The Generation Gap That Doesn’t Exist

speaker-0 (00:02.894)
OK, everything good. OK. Thanks for joining us, Catherine. Much appreciated. If you could, it always sounds better coming from the person that I’m talking to. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Thanks Jill and it’s great to be with you today. Look, I’ve been in this space around really exploring aging and longevity for many, many, many, many years. When I first went into it, I was really curious to understand what we believed about becoming older and aging and what was being done in this space. And in fact, where I started was attending

conferences on aging, which turned out to be about aged care, much more about aged care than the area I was interested in, which was what do we do as we become older? How do we age and how do we age well? And what I noticed is that a lot of the conversations were really about addressing some of the issues that can occur. How do aged care organizations, carers,

manage or support people with some of the physical and cognitive decline that we can experience, and it’s not everyone, that we can experience as we become older. Things like physical dementia, falls risk, et cetera. And I’d be sitting in this room, and I did this for a couple of years and attended quite a number of conferences. And I thought, well, how do we stop ourselves from getting there?

How do we live a better life in order to mitigate the issues associated with living longer? So from there, I sort of moved away from those aged care conferences and explored other areas in terms of what was happening around, what was happening in the corporate sector, what are our attitudes and beliefs towards aging. And that’s where I sort of then entered

speaker-1 (02:19.37)
Well, I did my TEDx talk, Retirement is Redundant, because I came to think that we needed to rethink and reimagine even the idea of retirement. And if we are going to retire and we’re attached to the idea of retirement, to at least reimagine what that is and what sorts of things we need to consider in order to age. Well, and in order to do whatever we could,

to minimize the risks associated with this potential physical and cognitive decline. Certainly our bodies change, but I don’t know that. I think there’s a lot more that we can do in order to age well. So that’s a bit of a roundabout story, but there you go. That’s kind of how the area that I’ve been involved with for many years.

So one of the things I noticed when I looked at your biography is it also mentioned about helping businesses tap those that are older than 50 in those type of years. What did you mean by that?

So it’s re-imagining what we think our workforce looks like. So it’s really thinking what is our workforce of the future and what are we thinking about older people? know, when we, know, organisations may, even today, consider that people at 50 are heading towards retirement. They may be when an organisation is

resizing, restructuring the people that they turn to for redundancy, which in itself is a terrible word. And then when older people are wanting to perhaps shift, or if they have experienced a redundancy or want to move on from wherever they are, that their employment opportunities and the choices they have are reduced

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by virtue of age. So my work has been, you know, if I’m over 50, trying to get a job when I’m over 50, if I’ve, let’s say, been in a white collar environment is really difficult. In fact, it can take twice as long for someone over 50 to get a job than someone much younger. And an important part of this conversation for me is that it needs to include everyone.

of all ages. So it’s one thing to say to an organisation, you know, reduce ageism and you need to think about who you’re employing and to not be ageist against people who are over 50. Younger people experience ageism too. So it’s sort of having ageism on the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda and thinking about

how we might create a work environment for people of all ages to work, to whenever they choose.

So that does bring up a question. Where does ageism come from? When I think of lot of native cultures, they actually view the elders as wise, and they go to them, as opposed to start to ignore them, which I find from a lot of Western cultures. I myself, coming out of IT, I’ve been in technology since 88. And I know why we have what we have.

But I get ignored. So where is this ageism coming from?

speaker-1 (06:13.71)
Well, it’s from a couple of different directions. So part of it is stereotypes. Part of it is a cultural narrative about what we believe to be true and what we believe we should be doing or who we are at any given age. So when we finish high school, we think the next thing we should do is go to university.

