New Report Calls for Employers to Have an Internal Public Health Strategy to Navigate the Aging Post-Pandemic World

Global Coalition on Aging addresses new approaches to providing guidance to employees, customers and all stakeholders

25 June 2021 – The Global Coalition on Aging (GCOA) today released a new report, Employers’ Role in the COVID-19 Environment: Winning in the Vastly Changed World of Work. It highlights the unique convergence between the megatrend of aging and the COVID-19 pandemic in the workplace and offers insights to inform employers’ public health and workforce strategies at this intersection.  Chief among the report’s key findings is the guidance to all employers “to elevate public health as a central feature of their culture and embed it into management.”

“As we all expect some semblance of a pre-COVID-19 world in the near future and as the World Health Organization and United Nations launch the Decade of Healthy Ageing, it is clear that public health must be a new focal point of every employer’s management strategy,” said Michael W. Hodin, PhD, CEO of GCOA. “Making public health a responsibility within the C-suite will be important, useful and socially responsible, and it will also align with every business’s self-interest.”

The report is based on multiple virtual roundtables from late March to December 2020, desk research, interviews, and analysis and insight development with experts within GCOA’s network. The report’s key advice for employers includes:

  1. Elevate the public health role internally. Just as so many companies have created the Chief Diversity or Chief Technology Officer, now is the moment to create the Chief Public Health Officer, who will have the right expertise and ask the right questions to advance the changes needed for success in the 21st-century aging world.
  2. Implement COVID-19 vaccination education programs. Valued, successful, and thoughtful employers will be active and engaged on their employees getting COVID-19 vaccinated. Such an employer will also then apply this to other prevention and wellness strategies to keep public health as a central driver of their value proposition.
  3. Improve upon childcare, elder care, financial planning, and other essential benefits. These employer benefits had already emerged as part of the new social contract prompted by the trends of longevity and population aging. In a COVID-19 work environment, employers will need to increase focus on solutions for caregiving and financial wellness, which will take on heightened importance.
  4. Enact new approaches to employee engagement and recruitment. COVID-19 makes it imperative for employers to develop new approaches to virtual hiring, onboarding, and skill and competency enhancement, to prepare for the virtual, multi-generational, and diverse workforce of the future.
  5. Listen to employees’ wants and needs. Without physical presence in many workplaces, employers will need to more actively seek out employees’ perceptions and concerns.
  6. Recognize that communications are closely linked to core operations. Enhanced employer communications – built on transparency and engendering trust – and new ways to maintain and measure employee engagement must be designed in the context of a global pandemic.
  7. Cultivate leadership skills. Especially during a sustained crisis, employers need a bench of senior leaders ready to take on the next crisis and support and align their employees in the process.

GCOA has been working with employers for 10 years to navigate the changing workplace and business environment brought by profound aging demographic shifts, which will continue for decades to come. From healthcare to the workplace, aging is the megatrend requiring major changes across society, and COVID-19, as with so much else, has become the accelerator for this trend.

“COVID-19 has highlighted what we have been observing through the lens of 21st-century aging: that a healthy aging workforce and a successful business are intimately linked,” said Hodin. “This report will be a guide for employers to create their own internal public health strategies so they can rapidly adapt, be flexible and win in the vastly changed world of work.”

Latest Developments

We keep our members and partners in touch with the most recent updates and opinions in the worldwide dialogue on population longevity and related issues.

Global Coalition on Aging Workshop Calls on G7 Countries to Fund Pull Incentives to Spur Antibiotic Innovation

The Global Coalition on Aging, in partnership with JPMA, today announced the release of its workshop report on the AMR crisis facing G7 countries and the world, “The Value of Pull Incentives in Japan to Encourage Investment in Antibiotic Innovation to Solve the AMR Crisis.” If strong action is not taken to address AMR, we will lose the antibiotics we need to cure infections, which is likely to outpace cancer as a major cause of death, killing an estimated 10 million by 2050.

Our National Conversation on Aging

Now that President Biden officially declared his run for a second term, what are we to make of the countless warnings about his age? Clearly, voters have already considered age a major factor – Google Search results for ‘Biden age’ hit an all-time-high just before the 2020 election – and speculation has only heightened four years on. Unfortunately, these concerns are misguided and even dangerous because they conflate age with poor health and confuse ideas about work and retirement.

World Immunization Week: Best-Kept Secret for 21st-Century Healthy Aging

The tremendous success of childhood immunisation campaigns across the 20thcentury is one of the greatest triumphs of public health. Along with advances in sanitation and antibiotics, childhood immunisation has resulted in the miracle of modern longevity: the once extravagant prospect of growing old has become the norm. Now, in our 21st century, isn’t it our great challenge to build on this achievement by realising a healthy longevity?

South China Morning Post Letter to the Editor

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the defining global problems of our time. Drug-resistant bacterial infections killed an estimated 1.27 million people in 2019. By 2050, 10 million lives annually could be lost to antimicrobial resistance, and annual global gross domestic product could fall by between 1.1 per cent and 3.8 per cent. Fortunately, Chinese policymakers, physicians and patients have shown what is possible when they focus collective efforts on antimicrobial resistance.

Medicine Price Setting Might Appeal to Voters but Will Cost Patients

As policymakers search for potential cuts to the national budget, they risk jeopardizing the country’s most cost-effective use of healthcare dollars: biomedical innovation regarding vaccines , prescription drugs, and emerging therapies, including antibodies. As the nation rapidly ages, protecting this pipeline of medicine will not only improve health outcomes but will do so at a lower cost by reducing more expensive hospital and primary care.

Global Coalition on Aging Hosts Cross-Sector Roundtable to Tackle Heart Valve Disease in Aging Societies

The Global Coalition on Aging (GCOA) and the Global Heart Hub have released a global position paper “Heart Valve Disease: Harnessing Innovation to Save Lives, Mitigate Costs, and Advance the Healthy Aging Agenda.” The report builds upon on a December 2022 GCOA-GHH roundtable of cross-sector experts and examines how behavior and policy change can best address heart valve disease in our 21st century.

New York City Twins with Ireland to Develop Age Friendly Communities

The twinning commits both sides to share knowledge on age friendly programs and builds on the 2011 Dublin Declaration of Age-Friendly Cities and Communities. The agreement was signed by the Cathaoirleach (Mayor) Nick Killian of Meath County Council which hosts the Irish Age Friendly Programme and Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez, Commissioner for Aging.

Just Getting Started at 75

In the latest charge against the promise of healthy aging, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, oncologist and bioethicist, doubled down on his infamous 2014 essay stating that 75 is the ideal age to die. Now 65, he maintains that after age 75, he will no longer receive medical screenings and interventions like colonoscopies, cancer treatment, flu shots, and heart valve replacement.