Older employees are not appreciated as they should be in everyday work life and are the first to be phased out. On the other hand, people just starting out on their careers find themselves confronted with exacting demands and are often in a constant state of being overwhelmed. Yet older and younger engineers, just as an example, desperately need each other. The older colleagues train the younger ones and transfer their know-how to the next generation. The younger people demonstrate flexibility and willingness to perform at a high level, and they accept delegated tasks. So the older and more expensive employees can concentrate on the higher-quality and more demanding tasks. Their labor is employed efficiently. The result is a high-performance, future-oriented tandem on the basis of a symbiotic relationship.

If this tandem is disrupted, long-term problems will develop, initially without being noticed. Experienced employees who are frustrated because they are insufficiently appreciated have a negative impact on corporate culture and transfer their frustration to younger employees. Once a virus of this type is in circulation, it is very hard to combat. 

On the other hand, our management culture does not give middle-aged executives the confidence to hire older and more experienced managers. The perceived risk that these employees could take over the unofficial leadership, perhaps even the official leadership of the team is much too great. Strengthening the confidence of a management team to such an extent that they can hire the most highly qualified employees for the company, regardless of their age, is a question of corporate and management culture.

Unfortunately, cutting costs is all that counts during a crisis

The response to the crisis is generally a plan to save money which focuses on personnel, i.e., staff dismissals. Strategic alternatives would be an expansion of current business fields and the identification of new business fields. This should be the task of creative managers. But the cost-cutting course is generally preferred.

So what are the possible ways to implement decisions to reduce personnel expenses and, much more important, what qualitative consequences do they have? 

Partial retirement schemes are a personnel-reducing instrument for the middle and long term. In many cases, its use in conjunction with short-term efforts to achieve a goal is short-sighted. Economically speaking, partial retirement is practically a zero-sum game when considered over the long term. Moreover, there are negative effects on corporate culture during the selection phase for partial retirement candidates as well as during the leave-taking phase. The affected employees abruptly and rapidly lose their sense of identification with the company. During the leave-taking phase lasting about one to three years, the output of these employees varies between zero and fifty percent. This decline in performance also infects colleagues who have not been directly affected.