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The Adecco Institute presents the Demographic Fitness Survey 2007, the second survey on the topic of demographic change in Europe and its consequences for companies in European economies. Similar to the inaugural Demographic Fitness Survey of 2006, the 2007 survey is based upon a sample of at least 500 interviews per country – a total of 2506 interviews with companies of all sizes in the five major European economies (Germany, France, the UK, Italy, and Spain), making it Europe’s biggest survey on demographics in the business world.
The survey includes a quantitative analysis, measuring the extent to which European companies are preparing for the realities of an increasingly ageing workforce; this quantitative analysis is summarized in the Demographic Fitness Index (DFX). To calculate the DFX, firms are scored on a scale of 100 to 400 points, and based on those results, country indices and an overall European average is calculated. In 2007, European companies averaged 182 points. While the overall average score of all five countries remained roughly unchanged (2006 DFX: 183), there are considerable changes on country and company levels, notably improvements in analyzing the age structure of workforces, a greater readiness to employ older workers and increased efforts in addressing demographic issues in small and medium-size companies.
Still, the 2007 results indicate that there are opportunities lying dormant. While companies rank demographic change along with globalisation and technological progress as among the most significant challenges faced by companies today, two-thirds of them scored 200 or less, thus indicating great room to improve their readiness for demographic change.
The issue of population ageing is real. In less than ten years’ time, people over 40 will, for the first time, form the demographic majority in Europe – in Germany and Italy, 60 percent of all inhabitants will be over 40. By 2050, the population aged between 15 and 64, i.e. the share of the population considered as being of employable age, will drop by one fifth in the European Union, while the share of people over 65 will double to 30 percent of the total population. This demographic change is a major challenge for all European countries. The ageing of the population and workforce has a major impact on our lives, our jobs, the pension, health and education systems – and the business world. For European companies adapting to the ageing of their workforces will not only have an increasing effect on productivity, competitiveness and innovation, many firms will have to address the issue as a matter of surviving the next decades.
Businesses today are already faced with an increasing lack of specialists, in particular in engineering. 35 percent of the companies surveyed on behalf of the Adecco Institute complain about a lack of technical know-how and adequately trained employees. 30 percent of large companies grapple with a lack of IT and computer skills. Roughly the same holds true for services and trade. 14 percent of the companies surveyed suffer from a lack of foreign language skills among their staff. It has not traditionally been the business of business to plan for demographic change; yet in comparison to globalisation and technological progress, it is an impending change over which employers have an unprecedented greater degree of control and responsibility.
With the DFX survey, the Adecco Institute encourages European companies to improve their demographic fitness and to better understand its growing impact on business success.
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