A sense of purpose will reshape the future of work
As plural careers will become the norm, it will be more common to exercise your right side of the brain and make money from sidelines and hobbies
Yvonne Sonsino, Partner and Innovation Leader of Mercer’s Digital Innovation Hub, International Region, and author of The New Rules of Living Longer - How to Survive Your Longer Life
It’s not just what Yvonne Sonsino says, but it’s the way she says it. There’s a sort of musicality in the way she speaks, like a gentle flow that carries you from the shore of what you know (or think you know) to the periphery of what researchers are discovering. At Mercer, the world’s largest human resources consulting firm, Yvonne is Partner and Innovation Leader of the Digital Innovation Hub. Basically, in the global observatory of the workplace transitions, she has a seat in the front row.
As the author of The New Rules of Living Longer - How to Survive Your Longer Life, Yvonne outlined eleven critical points that we need to take into account while we celebrate the fact that our chances to reach older ages are multiplying from generation to generation. Amongst the elements that will require our attention there is a change in the nature of work, with a growing search for meaning entering into the equation and a different stratification of the working and learning curve.
I got in touch with Yvonne to talk about how ready we are to face all these challenges. Yes, we read a lot about the aging workforce, the changes in the future of work, the constant lengthening of the life expectancy, but can we really picture what this will practically mean? Here are a few interesting hints.
By 2025, in the UK alone, there will be one million more workers over 50 and 230 thousand fewer workers under the age of 25. How will this scenario look and feel like?
In the most advanced economies, the supply of talents is shifting. Especially when the flow of immigration, for various reasons, is impaired, employers will have access to talents in the existing population only. Between 2015 and 2030, 38% of the population of Japan and Italy will be over 55 and the same will apply to 27% of the American workers. In order to grow or replace labour forces, employers will have to maximize the role of people who, at the moment are outside the workforce, like care providers, returning mothers or older people who fell out of the workforce for some reason. Or, employers will have to work harder to retain and retrain their existing talents, which by virtue of the longevity dividend, will have a longer “shelf life.”
What changes can we expect on the side of the workers, instead?
The employee value proposition will evolve. The reasons why people work will be more nuanced. It’s a package made of multiple layers, think about it as a pyramid. At the bottom, the largest layer is made of contractual elements, like pay, perks and benefits. On the second layer, there are career development opportunities for progress and next to that, the work-life environment. At the very top sits a fairly new group of variables connected to the sense of purpose.
This latest layer is becoming more and more important not only for the workers, but in relationship with their contribution to the company and the company’s contribution to social purpose. In the future, the “weight” of sense of purpose will likely increase and will impact on the entire construction. There will be other nuanced shifts in the relative proportions of the elements that make up the employee value proposition. It will be a positive shift that will fit the needs of multiple generations.
In your book The New Rules of Living Longer, you stressed that a longer life expectancy goes hand in hand with the need to pay for it. For women, the scenario is grimmer: they can live longer than men and have to make ends meet with a pension that can be up to 40% lower than their male counterparts. Companies and policy makers are slow in acting. What are the options for the individual?
When we talk about older female workers, many elements of discrimination come to a bottleneck: generally, women experience lower earning capacity and, compared with men, deal with both a salary and a pension gap. They have a longer life expectancy, which may mean that they will be alone and not be able to count on their partner support for the last part of their lives. Policy makers are not helping. They try to equalize the retirement ages for fair play, but this has left some women vulnerable, because they have to re-work their plans for a later retirement age, when they are already along the way.
Women need better quality financial education. They need to understand the impact of their present financial choices in the future. When there is a family, it’s generally the woman’s career that comes to a halt. Women pay for childcare out of their pocket and if they have extra money, they put it where it does more good in the family. All these facts, compared with their partners, impair their capacity to save. We need to help women to understand the implications, increase their financial education and help them to think long term about financing later life.
One of the rules you wrote about in your book regards the “shape” of the career. Can you tell us about it?
Yes, it will look more like a multiple hump than the classic incline and cliff edge of retirement. We’re used to thinking of careers as the expression of a three-stage life, made of education, work and retirement. But in the future we’ll add other layers: self-employment, travel, sabbatical, re-education, re-entering the labour force, part-time work, post-work travel, mid-life gap years!
Different stages of life come with different needs and the work environment should be able to acknowledge them. For instance, there are moments when you need more money, like when you have a family or a mortgage and other commitments, and other periods instead, when you need less money and more meaning or more time.
A more flexible workplace doesn’t mean just how much time you work, but also where you work and what the job content will look like. Questions need to be resolved about who gets the job done - full-time permanent staff, part-time, gig workers - and what tasks can be automated. That’s why companies are redesigning tasks that can craft more flexibility into the jobs.
You stated that 57% of the workers have no plans or ambition for their life after 60. Still, the extended longevity is a work-life revolution and a shift of mentality is needed. What is the best way to look at this challenge?
I recently ran some focus groups and asked workers over 45 what they wanted from their job. I was blown away by the results. In the insurance sector, 93% said they want to work differently in future, they wanted to learn new things and progress or work more flexibly. I saw similar results in a pharmaceutical company, 66% wanted to work differently. Half of these expected more challenges and the other half, more flexibility.
People are starting to understand that work will not be the same anymore and are open to this change, hoping to meet their own needs in the meanwhile. It’s almost as if the age line is shifting and older workers are re-adopting some of the ambitions they had earlier in their careers. They are almost taking on the stereotypical millennial mind-set.
In the current cultural climate, there's not much fancy about aging. Do you agree that changing our mentality is as fundamental as change in policies?
We definitely have a big ageist cultural issue to deal with and it needs to be tackled head on. At Mercer, we try to redress cultural apathy by providing hard evidence about the value of age in an organization. In our paper “Are you age-ready?”, we unraveled the evidence and analyzed where business performance is driven from. For example, older workers tend not to move jobs so quickly and this is good news for a company. Turnover is expensive, in terms of downtime, recruitment, training and so on. Furthermore, older workers influence their team to move less too – they have a positive impact on career development for their teams, and generally have better people and collaboration skills. There are many myths associated with older workers, and our paper breaks them down with facts.
Considering your knowledge of the most up-to-date studies, how has this influenced your career?
My husband is an artist and we decided to buy an arts and crafts school as a plan for the future and I help him to run it. I noticed an enormous growth in the artisan craft arena: people want to learn. It’s our retirement nest egg – I can see us working there until we are 90! Keeping our minds and bodies active at the same time…
Can we expect that all these changes will bring a surge in entrepreneurship?
The indications point to this, yes. There are more successful start-ups from the over 50 generation than any other, as people start their own businesses. At the art school we also hear from our students that they are making money from their artistic sidelines. It’s so satisfying to use your creative right brain, it gives a sense of purpose, but it fits perfectly in the changing nature of work, too. As plural careers will become the norm, it will be more common to make money from sidelines and hobbies.
One last question regarding plans and ambitions for the life after the age of 60. What do you imagine for yourself?
I love my work and don’t see me ever stopping. I also like to be involved in the arts and crafts school as a creative counterbalance to my City job. Tutoring students on how to transform a passion into a business is one of the options.
