Previous generations used to be able to plan for their retirement knowing that the party and the carriage clock would arrive at a predetermined date. Then the compulsory retirement date was outlawed, and people looked forward to being able to work for a lot longer.
Over the past five years the number of people working over the age of fifty has risen by one million.
Employers have been keen to take advantage of the willingness of older people to carry on working with more offering a wide range of flexible working options with the aim of keeping skilled workers in employment in the face of a labour shortage created by a well-documented demographic time bomb.
When the retirement age and pensions were introduced in the United Kingdom, a little over a century ago, part of the aim was to take workers with debilitating physical health out of the workforce and create vacancies for younger people.
It now seems that many older workers are being forced to give up work because of concerns about their mental health.
Research conducted by Aviva has found that as many as four million over-fifties see themselves as being forced in to retirement by their ill-health, and that almost two in five believe that that ill-health will be caused or aggravated by their work or their working environment.
In the age of well-being strategies, it is surprising to hear that more than half of those workers do not feel supported by their employers.
At the other end of the age spectrum two thirds of workers aged 16-49 said that they felt supported by their employers in their efforts to lead a healthy life and achieve a good work-life balance.
Far from giving up, older workers are looking for help to improve their health, with one in five suggesting that employers should proactively offer workshops and seminars on health education and well-being.
Part of the problem for older workers suffering poor health and poor mental health inparticular is that they grew up in a time when lunch was for wimps and putting in the hours was the way to be successful.
This is now a well-recognised route to mental health problems such as stress.
It wasn’t the ‘done thing’ to talk about mental health and only weak people had mental health problems.
It might be a generational thing, putting work ahead of health and well-being. But the result is that when faced with a health issue, older workers often lack the skills to manage work around it and decide that the best option is to retire. To break-free from the source of what they might perceive to be the problem.
This may appear to be the best thing to do when you don’t have the knowledge to do anything else but says Aviva’s managing director of savings and retirement, Lindsey Rix “Employers could do more to help older workers to understand the principals of well-being. It might be as simple as encouraging people to talk more about their health.
“Employers have a really important role to play both financially and emotionally in supporting their workers through periods of ill health and facilitating their return to the workplace where this is possible. Greater clarity and support for health and wellbeing in the workplace will prevent employees, especially those closer to retirement, from having to retire prematurely and avoid a drain of valuable skills and talent.”
For more information on health and well-being education visit the Work Place Learning Centre
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