Breaking age bias - Insights from the HR and DEI working group

By Mike Frost, Co-Founder, Expocast

"The younger the hiring manager, the more likely they are to discriminate due to age" 🤯

This one was of a few eye-opening bits of research shared on Tuesday, 30th of April at the in-person HR and DEI Working Group run by AEO, AEV and ESSA.

We spent a great deal of time focusing on Age Discrimination, a couple of other interesting research outcomes I noted down were:

🪀 Fewer people are even thinking about retirement these days
🪀 There's something called a "Rainbow period" of 2 to 3 years at the start of retirement then people begin to get bored

There's a lot of "Gen X this" and "Millennials that" etc. which often only serves to foster an Us vs Them atmosphere.

A great point was made by Mike Sealy FRSA that we need to shift away from this mindset around a multigenerational workforce, which treats each generation very differently, and think more of an intergenerational workforce, which is all about those different generations learning from each other.

Honestly, this was such an informative meeting, I would encourage any AEO/AEV/ESSA member companies to have representation in these working groups - this knowledge will add so much value regarding the performance, wellbeing and retention of your existing staff, as well as enabling you to recruit in a much more inclusive and accessible way, which opens your business up to a wider talent pool.

Other food for thought from the wider discussion:
🪀 No interviews with only one interviewer
🪀 Consider job shares to attract highly motivated candidates (and you may be surprised how many of your current staff might be interested!)
🪀 "Domestic responsibility leave" as an additional leave for staff (I've heard it called Carers Leave as well)
🪀 Compressed hours - e.g. working 5 days worth of time/output in 4 days
🪀 Term time working
🪀 Shared parental leave - my understanding is that there's a legal requirement to use the wording "paternity/maternity" on contracts etc., however using language like "primary care giver" and "secondary caregiver" is much more inclusive for the wide variety of families out in the real world

Check out the DEI Hubs on the AEO website for cross association resources and loads more value by clicking here

Expocast is Talent partner for AEO.