Case study
Land Registry, Swansea
Age Positive Champion
Land Registry is the government department responsible for the title to registered estates and interests in land.
New staff this year have been teamed with older and experienced staff for mentoring and sharing experience. It's important to us that we maintain our organisation's levels of experience and we encourage our staff to stay with us beyond age 60.
Glyn Rowland, Personnel Manager
OUR AGE POSITIVE GOOD PRACTICE:
Staff feedback and evaluation of diversity training days identified a need to address deep-seated cultural views about age. Implement changes to deal with individuals' attitudes to age ahead of new legislation.
- Looked to raise awareness by including age stereotyping in its programme of diversity training being rolled out to all staff
- Produced a leaflet for all staff emphasising their role in tackling the issues, rather than it just being an HR procedural approach
- Involved people from across the HR group, not just those specialising in diversity work.
We encourage our staff to remain with us after the 'official' retiring age of 60. We actively promote and support our staff.
Our aim is to keep our experienced staff and support an age-diverse workforce. Therefore, when we found some staff were having some difficulties adapting to new computer systems, we made sure everyone received full training and arranged some individual programmes with additional support from trained instructors.
We have carried our diversity approach through to our recruitment procedures which are no longer based on restrictive academic achievement. Instead, they are now completely competence based.
BENEFITS OF OUR GOOD PRACTICE:
- Beginning to challenge people's attitudes well ahead of legislation
- Management board has endorsed a mandatory programme of diversity training for all staff - a huge time commitment
- Created a training programme that includes an e-learning package, delivered by a local management trainer.
We have a low turnover of staff and an older workforce. We are aiming for a balance of ages and working to attract younger people too, while maintaining levels of corporate knowledge.
Our grading structure changed and, along with advances in technology, we found there were very few employment opportunities for lower-grade workers.
Therefore, we actively encouraged and supported all staff to take up personal development. That opened up a much wider pool of people for progression to higher grades - including 2 promotions to higher management for staff aged 53 and 57.
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