With age comes wisdom...and efficiency at work

November, 2021

Google 'over 50s at work' and you'll get results about age discrimination, how unemployment of the over-50s is rising, how worried the over-50s are about their job prospects etc.

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And yes…getting closer to the 50-mark is daunting. I do worry about how I can secure my longer-term employability, how I can stay employed in a well-paid job long enough to get my kids through university etc.

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But rather than opening the door to my midlife crisis, I'd rather talk about the POSITIVE side of things (..and of course here I have to refer to Monty Python's "Always look on the bright side of life"). I want to surface and talk about the amazing benefits of having over-50s in the workforce.

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Rather than simply creating a shopping list of all the benefits of having the over-50s at work, I will approach it from a personal standpoint, as one of those who is the elder at work (getting there), the wiser (I hope)…but definitely more efficient! And this word 'efficiency' is what I will focus on in this article.

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In thinking back to my professional decades, I can confidently say that my current 40-50 decade is by far my most productive one professionally.

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Productivity comes as a result of efficiency and this can only be perfected through practice & experience.

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Efficiency is perhaps not something you actively strive to achieve (i.e. my goal this year is to become more efficient...how is that even measured!?!) but it is something that comes naturally (or should come naturally) as the years of professional work start piling up. With age comes the unconscious wisdom of knowing where and on whom to invest your time and energy and when and where not to even bother.

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Efficiency can appear in many shapes and forms, some more obvious than others. Let start with the very basics:

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Email efficiencies

Email efficiencies are a big bonus given the number of emails we deal with on a daily/monthly/annuals basis! With age comes the wisdom of knowing which emails to ignore, which ones to reply to, which ones you really need to dedicate some time to etc. Experience contributes to a natural urge to being clear in your communication, concise with clear to-do actions, while also ensuring that the emails you draft & send do not spiral into a tornado of 1000-reply-to-all emails.

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Meeting efficiencies

Efficiency can surface within your meetings too. It's about keeping your meetings short, ensuring that conversations don't spread too thin and/or fall out of context. It's about bringing closure to meetings with conclusive decisions and actions. But it's also about creating efficiencies in those side conversations as well. If every conversation adds just a little bit more complexity, then you're really not going in the right direction.

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Personal deliverables

Practice makes perfect they say. If not perfect, it at least makes you faster. Efficiency also comes in the form of quick turnover times regarding our personal deliverables, be it an excel or PowerPoint, a strategy or a new proposal. Remember how long it used to take you to write an important email, or how long it took you to prepare a presentation? But being fast is no compromise for sloppiness. Efficiency in fast deliverables should come hand-in-hand with super high quality deliverables. No excuse for poor quality at our age.

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Leveraging your network of colleagues

The benefits of elderly wisdom in the workplace also include the ability to detect who in your network of colleagues may slow you down but who on the other hand can act as an accelerator. As a result, you naturally know (perhaps without consciously thinking about it) how and when to engage with this mixture of people to ensure an optimal and speedy outcome. 'Elderly' managers have the experience to understand their team's dynamics to be able to fully leverage their team's strengths and high energy points to maximize collaboration & productivity.

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Working the system

The over-50s are good at scanning and assessing their environments and knowing how to work the system in such a way as to lead to greater efficiencies. They've been-there done-that a million times before. They don't dwell too much on futile tasks and pointless discussions (and small talk). They know which strings to pull to get quicker results, bringing out the best in people and delivering with impact.

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Finally....Saving energy

At this age, it's also about personal efficiencies. Saving energy. Not wasting your precious personal energy over-analysing shit going on at work. Yes shit happens (btw I used to live in a student house that had a sticker on the front door 'Shit happens' so it's a sentimental phrase for me!). Of course you get annoyed with people and/or situations, but it's momentary, you let it go quickly, get over it and move on. No dwelling into the depths of each little comment said, every remark insinuated, every tone of email etc. Too much energy wasted. Just keep on moving (which is a Soul II Soul song btw from the 90s)

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So...to come to a conclusion, if when answering a survey you tick the 45+ age group box yet you don't feel you have reached the top of the efficiency-mountain then…oops!…Think about what efficiency means for you and how you can work towards perfecting those deficient areas in your work if anything to achieve that much-deserved inner balance and level of happiness at work.

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Interesting fact: The most successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged. In fact research shows that the average age of founders of tech start-ups is a mature 47 years old (exactly my age btw!!) It seems that experience and wisdom have their unique worth.

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As I have mentioned before, I don't usually read articles related to the topic I am writing about so that what I write is 100% my own thoughts and reflections based purely on my own experiences and not influenced by what I read.

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However, I was curious to see what's written about the over-50s. Here are a couple of interesting articles:

• Wise Up! The Benefits of Hiring The Over 50s | · Trojan Recruitment

• 10 Reasons To Hire and Retain Workers 50+ (forbes.com)