The Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review

 

January 28, 2015 Make Engaging Your Older Workers a Priority To increase motivation, performance, and loyalty, companies need to do a much better job of engaging a valuable and growing segment of the workforce: older workers. Start by acknowledging and using their experience. Check in with individual employees and ask what problems they might foresee in executing a specific task. Ask for their input before making a big decision. Consider giving them jobs with more customer interaction (frontline roles) or jobs dealing with internal customers. Research also suggests that putting older and young workers together helps both groups perform better. They’re at different stages of their lives, so they are less competitive with each other, and they make good allies because they have similar interests. So they’re far more likely to help each other and to form good teams. Adapted from “Engaging Your Older Workers” by Peter Cappelli.

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