March 2024
In the second episode of our “In Conversation with…” podcast series for 2024 Lucy is joined by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, CEO of 20-first, one of the world's leading global consultancies focused on balancing gender, generations and culture.
Lucy and Avivah discuss some of the key demographic shifts impacting the labour market and explore why generational balance needs to be a business priority. Avivah explains the importance of longevity literacy amongst workforces and leadership teams, and how a deep understanding of people’s differences will be key to any diversity and inclusion strategy.
Key Takeaways:
Older workers as an answer to skills shortages: In a challenging labour market, employers may be able to leverage the skills and experience of existing older workers to fill skills gaps.
Senior leadership teams must prioritise generational balance: The impact and success of a company’s longevity strategy will depend on the buy-in, involvement and longevity literacy of the executive leadership team.
Start by measuring the demographics of your workplace: Use data to analyse the potential impact of an ageing workforce on the business in the next 5 to 10 years.
Inclusion requires a deep understanding of where people are from: Instead of segmenting the workforce into identity groups, bring people together to discuss shared issues and define common goals, to increase compassion and understanding of differences.
Lucy Lewis: Hello and welcome to the Future of Work Hub’s “In conversation with…” podcast. I'm Lucy Lewis, a partner in Lewis Silkin’s employment team, and in this podcast series, I'll be hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders to explore their perspectives on the longer-term trends and immediate drivers shaping the world of work.
Demographic change is profoundly altering the world of work, and the workforce is increasingly reflecting more broader demographic shifts that we're seeing in society. We know that the workplace in the future will be more ethnically diverse, it will have more women in senior managerial roles and, for today particularly, it will have more people working well into their 70s. In today's podcast, we're going to explore the reasons behind this and look at the impacts that it will have on the composition of the workforce, but also consider what it means for employers and HR and what they can be doing to prepare.
My guest today is just brilliantly placed to be speaking to us about this. I'm absolutely delighted to welcome Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. Avivah is the CEO of 20-first,one of the world's leading global consultancies focused on 21st century leadership and the future of work and careers. Avivah has over 20 years’ experience consulting and advising CEOs and senior business leaders on balancing gender, generations and cultures. Avivah was a guest on our first podcast series, and in that conversation, we talked about gender balance in the workplace. So, I'm really delighted to be speaking to Avivah today and hear what she has to say, particularly around generational and cultural balance. So welcome back, Avivah.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: My pleasure. Lovely to be back with you, Lucy.
Key demographic changes affecting the labour market
Lucy Lewis: I thought to get started, it would be really useful if you could just talk a little bit about some of those key demographic changes at a global level, some of the things that I highlighted and, share your thoughts on the impact that's having on the labour market. What's driving those changes?
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: Well, what's driving those changes is we are seeing the second billion people over the age of 60 rising. That's you and me Lucy I hate to tell you! We are seeing the natural bulge of demographics ageing, so the boomers led the way, and at the same time, the parallel trend is the plummeting of fertility rates almost all over the world, with the notable exception of Africa, which will… we can talk about because that's going to impact global demographic arguments quite a bit. Generally, what we're seeing is the world's demographics are shifting from what I call the pyramid to the square. The pyramid is what we've all grown up with, and learned for all of human history, that is a few old people and a large base of young people. And that's how we've designed our systems, our retirement plans, our pension infrastructures. Everything is designed, including our workplace and career management patterns, on the pyramid. The issue is we are morphing into a square, which means we're going to have generational balance or the same number of people over 50 as under 50. We're already at 40% in a lot of European countries. So that naturally feeds into the workforce, the workplace and all of our futures. So, what are we going to do with this generational balance and are any companies really looking at this as the discontinuity in the 21st century that it is?
Generational balance as a business priority
Lucy Lewis: That last point is really interesting to me because, certainly on the Future of Work Hub, we've been talking about this issue for a long time, and somehow it doesn't seem to resonate to action employers. This is why it's really interesting to talk to you, because other issues that you think might be related, you know, skill shortages, for example, that's something that we see businesses really focused on. So, I'm interested in your thoughts on how making generational balance more of a business priority can address some of those other challenges that businesses are facing at the minute.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: Like the skills shortage that you talked about.
