2023 Paul Irving

‘Recruiting and retaining older workers can solve immediate workforce challenges for many global organizations’

Reflections on The Future of Work 2023 from WorkingNation Advisory Board member Paul Irving
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We asked our WorkingNation Advisory Board to share their thoughts on the most important issues and challenges facing the workforce and the labor market in the coming year.

Paul Irving is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, previously serving as the Institute’s president and founding chair of its Center for the Future of Aging. 

Here are his thoughts on The Future of Work 2023.

“Facing high inflation, uneasy markets and retirement accounts at risk, many older adults want and need to work longer. Employers, confronting skills deficits and workforce shortages need talent, especially for customer-facing roles — the “essential workers” recognized during the pandemic as critical for business success.  

In a challenging business environment, older, experienced workers offer employers greater loyalty and reliability as well as sound judgment in addressing critical customer needs. An emerging body of research confirms that older employees bring a collaborative spirit and enable organizations to benefit from the diversity of intergenerational teams. 

Recruiting and retaining older workers can solve immediate workforce challenges for many global organizations. But in aging societies, including Japan, Germany, France, Italy, China, and the US, critical long-term labor shortages must be addressed by policy and practice changes that enable and encourage longer work lives. 

Flexible schedules and compensation arrangements, clear and open communications, well designed and collaborative environments and other adaptations can help employers recruit and retain not just essential workers who are older, but essential workers of all ages.”

You can read all The Future of Work 2023 articles from our WorkingNation Advisory Board here.

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.