IT must address grey matters

First published in Computing, September 2005

Technology must be harnessed to ensure businesses get the best out of the UK’s ageing workforce

At Septembers TUC conference in Brighton, Gordon Brown hinted he would not look kindly on strikes, threatened by three million public servants, against Whitehall’s drive to raise their pension age from 60 to 65. But he will be able to face down the unions. The age of retirement looks set to rise – and not just in the public sector. The Institute for Public Policy Research, a Blairite thinktank, wants the age at which everyone receives a state pension to go up from 65 to 67.

What do these facts mean for IT? Perhaps we need a renewed government campaign for computer-based “lifelong learning” – though I find the phrase condescending. Or perhaps we are only delaying our old friend, the “demographic timebomb”. As a result, IT workers will have to tighten their belts to help pay for society’s retirees.

However, I am suspicious. There are timebombs everywhere now. And I thought IT could help raise the productivity of labour in UK industry and services.

The fact of IT means that no belt-tightening should be necessary if we want to assure older people a decent life.

No, there are two much more important ways in which working longer will affect IT.

First, IT departments need to find ways to make the best of older workers’ expertise. That’s another way of saying that the jobs done by older people need  to be as motivating as those done by younger ones.

A recent poll has confirmed that people encounter problems of ageism more than they do problems of gender or of race. But a government-backed campaign against ageism in the workplace could easily turn out to be so much breast-beating bureaucracy. The point, rather, is to make jobs for older people intellectually challenging, and – above all – properly paid. As Phil Mullan, an expert on oldies, points out, more than four out of five British men between 55 and 64 were usually in jobs before 1975; today the figure is less than two out of three. This, Mullan argues, is an economic problem, not one of ageing.

That’s beginning to happen. In Britain, people now want digital hearing aids, rather than analogue ones. But in the South East, the waiting time to get your ears technologically improved now stands at 81 weeks. The government has shrugged off responsibility for this absurd state of affairs; but IT’s role, at least, has been a noble one.

We also need to think much more broadly, for old and young alike, about acoustics in the workplace. As I write this in my garden, an ambulance siren goes into its 20th minute, flights overhead are as noisy as ever, and construction next door brings drills and bangs.

The fashionable answer to these problems would be to campaign against noise pollution, “binge” noisiness and anti-social noise behaviour and all that.

However, more Bose headphones, better voice quality in telecoms and a more critical attitude to open-plan workplaces make much more sense.