The Silver Tsunami, Are You Ready for the Shifting Age Paradigm?

Transcription

1 Session No.514 The Silver Tsunami, Are You Ready for the Shifting Age Paradigm? Scott B. Lassila, CSP, ASP, CSM, APS Managing Consultant Aon Global Risk Consulting Houston, TX The Issue The American employer is facing and an impending crisis that is fast approach and in some cases is already here. The safety profession is going to be affected dramatically and needs to get involved now in order to get ahead of the curve before it is too late. The U.S. Department of Labor statistics shows that over the past decade, workers in the 45 year-old and over category have increased 49% and now make up 44% of the workforce. The age group over 55 has grown to 21% of the workforce. As a glimpse into the future, a 2013 Gallup poll revealed that 37% of working age respondents indicated they expect to work beyond age 65. Gallup reported that only 22% responded the same way in 2003 and only 16% in Given this projected aging of America s workforce, are America s employers prepared to effectively address the associated increase workers compensation claims? Let s face it, the workforce is getting older and as safety professionals we need to start developing a holistic approach that includes a combination of a formal safety program, ergonomics program, benefits programs, wellness programs, and human resource programs to manage this process. The Safety Professionals have been somewhat slow to act in aligning their approach, policies, procedures and programs to address aging workers. Few of us in the field have refined our training programs, for example, to more effectively address the issues facing aging workers in our organization. Under the leadership of Joe Galusha and Vicki Missar, Aon has created a thought leadership group to address these issues and the impending Ageonomic issues that are facing employers. This practice was developed to institute best in class solutions for how safety, ergonomists, occupational health, claims and other professionals work through the issues created by an older workforce and to create solutions to address those issues. The American workforce is getting older at the faster rate than ever before. The Baby Boomer generation is getting older and with the downturn in the economy over the past few years, employees are staying on the job longer and are not retiring at rates we have seen in the past. Many of these employees have a wealth of

2 knowledge that can be shared within your organizations, but with that knowledge comes some physical challenges that have to be addressed. Ageonomics is a term used to describe the ageing worker in a work environment and the processes that can be used to reduce the possibility of accidents in the workplace and improve the health and wellbeing of the individual worker. Ageonomics is driving health and safety transformation for organizations by focusing on these areas and the strategic implementation of strategies to reduce occupational and non-occupational absenteeism causes resulting in a healthier, more productive workforce. The table below shows six areas of program emphasis that can be used to start your Ageonomics process and the Ageonomics Work Environment Strategy and key areas to focus your effort in your organization. Program Emphasis Safety Program Design Ergonomic Program Design Benefits Programs Ageonomics Work Environment Strategy We need to design our trainings programs around the aging worker. Simply playing a video or lecturing with a PowerPoint is no longer going to work. We need to do classroom trainings, hands on orientation and target the high risk exposures for aging workings (e.g. fall prevention, musculoskeletal, ergonomics, etc.) The core issue of training programs for aging workers is that they are not grounded in the fundamental physical, cognitive, psychosocial issues facing aging workers nor are the aligned with the core causes of absenteeism. For example, one study by Aon Hewitt found 116% higher safety incidents for employees with diabetes. How many of our safety training programs talk about the risk of diabetes as a risk factor for safety? Obesity, reduced muscle strength, changes in gait, vision reduction all of these need to be worked into our programs and safety assessment tools need to be designed with modifiers that address aging workers. Has anyone ever thought of a JSA that addresses risk to the aging worker? The ergonomic programs should assess fatigue and work rest cycles because the pace of the work and the ability to keep up may be an issue. Evaluate signage and work instructions for aging workers because the ability to see and read the printed instructions may be impeded and aging pupils shrink letting less light in and making it harder to read documents. Address lighting in your facilities and make improvements. Conduct age-specific evaluations that help fit the job to the employee and not the employee to the job. Time and motion studies play an important role too in that we want to reduce the time and motion need to perform a task to help reduce motion which will help reduce fatigue too. Ergonomics tools should be modified to address aging. Repetition rates, strength capabilities, compression forces, etc., are assessed and benchmarked for aging workers epidemiological and biomechanical modifiers. Engineers designing layouts need to include aging. Leading indicators need to be implemented that track early MSD symptoms. As part of our benefit programs we need to align with age-specific

