GENERATION MANAGEMENT, LEADERSHIP, SAFETY AND WELL-BEING
Role: Researcher and consultant｜Client: public transportation company in Switzerland｜Year: 2010-2012
Project context: Manufacturing organizations in Switzerland are faced with the challenges of an ageing workforce, knowledge transfer, and leading multi-generation teams. Under this broader research question, we collaborated with one of Switzerland's main public transportation companies to assess their readiness now, and made projections 5 and 10 years into the future.
Team: We were a core research team of 2, and collaborated closely with different senior stakeholders in the client company (head of HR, head of occupational safety and more).
My role was to research the current status quo, develop two different surveys for employees and leaders, design and conduct expert interviews, conduct field research, analyze all data, co-write reports, co-design and co-lead insights and strategy workshops with different stakeholder groups.
Impact
We created two versions of the insights reports and ideation workshops: one for the railworks employees and middle management and one for top management, in which the inputs from the employee workshops were integrated and developed further.
Based on our work, the following happened*:
- change in perception of younger employees and managers that older employees are more often sick
(which our data showed wasn't the case!)
- change in recruitment strategy to create a more age-diverse employee base
- putting in place a more systematic knowledge transfer to retain the employees who were close to retirement invaluable
and thus far often undocumented experience
- actionable plans to create more age-diverse teams and to learn from those team leads who were already successfully
leading multi-generational teams
- strategic decision to roll out more flexible pre-retirement solutions, e.g., part time work from age 55 onwards for certain
roles, adding mentoring tasks to roles of senior employees who previously didn't have that in their scope, and more.
*this list is not exhaustive :)
Process & selection of insights
Coming soon