Creating an Age-Diverse Workplace

Organizations have committed to investing more money and resources than ever before to increasing diversity and inclusion (“D&I”). According to the Winter 2022 Fortune/Deloitte CEO Survey, 94% of the CEOs listed D&I as a personal strategic priority, 90% of those surveyed confirmed that their organizations aspired to be industry leaders in D&I and more than half of the CEOs reported that as of June 2021 they believed they had succeeded with respect to building D&I into their strategic priorities and goals. However, skepticism regarding commitments to D&I and the efficacy of programs remains quite high, with one report finding that roughly 80% of companies were “just going through the motions and not holding themselves accountable”. Gender, knowledge, skills, experience and ethnicity/nationality/race are the most common dimensions addressed in the D&I strategies covered in PwC’s 2015 survey; however, surveys indicate that only a small percentage of organization include age as part of their D&I strategies and that even among those organizations the strategy selected is inadequate (e.g., simply encouraging those of different generations to focus on their similarities and/or denying the reality of their differences altogether). This chapter describes best practices for creating an age-diverse workplace as a fundamental goal of D&I strategy