3 Program Emphasis Wellness Programs Human Resource Programs Ageonomics Work Environment Strategy data trends and adjust our programs to reduce these loss drivers. Another key item to review is your WC, STD, LTD, FMLA, and Casual Absence trends because they also useful in determining which direction we need to take our safety an ergonomic programs to reduce claims. Simple changes in work schedules, days off, and job rotations can keep older employees engaged and healthy. There is a need to align wellness programs with injury trends on the WC side to improve worker fitness to meet physical demands of the job. Stretch and flex, health coaching, diabetic testing and coaching, and annual physicals are beneficial and can easily be part of the company benefits program. Based on the CDC statistics from 2012, 105 million people in the US are diabetic or pre-diabetic. That is nearly 1/3 of the US population. Injured employees with diabetes usually will have longer recovery times and in some rare cases cause the injury to get worse. Aon Hewitt found 116% higher safety incidents for employees with diabetes. Your company s Human Resource department plays an important role in assessing workforce profile and age stratification while understanding the production and job demands and review for jobs for age-appropriateness. Thorough and complete job descriptions are a must have and should be followed to get the best candidate for the position. Create synergist program within the organization to hire the best and retain the best workers in any age group. Changes Associated with Aging Our bodies start changing from the time we are born. Fast forward to age 45 and older and the body begins to change more significantly. Depending on primary factors such as health, fitness and genetics, all of us age differently, with varying degrees on our impact to function in the workplace. Researchers in Finland (Ilmarinen, et. al. 1997) 1 found a decline in workability with 51 years of age being the most critical point at which workability started to decrease. In addition, researchers noted that workability was shown to have a high predictive value for work disability (e.g. lower workability equals higher disability days). This means that we must now focus on the individual to understand age-related risk factors, modifiable and non-modifiable, in order to really address the challenges facing the aging workforce. Physiological Changes that Impact Worker Performance As we all know, as we age muscles lose strength, we have lower dexterity, reduced fitness level and aerobic capacity, poorer visual and auditory acuity, slower cognitive speed and function, to name a few. All of these changes can have a dramatic impact on the aging worker. For example, aging is related to the loss of muscle mass beginning at the age of 50 but becomes more dramatic at the age of 60 (Deschenes 2004) 2. In addition to physical changes, older workers are at

4 increased risk of disease and other ailments. These include the increased risk of obesity associated with aging, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, reduced fitness level, among others. Thus, individual along with organizational structures, need to be engaged with prevention initiatives in order to support the aging worker so that an effective, comprehensive strategy is developed. For example, if we know that muscle strength declines with age, organizations need to consider implementing proactive safety, ergonomics and wellness programs to help build individual strength while working to reduce manual lifting that would be fatigue-inducing for the aging worker, which could potentially result in injury or absence. Joe Galusha and Vicki Missar of Aon s Ageonomics team have done a great deal of research as it relates to the aging working and the impact it has on the employee s performance. In the course of Aon s Ageonomics diagnostic research, the two leading loss causes of injuries to knees and shoulders stem from strain/sprains and slip/trip/falls which can directly be attributed to reduced mobility and reduced strength, both of which can be related to an older physiology. By understanding the physical changes of an aging human and linking these changes to lossproducing trends in the data, we can develop a thoughtful strategy for increasing workability and reducing age-specific exposures in the workplace. PHYSICAL CHANGES COGNITIVE CHANGES DISEASE PROCESSES ABSENTEEISM TRENDS WORKPLACE AGING STRATEGY Figure 1: Various elements of aging drive the aging strategies in the workplace. The Impact on Work-Related Injuries Over the past several years, Aon s casualty specialists have been monitoring the impact of workrelated injuries to aging workers by examining workers compensation claim costs of our clients. From this research, they have identified some rather compelling trends. One of the most concerning trends is the current impact of this age group on the cost of workers compensation. We studied $2.5 billion in workers compensation claims from 2007 through 2012 and found a consistently higher average costs for workers compensation claims for older claimants across all industry groups. For example, as shown in Figure 2, the year old claimants in the Manufacturing Industry group s average claim cost was 52% higher than year old claimants. This trend varied in degree by Industry, but only by the pitch of the slope, leaving us to look deeper into the issue and attempt to identify what was driving this cost. This issue has been under study for quite some time. Heather Grob, Ph.D. and Senior Economist with Washington State Department of Labor and Industries published materials on the concern in 2005 stating a random sample of Washington workers compensation claims from found that workers over age 45 were at risk of longer term disability (Cheadle et al 1994). The study concluded that older age is the most important and consistent influence on duration of disability. While we are not breaking new ground on