And then once we finish university, the next thing we should be doing is getting a job. And then the next phase in our life might be to get married and have children. And it’s this very linear thing until we’ve worked so hard, all we desperately want to do is retire. And that’s a cultural narrative about who we are at any given age and what we do. So that then creates a stereotype.

about not only what we believe to be true for others, it’s what we believe to be true for ourselves. Professor Becca Levy from Yale University has coined the term stereotype embodiment theory. what that means is that we embody a cultural narrative that is a stereotype about who we are

and what we do at a particular age, particularly as we become older. So what that thing creates these stereotypes, so we have a cultural narrative that creates stereotypes about what we believe to be true about others or how we view others and what we believe to be true for ourselves, which then creates ageist perceptions, ageism, because we judge people, we box people.

as to what their abilities are, what their capabilities are. So you mentioned that you’ve been in technology since the eighties. It’s a very common stereotype that older people don’t know how to manage technology. And yet we’ve been utilizing technology since it was particularly things like computers and the internet, since it was invented actually.

speaker-0 (08:34.446)
I had an interview I had back in January was with the futurist from the New York Times. And he was saying that our generation, and you and I being probably of the same genre, and we’re on 35, we actually created the technology. We went through all these changes. We’re the first generation to actually live in technology.

And I think this concept of not understanding technology is applicable to our parents’ generation, but not necessarily to ours. So the stereotypes you’re talking about probably pass from generation to generation and don’t adjust as quickly as they should.

Well, I agree. And what we believe we’re doing or what we believe to be true for ourselves is also passed from generation to generation. So it’s not uncommon even for us as we become older to say, well, 60 or 65 is a retirement age. I have a right to retire at 60 or 65. We don’t question whether or not that’s relevant.

We don’t question whether or not that need to retire at 60 or 65 is actually a healthy or good way to live. It means that in today’s terms, it means that we’ve got 20 plus years of life. Well, in our parents’ grandparents’ generation, that wasn’t necessarily true.

When the retirement age was first conceived and attached to a pension age, average lifespans were only in the mid 40s. So think about that in the context of today. We now believe we’re entitled to a pension and to not work when we still have another 20, potentially, let’s say 10, 15, 20 years

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of really healthy living. At the time they were set, most people weren’t alive. They weren’t living that long.

You and I met in our introductory conversation before this interview. You had mentioned about the actual history of how retirement came about. I think what you were just saying there, this would be a good point to get rid of all the false notions. Tell us a little bit about how the concept of a retirement came about.

So the first person to set a universal pension was Vice-Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in Germany in the late 1800s. And he actually set eligibility for that pension at 70 years old. It was only in the early 1900s, and I mean 1902, 1903, 1905.

that it changed to 65. And, you know, for the US and Australia and Canada, we adopted 65. That was in early 1900. And anyone can, you know, Google what were the average lifespans in your country at that time. It was nothing like it is today. So the pension age, eligibility for the pension age, in Australia, it’s shifting slightly, but nothing compared to eligibility.

eligibility when it all came into being. Something that I encourage and I have used this as a tool in workshops in organizations is for us to be far more curious about who we are and what we believe to be true at a certain age. you know,

speaker-1 (13:00.578)
And it’s not only about ourselves, it’s how we perceive others. you know, if I’m in a corporate environment and I’m working with younger people, say, I’ll say, well, what do you believe about the over 45s? What do you assume about them? And what do you need to learn about them?

I would say that they are equally relevant questions for all of us. What do I believe about being over 45 or 55 or 60 or 65? What do I believe about that? What do I assume to be true about that age? And what do I need to learn? Because there’s a reasonable chance that what we believe and what we assume to be the truth

is actually a stereotype or a cultural narrative that’s a groove that we just slot into.

speaker-1 (14:05.678)
And those same questions are equally true for people under 45. As older people, what do we believe about people under 45? What do we assume about them? And what do we need to learn? I had conversations just earlier this week with some people about their concerns about their children who were leaving school and they weren’t going to university or

they weren’t working full time or they were doing their own thing with their businesses, or they’d gone to university, but they weren’t working for a corporate and they were establishing their own thing. They were working maybe part-time and doing some of their own thing. It completely goes against what we did.

or believe young people should be doing. We need to kind of step back, I’d suggest, and learn from them. And how are they living their life? Because what I observe is that they’ve got a lot more balance.

