Issues at Work
Development of a Reflective Telework Application Guide to Support Accommodation, Inclusion, and Health of Aging Workers View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alexandra Lecours
Telework is increasingly present and has the potential to be used as an accommodation modality to facilitate inclusion and healthy participation in the workplace while returning to work after a period of absence. However, this topic has not been studied with aging workers, a growing, qualified, and indispensable workforce. This paper presents a study aiming to develop a reflective guide for applying telework to support the accommodation, inclusion, and health of aging workers after a period of absence. This study follows a three-phase developmental research design. First, individual interviews with aging teleworkers and managers are used to gather qualitative data on their experience. Second, the issues, considerations, levers and good practices that emerged from Phase 1 are compiled into a reflective application guide developed by a monitoring committee. Third, this guide is validated by workers and managers to ensure its acceptability and applicability in daily life. This study generated a concrete tool to be used by managers and aging workers to promote the healthy use of teleworking to support the inclusion of aging workers when returning to work after a period of absence. This study is expected to have innovative impacts on several levels, including individual, organizational, and societal. The results provide sound solutions to the labor shortage in a changing world of work where digital and telecommuting are becoming increasingly important.
Responding to the Policy Shift Towards Extended Work Life: Swedish Government Agencies’ Employer (Non-)Attractiveness vis-à-vis Older Jobseekers
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lisbeth Segerlund
The reform of Sweden’s pension system with the introduction of a flexible (increase in) retirement age, and the adding of age as a ground for discrimination into the Discrimination Act, raise questions on how this is reflected on the job market. This study explores in what ways government agencies respond to these changes in their recruitment practices, focusing on how they portray themselves as attractive employers to older jobseekers. The study intends to contribute to an understanding of how a policy shift related to age norms manifests itself in public sector recruitment practices. Through the collection of pictures of people and texts posted on employment websites from over 100 government agencies in Sweden, a mixed method analysis was employed with the use of image analysis of persons portrayed and content analysis of written texts. The result shows that the agencies rather emphasise youthfulness and energetic appearances, often associated with younger adults, in pictures of persons posted on their employment websites. When describing the advantages of the agency as a workplace, references to benefits or other aspects of interest to older jobseekers, such as the right to longer vacation, part-time retirement possibilities, and anti-discrimination work on age are less frequent. Thus, government agencies still appear to be influenced by age norms in their recruitment practices where older jobseekers remain in the margins. This implies a need to further investigate age norm change in relation to the enhancement of diversity in recruitment practices by the public sector regarding older jobseekers.
Late Careers and Work Exit Variants in Norway: Retirement as a Process View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tale Hellevik, Katharina Herlofson
In recent years, work exit has come to be seen less as a single transition from full-time employment to full-time retirement – and more as a complex and individual process. In Norway, a pension reform from 2011 designed to encourage later exits, includes aspects that are also likely to stimulate further variations in the retirement process. In this paper we use a combination of survey- and register data to map out distinct types of work exits and study their distribution over time and between social groups, and their association with the timing of work exit and individuals’ satisfaction with the timing of work exit. There seems to be a recent development where the more traditional way of leaving work, from one day to the next, is decreasing in importance, while an exit variant involving a period of scaling back working hours before leaving completely is becoming more common. This development has potentially beneficial consequences both for society (in the form of later exits) and for the individuals (who are more likely to be satisfied with their timing of exit). However, our results also indicate that a gradual exit may not be available to the same degree to all workers, but more so for men than for women, and for the higher than the lower educated.
