Look, Listen Act: Getting Started on Age

• Healthy_Communities
• Diversity and Inclusion
• Age

Business in the Community’s (BITC) Look, Listen Act: Getting Started on Age toolkit guides employers through a process of looking at their data, listening to their employees and taking action to improve age diversity and inclusion in their business. At the heart of this are ways to retain and retrain staff and recruit new employees to support age inclusion.

The toolkit discusses how age diversity and inclusion can enable businesses to:

• improve customer service and product development
• increase team productivity
• create a skilled workforce
• retain knowledge and experience
• reduce turnover costs and plug skills gaps
• improve their brand.

The population is ageing. By the mid-2030s, half of all adults in the UK will be over 50 years old¹. The workforce is also becoming more age-diverse, with up to five generations working alongside each other for the first time. People from different generations may have different ways of approaching problems and decisions. Drawing on their data, businesses can leverage this diversity of thought for business success.

A rising life expectancy is to be celebrated, but it also brings with it the challenge of how we support more older people. The Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts that the annual cost of adult social care alone will double by the mid-2030s². One part of the solution is to enable longer and fuller working lives and embrace lifelong learning for future generations.

This approach supports both the wider economy and businesses. Retaining more older workers enables businesses to drive productivity through a skilled workforce and retained knowledge and experience and can also improve customer experience and brand.

BITC wants to support businesses on their age friendly journey. We can help businesses identify the age inclusion challenges they face and then provide the advice and support needed to drive action and build age inclusion into their workplaces. Find out more about becoming a member of BITC.

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Business in the Community is helping create a
skilled and inclusive workforce for today and tomorrow.