London - Workers aged 65 and over are more productive and more reliable than their much younger colleagues, a study claims.
Tests showed older employees performed tasks more consistently than twentysomethings did.
The Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin studied how more than 200 workers, aged 20 to 31 and 65 to 80, performed 12 tasks testing perceptual speed, episodic memory and working memory.
In the nine cognitive tasks, the older group’s performance varied less from day to day than the younger group’s.
“On balance, older employees’ productivity and reliability is higher than that of their younger colleagues,” says the study, published in Psychological Science.
Researchers put this down to them having experience at how to solve the task, higher motivation, a balanced daily routine and stable mood.
The findings are important to the debate about older people’s ability to work.
“[In the car industry] serious errors that are expensive to resolve are much less likely to be committed by older staff members than by their younger colleagues,” said the researchers. “In other industry, one does not observe higher productivity among the younger relative to the older workers.”
Our impression that a whole day is either good or bad is often wrong as most performance fluctuations occur within shorter periods of time, the report adds. - Daily Mail