Older Workers Boost Productivity

Employers who invested in older staff experienced dramatic reductions in absenteeism and improvements in productivity, a ccording to the head of Finland's National Program on Ageing, Professor Juhani Ilmarinen.

Prof Ilmarinen, who introduced a program to promote health, update skills, providing training and improving work environments for older workers, said the 200 companies that participated in the program got back at least three times the investment they put into the project through productivity gains and drops in absenteeism and work incapacity.

"That money that was invested by the employer came back at least three-fold and in the best case twenty-fold," Prof Ilmarinen said.