Older Employees Underperform: Let’s Check If It’s True

Using our Kickidler employee monitoring software, we conducted a survey to find out employees from which age groups are the most productive. Find out the results at the end of this article.

It’s not exactly a secret that the older a person gets, the harder it is for them to find a new job in their line of work. For many professionals, the age of 45 becomes a turning point, at which they begin to cling more and more tightly to their jobs – while simultaneously coming to the attention of the HR department due to various “youth employment” policies. This is a topic worth exploring, and we tried to get to the bottom of whether such an approach is justified.

Main Issue with Replacing Older Employees with Younger Ones

In our analysis of the situation on the labor market, we primarily assessed the state of affairs from the business owners’ point of view, abstracting from any social norms or moral dilemmas. If we apply the dry math of the “advantage/disadvantage” rhetoric, staff rejuvenation seems to have the following advantages:

1. Young people oftentimes are much more active and ambitious than the long-established employees who have worked their way up the career ladder. Young specialists tend to come up with new ideas more often, and they adopt modern policies more easily as well.
2. Young specialists usually have more energy and a less formalized economic base: they are more willing to work harder, giving their all in sprints (note: we aren’t referring to unpaid overtime that drains all the juices out of a person – we are talking about transparent contractual arrangements).
3. Sometimes, depending on the industry, it may be easier for a young person to get along with clients, colleagues and partners (or it may be the other way around, it’s very industry specific).

Disadvantages also abound:

1. When older employees, i.e. the most experienced ones, leave the company, their expertise leaves together with them. And this is obviously not a problem in the case of a smooth, natural change of employee generations, seeing how older specialists have enough time to pass on their competencies to the younger ones. However, if the rejuvenation is forced, you may notice that many processes will start to falter. 
2. Older people are less inclined to make hasty decisions and take risks, and they generally organize their work in a more secure, steady way. This greatly simplifies the planning and management aspects of the business. 
3. Older employees are considerably less likely to switch jobs. An ambitious young specialist might very well gain experience from you and jump ship to your competitor in pursuit of slightly more favorable conditions or slightly more interesting prospects, while a seasoned professional tends to have a different outlook on their career path.

Add to this list the fact that any “employee rejuvenation” is, in fact, a forced stimulation of staff turnover, and the cons significantly outweigh the pros. However, everything does change if we add one more item to the list of young people’s advantages. It goes like this, “young people are more productive and perform better.”

It is this productivity gain that may outweigh the disadvantages, but is it real? This is precisely the question we’ve given our utmost attention to.

Research Methods

We already have the perfect tool for assessing productivity at our disposal: Kickidler, time tracking & employee monitoring software. All that’s left to do is to take the data it collects and analyze it. But here’s where our own company is not well suited for such a study. After all, we don’t employ enough people for a relevant sample. So we enlisted help.

One of Kickidler’s core policies is that we remain in touch with our clients and are always willing to work closely on the particular challenges of your business. There are for whom 

We have developed custom configurations of our solution and helped build productivity management processes for a few medium-sized organizations, and so we reached out to their management to receive their assistance.

Two organizations agreed to provide us with detailed statistics:

• call center with subsidiaries in several European countries (188 line specialists);
• IT product company with remotely working specialists from different countries (115 line developers on the payroll).

*The total headcount in these organizations is larger, but to make the comparison clean and objective, we considered only the performance of people occupying one position in the staff schedule.

As per the agreement, we do not publish the names of these companies, but we would like to express our gratitude to them for their support!

Productivity levels of people of different age groups

We divided all employees whose statistics were selected for our study into 4 age groups: 

• 18-25;
• 25-34;
• 34-44;
• 45 and older.

Results for the call center:

Results for the IT company:

As you may notice, productivity figures don’t deviate too much for employees of different age groups – we are even inclined to believe that these differences are mainly related to the different nature of the tasks performed and on the whole represent a margin of error.

It should be noted that the lowest-ranking employees’ performance is not significantly off from the average productivity. This is largely due to the fact that both organizations have been using Kickidler for quite a long time, so the productivity monitoring processes are well-established and there are no glaring outsiders in the teams.

Our final conclusion is that an employee’s age has little influence on their productivity, with other factors being more significant. Comfortable working conditions, team morale, leadership qualities of the manager, competent approach to project task setting – there are dozens of factors that actually affect employee productivity, and age doesn’t seem to be one of them. At least, our research and our own experience allow us to draw such conclusions.

And what about you? Feel free to share your experiences! Your feedback is appreciated!