One of the things, earlier today I met with a woman that I’m going to interview next week. She’s now up in her early mid-80s. But she is on a… When she first retired, she was struggling to figure out what she was going to do. And this seems to be a common theme that I hear with everybody that I interview, is purpose. What is… What am I… What’s my purpose? What am I going to be doing now?

I’m wondering whether the entire concept of going from work to non-work isn’t normal, isn’t natural. Yes, we’ve been doing it for, what, 170 years. But that’s a very short period of time for all of us. I would suggest that.

speaker-0 (16:14.432)
If we, and I want to be clear because I did have somebody once make a comment in one of my videos that anybody suggesting we should get rid of retirement, they would fight arguably hard against it. But that goes more towards not understanding that maybe the period before retirement was wrong.

speaker-0 (16:39.82)
Anyway, in my conversation with her, the use of AI seems to be changing society and more and more jobs are being lost, which means society itself is going to end up changing. Do you see how society might be changing views with regards to work and retirement?

So a couple of things. I’m not sure if how we’ve lived life up until now is necessarily wrong. It’s how it was and it’s how we did things. What we have now is an opportunity to reimagine that so that instead of saving those 15 years, 10 or 15 healthy years of living,

till the end, we could spread them out throughout our lives. look, I’ve spoken at conferences and various events where I’ve said, you know, retirement is redundant. And there are people in the audience who immediately cross their arms and say, yeah, okay, I’m not going into that. Because, you know, it’s not uncommon. If we’ve worked really, really hard, we’re exhausted. All we want to do is stop. There’s also a reality for people who do physically

very, very hard work. It’s not physically possible to continue doing that very hard work. So then what sorts of things might we do and retrain for that enables us to have, you know, working lives if we so choose. We have a company in this country called Bunnings and it’s a massive

a handyman’s lolly shop, really. It’s got tools, it’s got garden stuff, it’s just where you go if you’re a handyman or if you want to fix something in your home or if you want to make something or build something, you go to this store. Well, they are held up in this country as an organisation that has absolutely embraced older workers because they employ ex-trades people.

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who are no longer on the tools and they’re brilliant salespeople in the aisles for people like me who is completely clueless and doesn’t know what to buy, doesn’t know where to look, doesn’t know what you need to use to put things together or fix something very simple in the home and they provide advice. So that’s one of the pathways that people talk about in this country around

you know, it’s sustained employment. The other thing is in terms of finishing work, you know, I remember speaking with a couple of stories. There was a gentleman who was speaking with a financial advisor and he said, that’s it, I just want to retire. The financial advisor said, look, why don’t you just take six months off and go and play all the golf you’d like?

He came back to the financial planner after three months and said, I am so bored. I’m going back to work early. One of the challenges for any of us when we do stop work is identifying who we are, which is often linked to what we do and is what we do who we are.

So in a work environment, we’ve been so busy identifying ourselves as an IT director or a call center manager or whatever it might be in a corporate environment. We finish that and then what? And it’s a really common question, isn’t it? When we go to a dinner party or we’re in a social situation, what do you do?

Yeah, I was.

speaker-1 (20:54.353)
I’m retired.

Yeah. I interviewed Richard Leiter last week, and I was saying to him something very similar. For a great portion of my life, I would work for the paycheck because I had a wife, I had a couple of kids that I had to support. And then when I got home, I’d be, OK, the boys need to go to soccer practice or to basketball practice. And then they’re in bed now have to help.

my wife with whatever she’s doing. There was never any time for me to figure out who I was. Now, I’m not saying that my wife wasn’t in the same situation because she also had to do all that sort of thing. But at the end of the day, all those years were done without figuring out who I actually was outside of what I did, if that makes sense.

