A phrase you’ll often hear us say is that age is not a barrier at Bunnings. Since the beginning, we’ve always valued having a diverse workforce, including older workers.
It’s important to us that our store teams reflect the local communities they serve, and our older team members form a key part of that. We’ve long maintained that having a diverse team creates the best mix of perspectives to help us make better decisions and get a deeper understanding of our customers.
While many older team members have joined up following another career, a lot have been with us for their whole working life. On average, roughly a third of Bunnings’ store team members are more than 50 years old while about 14 per cent are aged over 60.
By sharing all the great knowledge and skills built over their careers, we find our older team members often become mentors to their younger colleagues. This goes a long way in helping foster strong connections and creating a positive working environment, which contributes to the inclusive culture we’ve created at Bunnings.
We often hear from our younger team how much they enjoy working with people across different generations and with different skillsets, so it’s a winning formula for us.
We know for some of our oldest team members, like 93-year-old Harold in our Canberra Airport store, coming to work is one of the highlights of their week, where they’re engaging with colleagues and customers, and their skills are valued and respected.
Having an openness to older workers has helped our business grow. Not only are there benefits from the collegiality and insight a multigenerational team brings, but the mix of perspectives helps with innovating and decision-making, especially when helping customers solve problems.
At Bunnings, there are a wide range of ways we set our older team members up for success for the duration of their careers, from the moment they apply, right through to the end of their tenure with us.
Flexibility
While there are several ways to create a supportive environment for older workers, for us it all starts with flexibility. We do this by first and foremost offering casual, part-time and full-time working options because we know it’s an important way to keep our team engaged and supported in their wellbeing and performance. We’ve also started trialling a compressed workweek option for some stores, whereby team members can work a nine-day fortnight or four-day working week.
We also work closely with our older team to implement a tailored pathway to their retirement, which includes the option of reducing their hours over time to support a gradual transition or changing department, for instance, to avoid heavy lifting. Our dedicated ‘Retiring Well’ program provides guidance on how they can enjoy financial, emotional and physical wellbeing in retirement. Retirement planning sessions are just one of the resources we provide to ensure our team are set up for a smooth transition into retirement.
Training
We also work incredibly hard to ensure all our team members feel physically and mentally safe at work every day. We have extensive training and guidelines in place to make sure all our team return home each day safely and feel equipped to perform their roles. This includes ongoing professional development, so that our team always feel confident and engaged at work regardless of their age; in fact, we often find our older team value training just as much as our younger cohort.
Travelling Team Member program
Then there’s the extras like our popular ‘Travelling Team Member’ program where people can pick up casual shifts at different Bunnings stores while they travel across Australia and New Zealand. We first introduced the program in 2014 and have seen it gain momentum, particularly for our older team members who are transitioning to retirement.
Team members change to casual employment to allow them to work and travel as they please. They contact the Complex Managers of the stores they would like to work at in advance and are temporarily transferred as a team member to that store. Team members can return back to their home store once their travels are complete to revert to full-time if that’s what they choose.
We’re proud of our multigenerational workforce and look forward to continuing to reap the many benefits it brings.
Damian Zahra is the Chief People Officer at Bunnings. He has over 20 years international experience across the full suite of Human Resources functions. Today, Bunnings employs more than 51,000 team members across Australia and New Zealand and Damian is responsible for the coordination and delivery of the Bunnings People & Safety plan. Damian has a multi-industry background having worked in the Property, Online/Media, Professional Services and Retail sectors in a variety of senior HR roles.
Additional resources
- What’s age got to do with it? Australian Human Rights Commission
- Willing to Work: National Inquiry into Employment Discrimination, Australian Human Rights Commission
- Older Workers Resource Hub, Australian Human Rights Commission
- Employing and Retaining Older Workers, Australian Human Resources Institute
- The Key to Preventing Generational Tension is Remembering That Everyone Wants to Feel Valued, Harvard Business Review
- Age discrimination in the workplace happening to people as young as 45: study, The Conversation
- Employing and Retaining Older Workers, AHRI
- Talent shortage? Here’s an older solution to a newer problem, Deloitte
- How Do We Combat Ageism? By Valuing Wisdom as Much as Youth, Harvard Business Review