Lucy Lewis: Exactly.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: If the skills shortage is because you're only looking for people under 30, there's a really easy answer that we can introduce you to. I think the question of why this isn't on the agenda, it's a little bit like climate change, right? It's this iceberg that you know, from all the data, it's very predictable. There's nothing surprising about where we're heading demographically. It's been in the data for many, many years but like climate change, I don't think you really react until it's on you and really hitting you and your workforce and your customers and becoming a very obvious pressure point. I think we're only seeing that emerge post-pandemic. I think there's never been more media attention, think tank attention. You were a little ahead of the game Lucy in introducing this to your podcast early. I think this is just coming to the agenda. Most leaders I talked to, it's still not on the senior leadership agenda and I think that's what's missing. It's tending to go in in kind of a bottom up way through D&I and diversity teams, eventually through the HR people. I don't think there's yet a very strategic frame and positioning to get this topic where it really belongs first, to explore just how big an impact it's going to have on an individual business. It's got to get to the leadership agenda, and I think that will require a little bit of pushing and nudging.
Lucy Lewis: One of the things that I have really loved about you talking about this topic, we talked about gender balance when you last came on and we talked about that as a business opportunity, and one of the things that you have said is that the ageing populations and workforce, that generational balance issue, will be to the 21st century what gender balance was to the 20th century. I'd love for the purposes of our audience if you can share a little bit more about that, because it's such an interesting idea and it goes to the heart of this real need for action on it.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: Well, it's just like gender. I'm doing a lot of work on the generations piece and it really reminds me of where we were on gender 20 years ago. So, it's really a question of, have you done the analytics? Do you measure age at all and life stage as a segmentation, first of your employees, how many of your employees are over 50? Does anybody even look? What percentage of that group is ten years from retirement? How much knowledge do they hold, how much expertise that you need to keep the lights on and your business growing and are you ready with succession plans or not? A lot of companies haven't even done the first step of really even measuring what those employees do. The default in companies is for people over 50, if you're not at the very top, you're likely to be nudged out and perceived as a little too old, a little too learning unfriendly and a little tech phobic, right? All the stereotypes are alive and well. Then on the consumer side, which is again, kind of like gender, the low hanging fruit is what are the longevity economy opportunities of realising that the greatest purchasing power is now held by people who are in what I call Q3, their third quarter, the 25 years after 50. In the UK peak purchasing power is actually the group between 60 and 64 years old. Does anybody market to these people or are any products and services reviewed with the age lens; does it speak to the motivations, preferences, and interests of those people? I don't know if you've walked into a London restaurant recently, but I can tell you they are not geared to the Q3 segment as they blare away with extraordinarily loud music so you can't hear the person next to you.
Four-quarter lives
Lucy Lewis: I wanted to talk to you about your Qs, your quarters, and I hope that you'd share a bit of thinking around that because I think it's really interesting for our audience. We're moving towards this 100 year life and one of the things you've been saying is that we need to challenge this traditional idea of three stages of life and you've proposed these four quarters. So, it seems a perfect opportunity to allow you, for people that don't know, to say a little bit about these traditional three stages. Why do you think we should move to these four quarters and, particularly, the impact of Q2 and Q3, as you were describing from a workplace perspective?
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: So I think, again, the world was designed very appropriately for where we were, which was this kind of three stage life where we started with education, then we had this long working age life, which the OECD still defines as 15 to 64, and then you have retirement and old age. And that's been obsolete for a little while and so I just came up with, if we now are agreeing that a large number of people, more than we've ever seen, are going to reach unexpected, uncharted territories of age, and they're saying that 50% of children born today will live to be 100, we need to update the model of life that we're working with and designing around. And so, the four quarters came pretty naturally with a little wink to the corporate world that is very comfortable with that vernacular; okay, let's talk about quarters, how are we doing? I think if you look at each quarter as 25 years, you can see that the work world has been essentially designed around Q2, the years from 25 to 50. You know, you get educated before, then you have these sharp, short, linear career trajectories with no pauses, breaks, interruptions and then over 50, you're kind of seen as a little over the hill.
The reality with the emerging Q3, Q3 is the really new piece. We always had working age and old age, but now we've got this unknown thing of these newly healthy, engaged and probably working years between 50 and 75, with also probably very different motivations, expectations and needs. And I think that's largely not very much studied yet. Companies aren't really designing yet. They're just starting to develop systems or even start to look, for example, at engagement scores and comparing, how did their Q3 employees feel versus their Q2? What percentage of development investment goes into Q3 versus Q2ers? All this kind of stuff to see, if in an age of talent shortages and difficult to recruit young people, can't we make better use and leverage the skills, experience and frankly, intelligence of this vast array of existing internal talent which we simply have ignored or under leveraged for some time?
the role of policy and regulation
Lucy Lewis: Thank you. That's really interesting and actually, it leads perfectly to the next question. Something I ask people quite a lot on this podcast is where is the balance? Where does policy feed into this? What's the role of policy and regulation and what's the role of employers? Of course, I'll want to talk to you about some of the practical steps that employers can be taking. But is there a role for policy and regulation to shift the dial on some of this stuff?