It absolutely makes sense because so much of what we do in our early part of our life, particularly if we have a family, is determined by external circumstances. And then at the point we stop working, we’re not really sure what it is we might do. Some people have hobbies that they can’t wait to dive into. And, you know, I have heard of people who have ended up redundant, perhaps in their 40s.

and they’ve retrained or their fifties and they’ve retrained and become school teachers, for example, or they’ve retrained for something else or they’ve become carers or whatever it might be. But you know, there’s another story where it can often hit men more frequently than women. It’s not that it doesn’t happen.

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you know, where we struggle to identify who we are and what we’re to do with our lives, irrespective of gender, but it can occur more frequently with men because women have had to adapt and change as their life has changed, particularly if they’ve had a family. Women also often have much stronger networks of friends and they are also more open to communicating with their girlfriends.

about what’s going on for them. Whereas men are content to be a bit more of a closed shop or they’ve been so busy working that they haven’t had a chance to even think about it anyway. There was another story, someone, again, this is from a financial advisor. did I hear it from her? Where her husband retired and she’d already stopped working and she already had a

a lot going on. was going to the movies with girlfriends and going to book clubs. And so when he stopped working, she’d say to him, look, I’m off to the movies tonight. And he’d ask what movie she was saying. And it’s she’d tell him and say, that sounds interesting. I think I’ll come. And then she’d say, I’m off to a book club. it’s, which book are you that sounds interesting. Mind if I come along? Because he’s struggling to figure out where to from there. So

I think one of the messages in all of this is that retirement is often seen as the panacea, the pinnacle of what we do without thinking what the implications of that are. And, you know, it’s, it’s, you know, we may have heard of someone saying, I’ve got an early retirement, you know, so.

They’re a bit cleverer than the rest of us because they’ve been able to save enough to finish work earlier with no concept of what that means and what we need to do. You mentioned purpose. That’s really crucial. It doesn’t matter what it is. What is my reason for getting up in the morning? There’s a Japanese term, Ikigai, the reason for which I get up each morning, my purpose. What is that? What am I going to be doing today?

speaker-0 (25:13.326)
That goes to a different cultural aspect which I’m looking forward to exploring deeper is how different cultures actually think of things. I did want to ask you because you’re in Australia, obviously with the accent, and I’m here in Vancouver, Canada. One of the things having talked with a number of people from a number of different countries, it appears to me

And I don’t have any empirical data on this, but it seems to me that Australia is a little ahead of the game in terms of managing an aging workforce and how to deal with that. Is that my, am I incorrect? Is that just my perception?

I think it’s a perception rather than a reality. We have ageism as rife here as anywhere else. So no, I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily true. Certainly there are organizations like the one I mentioned, Bunnings, that has a reputation for employing older workers and employing ex-trades people because of their knowledge and skills.

And certainly those organisations that do embrace older people, and this is not just true in Australia, this is true anywhere in the world, that do embrace employing older people is that they find that they’re reliable, that they have longevity in terms of staying, they’re very loyal to the organisation, they are hardworking.

They don’t have as many sick days as they envisage or might be concerned about as a reason as to why you might not employ them. So older workers are proven to be an enormous asset. I worked with one organisation who had employed an older gentleman who was actually in his seventies. He’d…

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been made redundant from a major financial institution in this country quite a number of years earlier and an enormous amount of really valuable experience had been contracting for quite a few years because no one would employ him as a permanent employee, which he could only attribute to age, but you know, in this country that’s illegal. So, you know, that was just his, you know, guess.

until this organization employed him. And, you know, I was having conversations with people of all ages and at all levels in the organization. They all knew him. They all said how fantastic he was. And when I was speaking with younger people, and this was interesting, when I was speaking with younger people in small groups, when they had an experience of working with an older person, and it didn’t need to be this gentleman, it could be anyone, it was positive.

