Patti Temple Rocks has a warning about the workplace, and she’s shouting it from the rooftops the pages of her new book, I’m Still Not Done: It’s Time to Talk About Ageism In The Workplace. Ageism, she writes, is “the one form of discrimination that has the potential to impact all of us,” and she reports that it’s only getting worse.
As Temple Rocks notes in her book, 61% of workers between the ages of 40 and 65 told AARP they’d seen or experienced ageism at work in 2019. Fast-forward to May 2021, and that number had jumped to 78%. And ageism can arise even in workplaces where leadership has the best intentions, Temple Rocks told HR Brew, recalling a conversation with a creative director who said she sidelined an older employee out of concern that she was asking too much of them post-50.
“She was like, ‘He can’t possibly do all of his travel! It’s got to be too hard,’” Temple Rocks said. “Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But assuming that it was because of his age—it happens all the time.”
Benevolent forms of ageism, in which employees are given less responsibility or shepherded into less demanding roles out of protective instincts, Temple Rocks said, worsened at the beginning of the pandemic. Older Americans, the public was told, were at increased risk of contracting Covid-19. Temple Rocks worries this may have reinforced stereotypes that older workers are “feeble [or] not as valuable to the rest of the world.”
Since it can be difficult, Temple Rocks said, to identify and address ageism in the workplace, her book breaks down how HR can use a “mirror test” to identify problematic practices and, she said, be the “hero of this story” in the fight against ageist policies.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
If an HR professional was standing in a bookstore, debating picking up your book, how would you make the case for them to read it?
One of the stats I quoted in my first edition showed [that] the vast majority of CEOs believe that age should be part of their overall DE&I strategy. But the reality is, it’s not happening. So, if I’m a CEO, and I want it to be happening, I’m gonna look to HR and say, why not?
Too often, HR comes into play because somebody raised [a] complaint, and [then] it’s defense, defense, defense. HR can lead the way in helping an organization literally change the way it thinks about [age] and be more proactively anti-ageist in how they deal with people.
What does ageism look like in the workplace?
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It looks like marginalization…a once valued employee is not invited to the same meetings that they used to be, or there is a future task force and the older voices are just absent, [or you’re] not offering certain opportunities to people…If you’re gonna send somebody to a workshop, it might seem quite reasonable to say, ‘I’m going to spend that money on somebody who’s got another 20 years to work here as opposed to another 10 years to work here.’ But in the end, you’re actually just limiting your ability to grow and develop.
In your book, you talk about the mirror test. What is it and how can it identify ageism?
If we don’t know that we have a problem, we don’t know how to fix it. There are a lot of people that just aren’t necessarily aware, and it goes back to my point about some of this being so subtle…When you talk about employment opportunities at the corporation [online], are you showing mostly twentysomethings and thirtysomethings in the workplace or do you actually show situations where it would make it clear that you are open and welcoming to people of all ages? Are you really open to training and developing employees of all agents? Take a look at your employee resource groups—there often are not a lot of ones that address multigenerational resources.
[The mirror test is] asking those questions and being willing to accept what they tell you about your organization. It might be that in spite of the fact that you have every good intention, you actually have not been paying enough attention to age as part of your strategy.
You interviewed a lot of people for this book. What sticks with you the most?
Above all…it’s the word invisible. I just can’t think of anything more hurtful than not being seen. There are all sorts of reasons why that happens to people but in the case of ageism, it is often because the people who aren’t seeing you just deemed you not relevant [and] not important.
A woman was telling me she was working in an open office environment and this person [who she manages] literally walked right by [her to ask another person], ‘How should we do this?’ Can you imagine what that feels like? To not be asked when these are all the people that work for you? She said, ‘I just never felt so invisible in my life. Like, why did I even show up to work that day? Like I didn’t need to be there.’
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