CALIFORNIA – The graying of the U.S. workforce is gaining momentum. A Pew Research survey found nearly a fifth of Americans age 65 and older were employed in 2023, nearly double the three decades prior. Employees 55 and older will constitute over a quarter of the global workforce by 2031, according to an analysis from Bain & Co. last year.
Finding ways to capitalize on an increasingly intergenerational workforce is top of mind for Jason LaRue, national managing partner of talent and culture at KPMG, who supports the firm’s 36,000 U.S. partners and professionals.
“We’re absolutely going to have to be able to attract workers across a wide set of generations, including people who have had longer careers already,” LaRue tells Fortune. “There’s no magic about, ‘I turned X age, and therefore I am capable or not capable of doing something else.’ ”
This marks an unprecedented time for most workplaces, where the presence of retirement-age workers used to be rare. However, given the current U.S. labor shortage, it could be a win-win for those older workers and their employers alike. As the pool of older workers grows, so does the evidence that their presence on multigenerational teams can boost a company’s bottom line, foster innovation, and help combat widespread burnout. In the war for talent, employers must implement novel ways to integrate and engage both longtime and new cohorts of experienced workers.
For practical and professional reasons, adults are working longer. For some, the financial impact of caregiving and the need for a steady paycheck to support their longer, healthier life spans have made traditional retirement impossible. “We’re having to try and invent a life that hasn’t been lived before,” says John Beard, director of the International Longevity Center–USA and professor at the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center.
Other older Americans continue to work to maintain social connections, for a sense of purpose, or to reimagine a career in a novel decade of opportunity—like Elizabeth White, author of 55, Underemployed, and Faking Normal. She joined a startup incubator at age 68 and became a founder at 70. “I think that the days of retirement being a one-time, one-way exit and then you’re done are over,” she tells Fortune.
While generations are not monoliths, research suggests older workers are the most loyal employees and tend to stay in their jobs longer. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), companies whose proportion of older workers is 10% higher than that of other firms see 4% less turnover compared with companies with a lower proportion. That may not seem like a big difference, but losing and replacing an employee can cost companies between one and two times the employee’s annual salary.
Older workers also possess what Bethany Iverson, cofounder of the Coven, a co-working space for underrepresented groups, calls crystallized intelligence. “As we age, we get better at formalizing knowledge. We get better at giving advice and sharing feedback,” she says.
Dr. Linda Fried, director of Columbia’s Age Boom Academy and the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center and the dean of the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, says older workers also possess more “prosocial motivations,” that is, an empathy and a desire to serve others. “As people get older, maybe because of their problem-solving capabilities plus a huge dose of generativity, [they want] to leave things better for subsequent generations,” Fried tells Fortune. Companies benefit from an older employee’s desire to make improvements and help others avoid mistakes.
