Taking care of older workers: a multi-perspective case study on HRM practices in health care organizations for older workers

Purpose – The purposes of this paper are to 1) give an overview of the prevalence of HR practices that are used to retain vital older workers in health organizations, 2) to examine the evaluations of those HR practices, and 3) to determine the wishes for HR practices in three different target groups:
older workers, line managers and HR professionals.
Design/methodoly/approach - An inventory case study was conducted based on 51 interviews with older workers, line managers and HR professionals working in 15 hospitals and nursing and care organizations.
Findings - Our results showed that maintenance HR practices focused on retaining older workers in their current jobs, in comparison with development HR practices, are by far more prevalent. In addition, maintenance and development HR practices, in general, are assessed being successful.
Although wishes appeared to be strongly related to development HR practices, maintenance HR practices are mentioned as well.
Originality/value - This paper aims to give an overview of the prevalence of HR practices used to retain older workers in health care organizations vital at work, which practices are evaluated as successful from not only line managers’ and HRM perspective, but from the older workers themselves as well.