Saga, which targets a range of commercial services specifically at the over 50 age group, indicated that, while unemployment had risen by 55% across the working population as a whole since the start of the credit crunch, it had shot up by 69% for those aged between 50 and 64.
Long-term unemployment had also hit older workers hardest, with 43% now having been jobless for 12 months compared with 27% of 18 to 24 year-olds. The survey was undertaken among a sample of 13,000 individuals aged over 50.
