Meet Emily - she constantly taps into the wealth of wisdom and experience available from older colleagues

Age-friendly Employer: FSCS

Emily Room

Intergenerational

Emily Room

Current Role: Business Analyst
Age at time of interview: 28
Time at FSCS: 3 years

Emily has found it fantastically helpful to work with older colleagues at the FSCS. She benefits from their experience and business intuition built up over years, while they welcome her knowledge of new technologies.

The work that I do at the FSCS is meaningful because it’s all about putting people back on track who have often gone through some very difficult times financially. In the Change Team, we can make that experience for our customers even better by improving our processes.

As a Business Analyst, my role involves working with colleagues within the FSCS to deliver any change that needs to happen. It's my job to ensure change is smooth and seamless.

Gaining a different perspective

The collaboration between younger and older workers at the FSCS has brought huge benefits because it gives the organisation so much more perspective. We serve a wide range of customers of different ages, but we have a significant number of older customers. It's important that we represent that diversity in the people who work here. Our older workers provide important input to make sure we're delivering for our customers of all ages.

I've also had the opportunity to work with older colleagues across the business on new technologies that we are introducing, and have asked for their thoughts on how else these technologies might benefit the FSCS. At the moment we’re rolling out new laptops. There's a whole host of modern software involved, so we're working throughout the business – which includes a lot of older colleagues – to make sure they understand how to use it and the reasons why we're implementing it.

Drawing on knowledge, experience and business intuition

In any organisation, I think it’s important to have people of different ages working together because it makes the business more representative of the world we’re living in. The world doesn’t just consist of young people, so we need to have a mix of perspectives. The knowledge, experience and business intuition that older workers have built up over many years can be invaluable.

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Both sides benefit

I’ve benefited immensely from working with my older colleagues. In particular, I work closely with a deposits expert called Stanley. If I need to know anything about deposits, I go to him straight away because he's got years of experience. He's also taught me a lot about new ways of working just through his wealth of experience within various organisations. This was particularly valuable when I was helping roll out a pilot across the business which changed our ways of working.

Then, in one especially busy period, I trained Stanley in the work that I was doing so that he could help out with a particular project. I put together a training plan to teach him the technicalities of my role and gave him feedback on a number of cases that he started. It was a really great opportunity for me to impart some of my knowledge and skills. We both benefited from the process.

Sleepless nights ahead!

Turning to my own plans for the future, my first baby is due in December so I'm very much concentrating on that. I can't actually see much further ahead than the sleepless nights!

After that, the next thing on my learning list is to gain a foundation qualification in business analysis. I'm quite new to the role and I want to solidify what I've learned so far and get a qualification, and the FSCS provides very generous support for personal development. I want to keep on taking new challenges and push myself out of my comfort zone.

What's Great About The FSCS?

Working with older colleagues is fascinating

Colleagues who are older than me often have a wealth of experience and knowledge from previous roles that I simply haven't got. For example, we run pilot schemes on new ways of working. I ask older colleagues for their input on whether they’ve tried certain approaches or not, and how that turned out. Their responses definitely influence the decisions I make.

I love working with an age-friendly organisation

I love how age-friendly the FSCS is. For example, whenever a change is implemented across the business, we gather a wide spectrum of opinions from all generations to make sure that we're listening to everyone's views. This happened recently with a workplace transformation project. Everyone shared their ideas about how they’d like the office space to be used.

There’s so much variety

My job involves so many different things. It can be anything from meeting with stakeholders across the business to capture their requirements for a change initiative to updating process documents and communicating them out to the business. I also get involved with running problem-solving sessions and creating action plans to implement changes, as well as attending team huddles to share news and knowledge.

“To be successful, businesses need to understand how to tap into the individual talents and skills of every employee; old and young”

Emily Room
Business Analyst, FSCS

Emily's career journey

Emily's advice to others

Seek out older people for advice

The advice I'd give to younger workers who want to get the best from working with older colleagues is to actively seek opportunities to learn from them. It could be asking for help with a certain topic or subject area. Personally, I’ve found this to be fantastically helpful.

Support intergenerational communication

All businesses should make sure they have a real balance of ages and find opportunities to bring older and younger colleagues together. We have so much to learn from one another. However, intergenerational communication doesn’t happen by accident, so organisations need to be proactive about it. This might mean arranging mentoring schemes or training programmes where older colleagues coach younger employees or vice versa.

Have quieter areas and contemplation spaces

As the retirement age increases, we need to think more about older workers' needs and make sure that they are comfortable in their working environment. For example, they might prefer to work in different ways to younger staff. Think about how offices can suit the needs of older workers by, for example, having quiet areas, spaces for contemplation and collaborative working spaces.

Keeping fit, reading, listening to music, spending quality time with friends and family.

Just some of Emily’s interests and side hustles