Health effects of reduced workload for older employees

Abstract

To keep elder employees in the labour force, introducing age‐dependent job conditions can be a policy measure. However, we know little about the effect of such initiatives. We investigate the effects of a particular programme in Norway that reduces the workload of teachers at age 55 but maintains the same wage. Evaluation of this programme is well suited to a difference‐in‐difference analysis, where the control group is teachers slightly too young to be eligible for the workload reduction. Using full population register data for the period 2006–2013, we analyse the effects of the programme on health as indicated by sickness absence and health care utilization. We find that whereas there is no effect among women, the workload reduction causes a decrease in sickness absence and an improvement in mental health among males. These results, which are robust to a placebo test, to extending the pretreatment period, and to dropping single birth cohorts, are driven by a subgroup of men whose prior health status is poor.

Promoting labour market inclusion of the chronically ill: a scoping review of Scandinavian countries’ efforts

“…Seven studies focused on both mental health and musculoskeletal chronic conditions. One study investigated former cancer patients [43], and one study included specific results for cardiovascular conditions [44]. Finally, our corpus included 11 studies of catch-all categories of chronic disease, such as chronic pain, activity limitations and self-reported long-term illness.…”

“…This heterogenous group, for which we used the umbrella term ‘multimodal non-medical’, included studies of interventions such as individual placement and support [50]; occupational or vocational rehabilitation [51, 52]; multimodal forms of rehabilitation [53]; and education [54]. Finally, four articles studied interventions which did not fit with our classification, for example, reduced workload of older teachers [44] and cross-country comparisons of flexicurity policies [41].…”

“…a Cross-country studies which included Scandinavian countries [41,42]. Braathen et al [55] Hara et al [88] johanson et al [59] kaldo et al [46] knapstad et al [56] reme et al [45] Skagseth et al [89] victor et al [90] Wormgoor et al [91] Øverland et al [92] Dellve et al [48] Evans-lacko and knapp [42] kuznetsova and Bento [49] larsen et al [93] Backhans et al [41] Bratberg et al [44] Grahn et al [94] Martin et al [95] number of positive studies in parentheses. We can observe similar shares of positive effects across all countries and interventions.…”

Assessing the general health, increase in mental and physical workload among administrative staff of the University of Nigeria due to the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Safari et al [ 46 ] achieved similar results in their evaluation of personnel health and mental workload among textiles workers and established that the older workers are more vulnerable to mental workload than the younger workers who tend to be more resilient to high mental demand, physical demand, temporal demand, effort, and frustration. Bratberg et al [ 47 ] established that reduction in workload for aged males in their workplaces resulted to significant improvement in mental health and reduced sickness.…”