Old is Gold: Integrating Older Workers in CSCW

Abstract

The tradition of a worker who retires by age 65 is being replaced by a trend of longer periods of employment, leading people to believe that an aging workforce will be a major social transformation of this century. With the proliferation of collaborative tools in workplace settings, we posit that it is essential to address the unique characteristics of older workers when designing groupware. In this paper, we marshal literature from adult learning, training, and work to articulate the unique assets and competencies of older workers, notably: knowledge and experience, adeptness in social group dynamics, and finely tuned strategies for improving group performance and productivity grounded in prior experiences. Further, we argue that the CSCW community should leverage these opportunities to support the expanding older workforce with groupware. We describe a synthetic approach to study how we might best support older workers in workplace settings and outline design implications for CSCW.

Older adults and hackathons: a qualitative study

“…This approach together with previously mentioned claims and solutions proposed by other authors i.e. Convertino et al (2005) encouraged us to employ the participatory design approach from the very first stages of the development process, namely the pre-design stage of our study(idea development).…”

The firekeepers: aging considered as a resource

“…Surprisingly, no systematic attempt was found to organize these findings to inform the design of technology for intergenerational groups. Table 2 summarizes some of the contrasts that have been identified, synthesized from published literature on workplace behavior patterns (see [5,6,27]). For example, younger team members have more specific skills in general, including being more confident and adventurous with information technology.…”

“…In two analytic research articles [5,6], the possibility that older and younger workers might bring complementary resources to teamwork was discussed. Social scientists have observed the positive effects that integration can have among younger and older workers [27], the biasing effects that stereotypes can have in interactions between colleagues of different generations [14] and the important resources that baby boomers bring as potential mentors for their younger coworkers in organizations [17,18].…”