And so what that did was shift their attitude towards having an older person working with them. And, you know, when, again, when I’ve talked with organizations and if there’s anyone in your audience who’s still working, it’s what sorts of things are they doing or championing

change in their organisation whilst they’re able to and whilst they’re employed. Because we need to consider what the impact is or what the challenges younger people might face in managing someone much older than them with a lot more experience. Imagine you’re 35 and you’re managing a 60 or 65 year old. What does that mean?

And if you’re still working, what can you do in order to provide confidence to a younger person to have an older person on their team? And what as an older person, if we do have a younger boss, what do our attitudes and beliefs and behaviours need to be in order to support them to be successful? It’s not about us.

speaker-1 (29:49.356)
It’s about them.

So are you seeing more more older people still working? And when I say working, I’m not using the old paradigm of 40 hours a week. Maybe they’re decreasing the number of hours. But are you seeing an increase? And I ask that simply because our populations are getting older. But the businesses are still going to need employees to do things, at least for the next decade or two.

Do you, are you seeing that an uptick in older workforce?

Look, I think ageism is still as rife as it ever was in terms of older people being able to get work in their 50s and 60s or 70s. think it still exists. It still takes twice as long for an older person to get a job. And again, a conversation I had this week with someone who is a director on a number of ASX 200 listed companies. One of the

challenges for organizations and for older people is there’s so many things on a corporate agenda today. AI is coming at organizations at such a rapid rate and having to figure that out and work out, you know, what, how they introduce that, how they use it, how they manage it, how they manage the workforce, how they, all of those things is

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a really big topic, as is cyber security. So again, one of the things that I say to older people is that we cannot rest on our laurels when it comes to how we educate ourselves and our skills. So it’s not enough to say, I’ve got a degree, I’ve got an MBA, I’ve got this many years experience. What are we doing as we age?

remain relevant to a workforce of today, to a work environment of today. And it is in that context that we may think, actually, maybe in reality, that is not for me. Maybe there is something else that I’d like to do and I’ve done that and I’d like to move on to something else. What that something else is, I may not know completely. It might be a creative pursuit.

it might be something else. But we cannot assume by virtue of grey hair and 20 or 30 years experience that that is enough to feel entitled to still be employed. We have to be current. We have to be on top of things and understand how things like AI work.

and how we can embrace that in the context of all of our other skills. So that is a whole package for us to go back into a workforce because that’s the reality as you’ve mentioned of the workforce of the future. It may also provide us with a freedom to get onto other sorts of platforms where we can work remotely from anywhere in the world. And again, just this week.

I was speaking with someone whose daughter and her boyfriend have been traveling all over the world, working and having a holiday because they’re working for an organization and it doesn’t matter where they are.

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I had a comment on one of my videos from a gentleman that was late sixties, I think pushing 70 where he just retired, but he had been working a blue collar role for his entire life. A lot of manual labor. And one of the things he was always saying is that everything he hears about from a retirement point of view is, is dealing with white collar workers sitting at the desk.

dealing with the computers, the automation, that sort of thing. Are there any thoughts about how to people that are coming out of the blue collar side of things should be dealing with this?

Look, think it’s, to some extent, think people that come out of a blue collar environment may have an advantage over those of us that were coming out of a white collar environment because they have manual skills and an ability to build and make things. So for example, I know of a builder, he’s on his last project at the moment. And what he’s going to do is he’s going to actually go down to Tasmania.

and build a boat because he can. I probably couldn’t nail a, you know, hammer a nail in straight, you know, so, you know, if I think about those people that come from a blue collar environment, they have a bunch of handy skills and think of things that they’d like to do for themselves that they’ve been putting off. The other part of that is thinking about

what else they might like to do that might support even their local area because of the skills that they have to offer. I have a friend actually, this is actually a whole business, but it kind of gives you an idea of the sorts of things where, know, those sorts of, that sort of knowledge and skill and experience that blue collar workers have is invaluable. And it’s not going to be taken over by AI in a heartbeat.

