Working Late: strategies to enhance productive and healthy environments for the older workforce Project Update 6 Aug

g 2012 Working Late is a four year collaborative research project addressing practice and policy issues associated with later life working. The project is funded by the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) Programme. Working Late is developing and evaluating interventions and design solutions to promote health and quality of working life across the life course. The project comprises interconnected work packages and this project newsletter includes a summary of developments within those work packages over the past six months.
New dynamics of later life working
During May 2012 we held a series of four expert panels involving a range of experts from industry, employment law, occupational health, transport and academia. These panels provided an excellent opportunity to gather feedback on our preliminary findings. Discussions focused on the policy and practice implications of the findings and considered dissemination strategies to maximise the impact of the research. The data gathered from these panels will be invaluable to the research team and we would like to take this opportunity to thank the experts who contributed to the reflective and insightful discussions. With help from our organisational partners, we have now achieved our target interview sample of 108. We have gathered detailed experiences of job seekers over the age of 50, employees over the age of 50, recently retired people and managers.

Analysis of the interview data is underway, with some interesting findings that sparked enthusiastic discussions in the expert panels concerning the uncertainties of later life working, changes in retirement, state pension age, new identities of ageing and age discrimination. For more information see: www.workinglate.org/may-expert-panels/.

The journey to work Over the course of the project, difficulties with the journey to work and strategies used to overcome them have been highlighted by employees and employers, leading to the development of a range of stimulus cards. These can be used by employees, employers and Human Resources personnel to explore different ways of travelling to work if journeys are found to be difficult, costly, tiring or stressful. The Index card below shows the structure of the resource according to each issue, with cards 25-29 providing further information on the main strategies that can support many types of difficulties.

Although some strategies could be suggested straight away by our workshop participants, the cards were seen to prompt discussion and debate, leading to a selection of suggestions to overcome some of the barriers to the journey to work, e.g. Park and Ride & car share. We asked the participants if they were able to find the information they needed, if there were any other strategies that werent included that they would have expected, and if these cards would be useful for employees in the workplace. A range of additional strategies were suggested, as well as ideas for dissemination of the research results. The project team are very grateful for the enthusiastic response from the panel, and these recommendations are being taken on board.

On one side of each card, the issue is described, along with a list of suggestions for making the journey to work easier. The other side provides quotes from employees about their actual experiences, along with some helpful links to other sources of information or schemes in place across the country.

Finally, we asked for suggestions for a catchier name for the Journey to Work resource. But youll have to wait until the next Newsletter to find out what the name will be!

Interventions to promote health and workability The Walking Works Wonders research team have completed almost all of the health screening visits for the 18 month follow up. Of the 1119 employees who originally signed up to the research programme, 430 returned to visit the team 6 months on, 262 at 12 months, and an estimated 250 will have been retained 18 months on. Given the on-going turbulent economic climate throughout the course of the programme, the research team are pleased with the rates of participant retention. The vast bank of data is being cleaned in preparation for data analysis. In addition to the health screening data, the research team also have also collected over 60,000 step counts onto the participant website www.walkingworkswonders.com. This is an impressive achievement and demonstrates our participants continued engagement and enthusiasm in the research programme.

Ageing productively through design OWL (Organiser for Working Late) is now in the realisation stages of the project, following the completion of the data collection phases. Each collaborator company has provided good access to workers who have enthusiastically participated during the data collection, Half-a-day in the life of and the followon focus groups. Interviews and observations of work environments, equipment and tasks were used to gather the in-depth data on design and healthy working. 7-8 people from each company took part and 192 design ideas were generated by these workers, 51% of which were deemed as low or no cost. Some of the design ideas are already being used by workers, and some were co-developed by encouraging workers to think more about what would help them improve their own health and well-being at work through design.

The research team begin the final stage of data collection in August 2012, at which point returning participants will have been on the programme for two years. We will also be conducting interviews with participants to explore individuals experiences of their engagement with the programme. This will enable us to gain some case studies and real life examples of how Working Late has directly impacted on participants lives.

The data collected identified key themes that have been used to direct and populate the OWL design resource. OWL will host participatory design tools, personal stories and video and audio clips based around; understanding Your body at work and Workplace design and healthy ageing.

The aim is to encourage thinking about the role of design in workplace and healthy ageing. Several different @ work cards have been designed to facilitate discussion. In addition, in order to help companies when planning how to respond to their worker needs, a downloadable Action plan has been included to help prioritise action ideas based on cost and time. Other tools include a template for collating the ideas generated and information on how to create word clouds using Wordletm. The next stage is to evaluate the OWL resource with the collaborator companies and additional industrial partners.

Other News and Events Our webpage has been fully revamped (thank you Ricardo!) and contains up to date information about our current news and events as well as further information about each aspect of the project. You can find the website at www.workinglate.org

Professor Cheryl Haslam, Professor Roger Haslam and Aadil Kazi presented on the Interventions to Promote Health and Workability and Ageing productively through design packages of the Working Late project at the Health and Wellbeing @ Work 2012 Conference at the NEC, Birmingham. In January 2012, Dr Elaine Gosling (ne Williams) presented two papers at the Ergonomics and Human Factors conference in Blackpool, one of which was with Esme Shanley who was presented with a Major Practice in Ergonomics Award (Dieter W. Jahns Student Award 2011) at the conference for her undergraduate project related to Working Late. The OWL team also had a paper accepted for the International Society for Occupational Ergonomics & Safety 2012 at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA which was presented by Elaine in June. Professor Ken Parsons presenting Lois with a certificate. Dr Elaine Gosling and Lois Kerr presented posters at the Loughborough University Research Conference with Lois Kerr winning a runner up prize.