Intergenerational team building: safety in an ageing workforce

On construction sites, production lines and in warehouses, people forty years apart now work side by side. The worker who has seen three generations of machines and the new hire who has just completed mandatory training each hold something the other lacks. In most organisations, that something never passes from one to the other.

Intergenerational team building tries to circulate this knowledge without turning it into a conversation about age.

The demographic and injury picture

EU-OSHA, in the infographic "Managing Europe's ageing workforce" from the "Healthy Workplaces for All Ages" 2016-2017 campaign, indicated that by 2030 workers aged 55 to 64 are expected to make up 30% or more of the total workforce in many countries. The same source reported that in 2014 the employment rate for the 55-64 age group was 51.8% in the European Union and 46.2% in Italy, with Sweden at 74% and Malta at 37.8%: very wide differences, which show how much the phenomenon depends on policy and not only on demography.

Two warnings in that same infographic deserve attention. First: shift work is listed among the risks requiring specific attention for older workers. Second, and decisive: older workers are not a homogeneous group. Treating them as a category is the first mistake.

On the injury side, the INAIL press release of 4 February 2025 on reported occupational injuries and diseases, with provisional data as at 31 December 2024, reported 414,853 reported injuries at work, down 1.9% compared with 2023. The distribution by age group is, however, uneven: an increase of 4.6% in the 60-74 bracket and of 1.8% among the under-30s, against a fall of 3.9% among those aged 30-59.

Fatal cases at work numbered 797, seven more than in 2023, with increases in the 45-54 bracket (from 199 to 225) and among those over 69 (from 39 to 47).

These figures should be read for what they are: provisional data, on which INAIL itself recommends caution when comparing periods. They do not say that age causes injuries. They do signal that the two ends of the age pyramid deserve different attention from the middle.

The risk is not age

The most common error is to read these numbers as a problem of individual capacity. The risk arises rather from two misalignments.

The first is between task and capability: a workstation designed around an average profile, pace calibrated on stamina that changes, lighting and print sizes designed for young eyes, shifts that do not account for recovery.

The second is between formal and practical knowledge. The long-serving worker recognises anomalies before they become events, but often has no words to explain how. The new hire knows the updated procedures and the new equipment, but lacks the repertoire of cases that makes anticipation possible. Neither is safe alone.

What does not work

• Identical training for everyone. A single module assumes a common starting point that does not exist.
• Mentoring on paper only. Without dedicated time, objectives and a review point, shadowing degrades into "stay with him and watch".
• The language of stereotypes. Talking about "distracted young people" and "older workers resistant to change" closes the conversation before it opens.
• Competitive activities based on physical speed. They select whoever runs fastest and confirm the very prejudice you meant to dismantle.

Game formats that work

The aim is not entertainment: it is to create situations where knowledge must pass from one person to another in order to reach the result.

Mixed teams in escape rooms and serious games

Deliberately heterogeneous composition by age and seniority, with puzzles that require both formal procedure and field experience. If a single profile can solve everything, the format has failed.

Near-miss hunt in senior-junior pairs

A walk through the area in pairs, tasked with spotting situations that "almost" went wrong. The senior names the signals they have learned to read; the junior writes them down and maps them back to the procedure. The output is a list of real reports.

Real incidents turned into game cases

An event that happened in the company years ago, anonymised, becomes the case to reconstruct. Those who were there act as witnesses. It is the most direct way to transfer organisational memory without giving a lecture.

Procedure relays

Each team member holds only one piece of the correct sequence. Nobody can complete it alone. It is a simple and very effective exercise for making mutual dependence visible.

Tasks that reward judgement, not the stopwatch

Deciding whether to stop an operation, choosing between two ways of slinging a load, estimating when a piece of equipment should be taken out of service. These are tasks where experience counts, and it shows.

For the broader picture on using games to build culture, see team building and safety culture.

Making activities accessible

• avoid tasks that require agility, strength or speed of movement as a condition for taking part;
• print materials in large type with good contrast, and pay attention to lighting in the space;
• allow adequate time and the option of breaks, without penalising those who take them;
• limit background noise, which makes following a team discussion tiring;
• schedule activities at times compatible with shifts, especially for night workers, a subject covered in night and shift work;
• make participation voluntary in form, but genuinely possible for everyone in practice.

How to measure

An activity of this kind is not evaluated by satisfaction scores. Some workable indicators:

• number and quality of near-miss reports in the following months, especially those signed by mixed pairs;
• time between a new hire's arrival and their first independent report;
• actual coverage of shadowing: how many hours, with whom, with what review;
• distribution of injuries and near misses by company seniority, not only by age;
• results of learning tests weeks later, not at the end of the session.

On onboarding newcomers, see gamification in new hire induction.

An ageing workforce is not a problem to manage: it is a concentration of experience that risks leaving the company without ever having been made available to anyone. Games, used seriously, are one of the few settings where that transfer happens between peers.