speaker-1 (35:48.194)
So this friend has an organisation, it’s a social enterprise. And what he does is work with marginalised young people to provide them with skills that, they, know, trade skills, so blue collar skills, and they provide services to community organisations to repair community buildings.

or for social housing and community housing to help those people with doing simple repairs around their house or whatever it might be. But they’re getting trained by skilled and experienced tradespeople. Now I’m not suggesting that retired tradespeople necessarily want to be working with apprentices again because I know I’ve got brothers who are tradespeople.

that can bring another whole lot of frustration. But what can older people do who have these skills that perhaps connect them back into the community, whether it’s to help people that need very simple repairs in social housing or whatever it might be. In Australia, again, we have something called men’s sheds. I don’t know if you have those in Canada.

Say the term.

Men’s shed. It’s a men’s shed and a men’s shed is a single location. It’s a shed where men come together and they fix and they make things and they can fix it. So if you’ve got things that are broken or you know want to donate to a local charity and need fixing you can go to a men’s shed or if you’re a

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tradesperson and you no longer have a in your back garden because you’ve now moved into an apartment or you just, you know, now you’re in something much smaller, you don’t have your shed, you can become a member of or join a local men’s shed and they’ve got all the tools and the equipment for you to make or build whatever it might be. So, you know, for anyone in Canada who is a blue collar worker,

Have a look at Men’s Sheds in Australia and perhaps that’s something that could be introduced into Canada. And it’s a great sort of environment for men to come together, make things, build things, share their knowledge, share their skills and have a chat and a cup of tea.

Sorry, but that is a phenomenal thought. That’s cool. One thing I’m starting to realize with all my conversations is I was, when I started this podcast, locked into my own view of the world. But now I’m asking questions from different perspectives and I’m getting a better idea of what’s going on around me. It’s been a really interesting journey so far.

Look, my experience of the topic is that it is really fascinating. And it’s just, I think there’s a really potentially exciting future for us as we age, providing we shift our own attitudes and beliefs about who we are and what we should be doing at any given age to really

think about what we want to be doing, to take responsibility for our own skills development and training, which may or may not put us into a different area of work or, you know, whether or not we go back into a corporate environment. And for blue collar workers,

speaker-1 (39:52.896)
I know, I kind of feel like they’ve got the upper hand on us with those white collar skills.

Well, keep in mind that right now the entire blue collar sphere is short of workers. Too many people have been pushed towards the university side of things and not into the traits. So yeah, I’d have to agree with you there.

There was something else that I heard about a number of years ago. There was an older gentleman whose wife died. And I don’t think he was actually that old, but what it meant was that he had to learn, she’d always done the cooking, he had to learn how to cook. So he taught himself to cook, very basic. And of course there’s so much available to us on YouTube and masterclass and all sorts of things available to us.

So he did teach himself how to cook. And then what he did was advertise that he was teaching single older men how to cook. So he ran these cooking classes. And what happened was it became a way again, a bit like a men’s shed, but these older people, older men in this instance, to connect and learn a skill.

that they could then utilize for themselves. They may still have been married. They might have been going home then and, you know, just surprising their partner with, you know, being able to cook something. But again, this is something where someone’s used an initiative to create something that is not only helpful to themselves, it’s helpful to others. And because, you know, again, often the case

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with men is that they don’t necessarily want face to face. Side by side conversations are good. Cooking together and having conversations together whilst doing something else proved to be a great outlet for people.

There seems to be an undercurrent to a lot of what you’ve been saying during this conversation of passing on knowledge, whether it’s same age to same age or from older to younger. Is that a theme that we typically see when we get up into these age ranges?

