1. Redirect recruiting and sourcing. Companies are quickly facing worker shortages from labor pools where they normally would draw younger employees. To reach mature workers, companies can conduct over-50 workshops at local job recruitment centers, offer targeted benefits such as unpaid grandparent leave and look externally to identify retired professionals desiring part-time or short-term work.

2. Retain valued employees through alternative work arrangements. While some companies are recruiting aging workers, others are developing alternative work arrangements, such as part-time schedules. Companies should also explore, when appropriate, the use of telecommuting as a way of retaining mature workers.

3. Preserve critical knowledge. One approach elicits employees’ experiential, or tacit, knowledge through detailed interviewing or documentation, explicitly capturing and storing these insights. Mentoring arrangements and communities of practice can also encourage mature workers to pass knowledge down to the next generation.

4. Provide opportunities for workers to continually update skills. Executives are recognizing the need to refresh the skills of workers whose formal training may have ended years, if not decades, earlier. Companies are seeking to actively transfer informal skills that have not been taught and that are necessary in the working environment.

5. Facilitate the coexistence of multiple generations. Often overlooked as a facet of diversity, the viewpoints of different age groups can present significant barriers. Organizations must balance the needs, interests and work styles of all. By pairing senior managers with junior employees, each can mentor the other in different areas.     

6. Help mature workers effectively use technology in the workplace. A common misperception is that older workers have more difficulty learning and adopting new technologies. While multiple has studies have shown otherwise, accessibility requirements and strategies for application rollout and training are needed to support all potential user groups, including mature workers.