Tough talking on older workers by Towers Watson

While on their own web pages, Tower Watson headline their latest survey “Which Employees are delaying retirement and why?”, the Wall Street Journal’s article reporting on the survey is more provocatively titled “Older Workers clog the employment pipeline”.

The WSJ articles states that the survey finds that “many people who are delaying retirement are less healthy, more stressed, and more likely to be disengaged from their jobs”.  They quote Steve Nyce,  a senior economist at TowersWatson as saying “The concern for employers is that this creates a productivity drag,”.  However this is based solely on the measure of employee engagement used within the survey – Towers Watson’s own measure that is, and classifications of poor or good health and low or high stress.  These are not particularly fine-grained measures and the resulting stereotyping by the WSJ headline suggests we need to take care when assessing survey findings.