Well, I think we also have to think younger to older. So what can younger people teach us? What can we learn from them? And as I said, I had a conversation only this week with someone that I said, you know, who’s, you know, a little bit concerned about their son who’s just finished year 12 and isn’t necessarily going to university, doesn’t know what they want to do. And I said, give them a break, give them space, watch and learn. They’re going to be

living a very, very long life. They do not need to go to university as soon as they finish high school. They might not go there until they’re in their mid-20s or their 30s. Let them figure themselves out and maybe they won’t go to university at all and they’ll still have a fantastic career. I’ve got someone else I know who

initially started out to train as an electrician. He dropped out of that and went off to India with his girlfriend and then ended up in Berlin doing the whole music thing and then decided that he wanted to do computing. So he did an online computing course for 12 months and he’s a rising star in Atlassian, which is a phenomenal

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you know, software organization. don’t know if you know it online. I shouldn’t say software, but you know.

for people that aren’t aware, Atlassian is a project management software.

Yeah, yeah, he’s a rising star. He doesn’t have a degree. He did a 12 month online computer course. And so, you know, I think it goes both ways. One of the things I mentioned in my TEDx talk is intergenerational job sharing. And I think that is a massive opportunity, you know, where you have older people sharing a job with younger people.

And if you think about that in the context of maternity and paternity leave, where you can then enable, you know, a young mother or a young father to work maybe three days a week. as an older person, you only want to work two days a week. And you share knowledge and skills in a job that you both qualified for, obviously, but how you approach problems and how you

resolve situations or address a project will be informed by your perspective and it can create a much greater whole. So I think intergenerational job sharing is a massive opportunity that is entirely untapped and actually provides freedom to younger people too.

speaker-0 (45:29.39)
That’s two really interesting concepts I hadn’t considered. I haven’t talked to anybody in quite a while with regards to job sharing. That hasn’t seemed to come up in conversation anymore.

speaker-1 (45:45.816)
Just on that, there’s two people I know here, two women, and they job share a job, and it’s three days a week, so they have one day crossover.

That’s what I was going ask you about because wouldn’t the knowledge transfer from younger to older and older to younger be best if there was that crossover?

I’ll give you two stories. This is one where the two women job share and there’s a crossover of one day, which they find works really well. Now those two women have been job sharing for

it would be at least 10 years and they apply for jobs as a package. So when they apply for a job, they apply for a job, both of them on a job share basis of three days a week each and they have moved organisations on several occasions and this is in the area of financial services. So that’s one example.

I spoke with another two women, one was older and one was younger, and they job shared three and two, I think it was. So they didn’t have a crossover and they said it worked well. They said, look, it would be better if it was three and three, but it worked really well. And they loved working with each other because the younger woman who was the young mother,

speaker-1 (47:24.13)
whenever she had sort of challenges with children or babies or whatever it might be, she had this much older woman who’d been there, done that. So she was not only fantastic in terms of the work experience this older woman had and the knowledge and expertise she brought to the job, but she was also really helpful when it came to some of the issues around being a young mother. And then the older woman was able to draw on the knowledge, skills and expertise

of perhaps technology that the younger person brought to the job. Not that the older person was technologically illiterate, but the younger person brought different perspectives to the conversation. And both those examples exist and work for all those people involved. And I just think there’s a much, much untapped opportunity.

for that and I think would provide more freedom to younger parents as well.

Would businesses have hesitation because of the additional administrative cost? So you have, in essence, one virtual whole worker, but you have the administrative activities associated with two. HR has to do their record keeping, finance has to do their things, that sort of thing.

