Shawnee Love   •  
February 21, 2013

A few years back, striking down the mandatory retirement rules was heralded as the savior of the workforce.  As our demographics showed that more and more Boomers were nearing 65 and there weren’t enough future employees to fill in the gap, not to mention the fact that 60 is the new 50, it is understandable that mandatory retirement was an archaic rule best scrapped.

I have been lucky to work with many who are 60+ and I hope they stick around as long as possible as they are a wealth of knowledge about business and people that will never be mined properly no matter how much time we have left.  They also seem to know how to get things done and that is a quality that never goes out of style.

However, I have also seen very tricky situations arise when an aging employee isn’t cutting it anymore and the manager doesn’t know what to do.  The team members might be complaining the worker is:

• Away for funerals, illnesses, aches and pains, and appointments a lot more than the norm,
• Taking longer breaks,
• Less willing to learn new systems, try new things or change,
• Making more mistakes, and
• Simply slower than in the past.

These 5 issues can come up at any age, so our biases might be surfacing when we tie these problems to age.  But biases or not, this is a complex situation:

• Is allowing an older worker to have lower productivity fulfilling a duty to accommodate or failing to manage effectively?
• Is disciplining an older worker for poor performance cold hearted or fair and consistent expectations of all employees?
• Is encouraging an employee to retire the path of least resistance or helping an employee through a difficult transition (or simply a way to allow the employee to save face)?

Employers typically don’t want to fire aging workers as it would feel mean, not to mention end a long and fruitful career on a distinctly sour note.  It is also usually very expensive to fire an older worker and leaves a bad taste in the mouth of other employees who are watching to see how people are treated as they near the sunset of their career.

However, individual businesses (particularly small businesses) are ill equipped to carry a less productive employee for long.

If you have comments, we’d love to hear from you on this topic!