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: I think, policy has already had a huge impact on this by removing a forced retirement age and so that was a pretty seismic shift. Some countries haven't done that yet. You can see that a lot of people are in the streets in a lot of countries about that very policy issue of what is retirement age and what is working age. We know the pension pressures and fiscal pressures of our insufficient pension scheme systems. I think the other big revolution, of course, that the UK did was to individualise pensions So people have control over their pensions, and they don't always make the wisest decisions about when they have enough money to stop working, because a lot of us are still underestimating just how long we're going to live. So, I think policy is hugely important.
I'd say culture is probably more important. We have to normalise and educate people. We are all going to live longer than we think and many of us are going to work longer than our parents did, for sure, and maybe what we're currently planning. It's not that much fun to be retired for 30 or 40 years, if you're really going to live to be a hundred. But I think the culture in companies, the mindsets of a lot of managers and hiring managers. There's lots of research coming out now to show that ageism is alive and well in companies. So, we have some work to do to educate everybody, ourselves included, by the way, because we are ageist against our own future selves in very strange ways. We've got to adapt, and we have to flex systems, we have to get rid of old work patterns, really linear careers that went up and never went back down. Now we're going to have to have, what my friends at Amazing If call, squiggly careers with much longer, slower off ramps at the end. So, there's lots to change and there's lots to innovate and it's interestingly, I think a very good news story. I don't know why it's often characterised as this fearsome, terrible, horrendous challenge. We've been gifted 30 years of extra life; I think that's something to celebrate.
Lucy Lewis: Yes, absolutely something to celebrate and I'll perhaps come on to talk about things that employers could do. I'm pleased actually that you think in the UK we've been taking some good policy or regulatory steps, because I tend to think that the approach of the policy makers in the UK, at least more recently, has been, well we'll just increase the retirement age or we’ll increase the state pension age, and we'll just assume that people have the requisite health and skills, and that they'll find jobs in order to enable them to keep working. Obviously, there's a gap there and part of that can be filled by employers, we’ll come to talk about that. But I wondered if you knew about anything innovative from a policy perspective that other countries are doing that we should be looking more towards in terms of shifting the policy agenda.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: Well, I'd say the issue with retirement age is and everything that we're doing fiscally has a lot to do with healthcare. So, health is the big outlier, both mental and physical health. Chris Whitty in the UK has been very vocal about this; getting the system to change from treating the sick, to treating the well, is what some countries are much better at. So, investing in preventive health care, as opposed to once we're already sick is going to be the big issue. I think employers can take a step ahead by offering some of these services internally. A lot of it is about education and preparation and knowing just how much simple lifestyle education will prepare us better for healthy aging.
longevity leadership
Lucy Lewis: One of the things that you've talked about, I know the World Economic Forum have also talked about it, is this idea of longevity literacy or longevity fluency. You know, people understanding the issues relating to ageing and helping them make good decisions earlier in their life to be prepared for, in this case, healthy older age. What are the things that employers can be doing, both in terms of supporting and helping their employees to have longevity literacy, but also looking at jobs and workplaces and supporting people to work for longer?
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: Well, I've just published a blog on Forbes, if anybody's interested, on the five steps to longevity leadership for companies. There's a number of steps and before you jump to policy, I think it's a really good idea to have a longevity strategy. First, you have to analyse how big an issue is this for your business, which means you need to measure. You need to measure your workforce, and you need to measure your consumers and stakeholders. Where are they? How old are they? What are the trends? What does it look like and what does it look like over the next 5 or 10 years? Armed with data, you then need to get this debate up to your executive team to decide how much you want to invest in it and what resources do you need to put into play. One of the key skills is you need to align your ExCo and skill them up first to be longevity literate. They need to know just how big… this differs from sector to sector, country to country, so it depends on your markets, your sector and what business you're in.
