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Innov Aging
Innov Aging
innovateage
Innovation in Aging
2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.209
igaa057.209
Abstracts
Session 2856 (Poster)
Employment, Training, and Education: Workforce
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
Creating an Age-Friendly Workplace for Older Workers and Employers
Hollis-Sawyer Lisa  
Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, Illinois, United States
2020 
16 12 2020 
16 12 2020 
4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”64 64
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract
Despite the clear aging trends in the U.S. and global population (e.g., World Health Organization, 2015), there has been a lack of “age audit” tools to evaluate the age-friendliness of workplace environments to facilitate older adults’ positive mental/cognitive health, physical health, social/interpersonal health, and general aging adaptation. The present study did a review of the literature and audit tools across several disciplines (psychology, gerontology, kinesiology, anthropometry, audiology, vision science, human resources management, architecture, and social factors engineering) regarding the assessment and design issues underlying “age-friendliness” in the workplace. Further, the present research pilot-tested a new audit tool in two organizations (educational, industrial). The researcher, in coordination with two independent raters, conducted a content analysis of the different peer-reviewed articles and books across several disciplines and available age audit tools/approaches to identify: (1) current practices in age-friendliness assessments (e.g., “user-friendliness” of audit tools for practitioners), (2) potential biases/limitations in age assessments (e.g., “decline/decrement” aging perspective), and (3) “gaps” in evaluations to create a more holistic evaluation approaches. The following conclusions were made: (1) most assessments focused on one factor of functioning (e.g., psychomotor capability), (2) existing tools are limited in options and functionality for daily assessments, (3) most focus on decline and limitations in functioning, and (4) need to design multi-sensory, multi-function assessments reflecting an integrated and coordinated system of sensory, psychomotor, social, and cognitive performance. A holistic model of the outcomes for workplace design “fit” interventions to create more aging-friendly workplaces based upon pilot test results will be presented.