Well, that may be the case, but you also need to think about the corporate knowledge that’s retained. certainly, you know, these two women who work in financial services, they, and this crossover, they were able to show the benefit of how that worked to the organisation to justify any additional expense. And I would argue that that would be true.

speaker-1 (49:10.542)
One of the things that is lacking in this space around having older workers and a longer life in the workplace is the lack of measurement. And we really need more data around the positive effect of having older people or intergenerational job sharing. We know theoretically what that might be, but

there’s a lot more work where we need organisations to engage in age diversity, have a focused policy around things like perhaps intergenerational job sharing and introduce metrics so that we’ve got a measurement of that success. There was actually one situation in Germany. I remember reading about years ago, BMW.

with their factory had a lot of older workers and they are really mindful of the knowledge and the skill that would be lost as they moved on. And so what they did was, and one of the concerns was the impact on productivity of older people in the workplace because as you get older, you might get slower. So they actually set up a test

I have got some of these details because it’s been a while since I’ve read this case study. But essentially, they set up a test where they had a factory, as it always was, primarily younger people. Then they had a factory that had older and younger people in it. They made some slight changes to the factory environment. So, for example, older workers might need a seat when they’re in the

production line might need to be a tall estate or whatever it might have been, they made adjustments in the workplace that weren’t particularly expensive, but enabled those older people to remain. And what they found when they actually did the metrics was that that factory with the older workers, with the slight adaptations to the factory environment was

speaker-1 (51:36.052)
slightly more productive than the other one. So it was actually beneficial. And again, in a blue collar environment, another example that I’ve just recalled is where there were hard hats in a work environment. And there were hard hats for those younger people who might need some more support and hard hats for older people with knowledge, skill and expertise.

Yeah.

speaker-1 (52:05.986)
that they could go to, they had different coloured hard hats. So they knew who each other were. Younger person knew who they could go to for some extra. They wouldn’t necessarily have been a supervisor, the older person, just someone who had knowledge, skill and expertise that they could go to.

Interesting. When you were describing that, my first thought was American football. In practices, what they’ll do is they’ll give the quarterback or some of the special skilled players a different color uniform, just so people know this person you treat differently. So it’s interesting that that has flowed into the corporate workforce as well.

Well, blue collar, it’s an example. it’s not universal. Anything I’m sharing here, you know, individual examples that exist. And we can only hope that these individual examples snowball into something else. And again, in terms of this snowballing, it is also down to us. Because if we buy into the stereotype, if we buy into the cultural narrative,

about aging and retirement, we contribute to its longevity. Unless we change, nothing changes. And that’s our own attitude.

I have so many other questions I could ask right now, Catherine. But we’re coming up on the full hour here.

speaker-0 (53:46.986)
If you were to give, and I ask everybody this question, a last piece of advice, in this case with regards to approaching retirement, either from the business side or from a worker’s side, white collar, blue collar, what would that advice be?

is that we need to really consider who we’re going to be in retirement and as much as we might be desperate to finish work. And I really understand that for people that have been, you know, who are a blue collar worker and it’s been really hard on the body for a long time, or if we’re a white collar worker and we have worked 50, 60, 70 hour weeks, or even if we haven’t and we’re just exhausted and we don’t want to work anymore.

The beach or the golf course or the bush or whatever it might be will be great for a period of time. It’s not enough. In order to have a longer, healthier life, and it is possible for pretty well all of us, we need to think about what we’re going to be doing. What is our purpose? What is our rikikai? What are we waking up?

for each and every day. And you know, we know the other basis. What is our exercise going to be? What are our social connections going to be? And often if we have social connections with a shared common interest, that starts to give us a little bit of purpose. What are we going to be learning?

What are the new things that we’re going to introduce into our life? And you know, my mother says, well, I do Sudoku each day. That’s great. But it can’t just be Sudoku every day. Cause what we do is hard wire those neural pathways. are the new things we’ll be introducing throughout our lives? So really social connections, what are we going to be doing in terms of purpose and meaning and what are we going to be learning?

speaker-1 (56:03.182)
Have the holiday, absolutely. And then while on holidays, start to think about some of these other things.

Catherine, thank you very much. I really appreciate you taking the time. For everybody else, I’ll be putting links into the description for Catherine’s website so you can reach out to her or take a look at some of the things that she’s been doing. And don’t forget to click like and subscribe. It helps grow this channel a lot. Catherine, thank you very much.

Thanks very much, Neil. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Thank you. Bye.