The publication of Keep Britain Working: A National Growth Opportunity puts a significant challenge in front of employers, policymakers and those of us concerned with the future of work. The challenge isn’t simply how we get more people into work, it is how we create working lives that people can enter, sustain, develop within, return to and remain part of.
That distinction matters, because if working lives are becoming longer, careers less linear and people’s circumstances increasingly varied, simply encouraging greater labour-market participation will only take us so far…we also need to look at the design of work itself.
From participation to sustainable working lives
The scale of the challenge identified through Keep Britain Working is considerable. Ill health and disability are contributing to high levels of economic inactivity, while hundreds of thousands of people leave employment each year following the onset or worsening of a health condition.
But one of the most interesting aspects of the emerging Keep Britain Working approach is its recognition that this cannot be addressed by focusing solely on individuals. workplaces matter too. Recruitment, job design, flexibility, management, workplace health provision, adjustments, opportunities to return following absence and the ability to move between roles can all influence whether somebody is able to participate in work sustainably.
That moves the conversation from, “How do we get people back into work?” towards a potentially more useful question, “What enables people to remain connected to working life in the first place?”
Health doesn’t exist separately from working life
This is particularly important because people’s experiences of work and health aren’t static.
Someone may enter employment with a health condition, another person may develop one during their career. Someone else may experience caring responsibilities, a period away from work, a change in capability or circumstances, or need to rethink how and where they work.
And those experiences can occur at virtually any age, indeed, one of the important messages within the Keep Britain Working evidence is that work-limiting health conditions are increasing among both younger and older parts of the workforce.
That should caution us against turning this into another conversation simply about “older workers”. Age matters, but age alone rarely explains a working life.
Bringing an age and life-stage lens to the conversation
Earlier this year, the Age Diversity Forum began engaging with the Keep Britain Working Vanguard programme, arguing that age and life stage should be considered alongside health, disability and workplace design. Our proposition wasn’t that age needed its own separate strand, quite the opposite…we believe age needs to be understood across the working lifecycle.
That means thinking about the person entering work for the first time, someone developing their career, someone returning after an absence, somebody retraining or changing occupation, someone balancing work with caring responsibilities, and someone choosing or needing to work later in life.
Since then, ADF has continued to engage with the Keep Britain Working team and has been included in the stakeholder communications supporting the programme’s development and the publication of A National Growth Opportunity.
Our contribution is bringing a specialist age-inclusion perspective to that wider conversation, particularly around age, life stage and the design of longer, healthier and more sustainable working lives.
And the latest Keep Britain Working work raises some important questions for employers.
What does a healthy working lifecycle actually look like?
One of the strongest ideas emerging from Keep Britain Working is the development of a healthier working lifecycle. For us, that creates an interesting opportunity to think beyond traditional career assumptions.
Working life is increasingly unlikely to resemble a simple progression from education, to employment, to advancement and finally retirement. People may learn, work, progress, care, retrain, change sector, reduce their hours, increase them again, leave employment and later return.
The workplace systems surrounding them need to be capable of accommodating that reality, and that makes inclusion much more than a question of who an organisation recruits. It becomes a question of whether people can continue to contribute as their circumstances change.
Better workplaces need better evidence
Another important strand of Keep Britain Working is its emphasis on measurement. Employers frequently collect considerable amounts of workforce information, but understanding why people stay, leave, progress, return or disengage can be much harder, and that resonates strongly with our own work at ADF.
Through the development of our Age Inclusion Benchmark, we have consistently found that good intentions alone tell organisations relatively little about what is actually happening across the employee lifecycle. Policies may exist, initiatives may be available, and commitments may be genuine, but the important question is whether they translate into people’s experience of work. This is why evidence matters.
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Where are people leaving?
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Who is progressing?
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Who isn’t applying?
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Where are adjustments working?
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Where is experience being lost?
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Who is participating in development?
And what happens when we look at those questions through age, career stage, life stage and organisational tenure rather than relying on broad generational assumptions? Understanding where you are is what makes meaningful action possible.
Prevention may be as important as intervention
There is another important shift here. Much workplace support understandably begins when something has already happened…someone becomes unwell, takes an extended absence or reaches the point where leaving work appears increasingly likely. Those interventions matter enormously, but better workplace design also asks what could have happened earlier.
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Could greater flexibility have helped?
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Could a role have been redesigned?
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Could skills have been redeployed elsewhere?
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Could a different conversation with a manager have changed the outcome?
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Could someone have moved sideways rather than leaving altogether?
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Could a return have been made easier?