Once you've got your longevity strategy, then you're going to have to cascade that longevity literacy, which requires a shift in management culture and mindsets to be much more proactively engaged in engaging with age and stage as part of your management, both of employees and consumers and customers. This is not just a workforce issue. The big opportunity here is also the customer one. I think then it's really taking a life course approach to career management, to attraction. I was just interviewing a colleague who said that just by changing an internal job posting to say at the very top that this position is open to job changers internally, upticks by 30 points how many people will apply who don't have exactly the right background for that role and facilitates some of the internal mobility that will be a key part of the solution on staffing.
culture balance
Lucy Lewis: That's fascinating and those statistics are really interesting and definitely food for thought for things to take away and start to action. We're running short of time, and I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about the idea of cultural balance and cultural literacy. You know, when we talked about creating gender balance, one of the things that really stuck with me that you said is that, those that are really going to crack that are not those people that just treat it as a numbers game, but see it as more of a strategic cultural shift. As I said at the outset, when we look ahead to the future of work, we know that the workplace is going to be more ethnically diverse. What are your tips for businesses in terms of generating that cultural literacy, to prepare for that demographic change, to prepare for greater balance from a cultural perspective?
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: Well, I always compare the culture to the gender piece. Because you remember perhaps that the metaphor I used on how to manage genders was you need to become gender bilingual to be able to lead and manage across genders, which requires people understanding what the differences are. I think you'll find exactly the same thing on generations and on cultures. We know from very successful international and global companies who've been working across cultures, languages, ethnicities and religions for decades, you need to learn about these differences. You need to understand them deeply, which is why global managers have spent a lot of time living in different countries so that they can get first hand experience and deep experience of what the reality of that particular culture is. We haven't done that much of that. It's very easy when you're in an organisation that's dominated by one profile, one background, often one school degree, not to be so interested in the extraordinary variety that humans come in. Ignoring differences or stereotyping, which is one reaction to that is just dangerous and not productive. So now everybody's pushing for more inclusive workplaces. Inclusion doesn't just mean a blanket let's be nice to people. It actually requires a deep understanding of where people are from.
increased workplace conflict
Lucy Lewis: Thank you Avivah. Just expanding on that a little bit, because one of the things that employers are really struggling with, particularly in the UK and perhaps the US, is the idea of conflict in the workplace. So, we're seeing in society a sort of intolerance to viewpoints of other people and that's starting to spill over into the workplace. People expressing views that other people find offensive and difficult and that creating tension and conflict. We see an increase in concerns and complaints raised to employers and an expectation that they will do something about that. What are the practical steps employers can take from what you're saying about cultural literacy, to try and minimise that challenge that feels very real at the moment?
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: I think what's interesting to me is that so much brings us back to the art and science of leadership, right? Good leadership has always been, but is increasingly relevant in times where differences collide. And so once you have the deep understanding of where the differences are, the art is to find what is the similarity between people. How do you discover it? How do you get people to come together around things they share rather than around things they differ. So, after decades of us seeing companies split people up into identity groups by all their various micro mission managed differences, and you're this colour and this religion and this ethnicity and I'm this one and splitting them off from the power structure so they can talk to each other. Perhaps it's finally time that we bring back people together and define visions and projects and goals that we can all subscribe to. I think that was always the leadership challenge and I think we've wandered away from that for a bit, and I hope we'll see it come back.
priority actions for employers
Lucy Lewis: Thank you Avivah, it's been fascinating as always. I'm going to finish by asking you the question that I'm asking everybody on this 2024 podcast series. If you think about all the issues we've discussed, what do you think are the two priority actions for employers and HR teams to prepare and build organisational resilience in the year ahead?
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: So the key things I think they should be looking at is to prioritise longevity and the new demographics on a par with the other two big issues that they are prioritising, which is climate and AI. I think everybody's talking about climate and AI, I'm not worried that we're going to address those issues in good time. But longevity is nowhere near but will have as big a shock, so my invitation is get those three things bundled together as the 21st century triumvirate of challenges that are going to shape shift our world and our businesses. And in the first phase, don't make it an ageism issue, an HR issue or diversity issue. Get it on the leadership agenda as a strategic global business shift and get a longevity strategy. That's step one.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you. That's a really powerful ending and it's been brilliant to reconnect and speak to you again. If you're listening and you'd like to find out more about the work that Avivah does, you can find all the information on her www.avivahwittenbergcox.com. Thank you, Avivah.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: My pleasure. Lucy. Any time.