Strategies to enhance productive and healthy environments for the older workforce Research Project Update 3

Working Late is a four year collaborative research project addressing practice and policy issues associated with later life working. The project is funded by the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) Programme, which is the largest and most ambitious research programme on ageing ever mounted in the UK. Working Late aims to develop interventions and design solutions to promote health and quality of working life. This newsletter includes a summary of project developments over the past six months.

Work Package 1 - User Engagement Expert Advisory Panel - May 2010 An Expert Advisory Panel meeting was held in May. This meeting included some key collaborators and occupational health experts. The meeting involved an update and discussion for each of the four work packages. The meeting was a success, with valuable input collected from all panel members which will help inform the research process. competition: Rachael Ball Risk and Jennifer Rice. All work packages delivered updates on progress and successes.

Future user engagement panels will be arranged for 2011. Work Package 2 The Journey to Work Collaborative Research Project (CRP) Meeting - June 2010 Our annual CRP meeting was held in June. The meeting involved all of our collaborators including our Canadian collaborators and winners from the Royal Society of Arts, Design Directions A questionnaire has been distributed to investigate the extent to which the journey to work may prove a barrier to older workers. With much appreciated cooperation from members of Working Lates expert and user panels, the online version of the questionnaire was distributed, covering a

wide range of industry types and locations. Due to the impressive response the survey has now been closed to the public sector but we are still interested in private sector responses. The results from the survey are being analysed, which will enable us to draw conclusions about which groups are most likely to suffer difficulties. So far, 25 percent of 1043 respondents from the public sector have said that they have difficulties with their journey to work. Nineteen percent of respondents have said that they have considered retiring or changing jobs as a result of issues with the journey. However, we still need to investigate the factors affecting journey difficulties and whether these differ among different groups. Upcoming interviews and focus groups will help to gather more information and their comments, stories and recommendations will feed into a resource to be developed later in the project. Work Package 3.1 Occupational health provision in the workplace Work Package 3.1 has now been successfully completed and targets set in the proposal have been met. Research papers are currently being written on both the qualitative (interviews) and quantitative (survey) data collected. Work Package 3.2 Physical activity interventions The research team have made significant progress with Work Package 3.2. The team have been collecting data since July and so far 796 participants have been recruited to the study.

In collaboration with RockKitchenHarris, a new webpage has been developed and is now live.

www.walkingworkswonders.com will be used to collect participant step counts and has also been designed as an interactive tool for participants to help maintain interest and motivation.

Work Package 4 Ageing productively through design A questionnaire survey is being conducted which focuses on the workplace and the ways in which design affects peoples work ability and experiences around working later into life. The questionnaire has been piloted and finalised and is being distributed to a range of companies. To date, 20 companies have been contacted regarding the survey. Four companies are fully committed wherein the survey is now live. We are negotiating involvement with a further three companies and in early discussions with another three. Over the next months, we will continue the process of negotiating agreements with other organisations. Interviews with company representatives will also commence in order to inform the questionnaire data and determine task areas for the next phases of the research. A logo has also been designed for branding the OWL (Organiser for Working Late) resource.