Preventing Age Discrimination in the Job
It is extremely important to prevent age discrimination in the workplace. Age discrimination can open you up to civil suits and other problems. It can cause a negative environment at your company and make you lose great employees. It can affect both efficiency and efficacy of your operation. There are many different steps a company can take in order to prevent age discrimination.
Do not assume that people know about age discrimination and how it hurts the company. You need to talk about it with your employees, and this can be done in a multitude of ways. You can send out emails discussing what age discrimination is and why people should take steps to make sure they are not acting unfairly to a person because of his or her age. Some people will do it without even realizing it. You can also hold a training session to discuss it. Put up signs to remind people. You should take these measures periodically since people come and go and forget. You can also include it with your initial employee training.
There are many things to discuss during age discrimination training. Talk about how it unfairly hurts great workers with a great deal of experience and ability. Talk about how it is done – for instance, passing over a more qualified but older applicant for someone younger.
You need checks in place to make sure it is not happening. For instance, track the ages of the people who are being promoted as well as the general ages of people around the company to make sure that older people are not being unfairly weeded out. You can also make the processes more streamlined. For instance, people can rate potential candidates by specific factors. Also, keep age off of as many documents as possible so it is not glaringly obvious.
You also need to make it very easy for people to complain about potential age discrimination issues. Tell your staff that you do not allow age discrimination and leave the door wide open for people to come to you with complaints. You can allow them to come to you in person, have an anonymous system or do both.
If you do get a complaint about age discrimination then be sure to take it seriously. Investigate the problem and make remedies as possible. You may need to take disciplinary action, especially if someone knew they were doing something wrong.
Age discrimination is bad for any business. Take the above steps to lower its incidence in your business.