5 identifying the issue, what seems to be missing is the socialization and acceptance of the impact as well as an understanding of what we should be doing about it. Figure 2: Results from Aon Laser report $25,000 $20,000 $15,000 < 25 years 25 to to to to 60 > 60 years $10,000 $5,000 $0 Education and Health Services Leisure and Hospitality Manufacturing Natural resources, Mining & Construction Professional and Business Services Trade, transportation, and utilities All Industries - considered together We Have to Act Now The time to discuss these trends as a having potential impact in the future has actually passed. We need to re-orient our thinking of the aging workforce as a new constant and as today s reality. As shown in Figure 3, the media age of some industries is as high as 55 (agriculture) indicating a need to act. Figure3: Percent of workforce over 45 years of age, by industry.

6 Rethinking Wellness With the aging U.S. workforce, we need to rethink wellness programs. Berry et. al. (2010) 5 state the following in a recent issue in the Harvard Business Review: Wellness programs have often been viewed as a nice extra, not a strategic imperative. Newer evidence tells a different story. With tax incentives and grants available under recent federal health care legislation, U.S. companies can use wellness programs to chip away at their enormous health care costs, which are only rising with an aging workforce. There are six pillars of an effective wellness program that can help an organization lower their health care costs. As part of Aon s Ageonomics practice, we analyze these key pillars, including leadership, program quality, accessibility and communication of not only wellness but safety, ergonomics and other programs, to understand gaps for aging workers. By reviewing agespecific data and wellness program statistics, we can probe deeper and ultimately develop strategies to better align these programs for the aging worker. Researchers at Harvard found that participants in wellness programs are absent less often and perform better at work than their nonparticipant counterparts. 5 Thus structuring a wellness program around aging workers can become a way for organizations to not only retain aging workers, but ensure their workability does not decline to levels that result in disabilities and/or workers compensation claims. Conclusions We are on a track that is not going to change in the foreseeable future. The workforce is getting older and working longer. The safety profession needs to understand that this is an issue that needs to be addressed immediately. Failure to address this issue is going to cost American businesses tens of millions of dollars in lost productivity, claims, lost time, restricted duty, unhappy employees, increase turnover, increased training time for replacement workers, absenteeism, missed production goals, overtime, and increased medical benefits to name a few. As a safety professional we need to work with ergonomics teams, operations, human resources, wellness teams, and employee benefits teams to develop a plan to address the issues facing us. The aging workforce is here and we can either embrace it or bury our heads in the sand. I strongly encourage you to embrace it. References Ageonomics : Seven Strategies to Improve Your Aging Workforce Claims Management Program, by Vicki Missar, Associate Director, Aon Global Risk Consulting-Aon Ageonomics Thought Leader

7 3. Ageonomics Responding to the Needs of an Aging Workforce Aon White Paper, - April 2014 V. Missar and J. Galusha deniedaccesscustomisedmessage=&userisauthenticated=false According to the Finnish researchers Ilmarinen & Tuomi (2004, workability may be understood as how good is the worker at present, in the near future, and how able is he/she to do his/her work with respect to the work demands, health and mental resources. This definition is based on a so called concept of work ability (Ilmarinen, 2004) according to which, work ability is the result of the interaction of the worker and his or her work. Work ability may also be described as the balance of the workers resources and the work demands. Reference: