Your workforce is ageing. Is your organisation longevity-ready?

Swiss employers measure age, health, caregiving, skills and financial security separately. Employees live them as one life — and in a country with no general legal protection against age discrimination, closing that gap is a management decision, not a compliance one.

The dimension we treat as a late-career issue

Swiss companies have learned to count. They count women in management, they count nationalities, they count accessibility. These are real advances, and the organisations that made them did difficult work.

Age is different. It is measured, when it is measured at all, as a retirement-planning variable rather than as a dimension of inclusion that shapes hiring, development, health, caregiving, technology adoption and financial security across an entire career.

That costs something. A Swiss Life study published in November 2024, surveying around a thousand HR managers in companies with four or more employees, found that people aged 55 and over make up 23 percent of the working population but only 8 percent of new hires. The same study found that 46 percent of employers thought men should retire before 65 — and 58 percent thought women should. A von Rundstedt survey reported in October 2025 found that 77 percent of participating HR managers said age discrimination occurs in Swiss companies, and 46 percent thought even a motivated older employee has limited prospects.

These are attitude surveys, not audits of outcomes. But when a majority of employers would retire women earlier than men, age and gender have stopped being separate diversity questions.

In Romandie the market reflects it. In recent Swiss outplacement data, jobseekers over 50 took roughly seven to eight months on average to find a new position against around five months for younger comparison groups, and accepted an average pay cut of about 14 percent, while people in their thirties changing jobs tended to gain. In Geneva, unemployment among 50-to-64-year-olds has been rising. That difference cannot automatically be attributed to capability; employer surveys document age-related assumptions and recruitment barriers alongside it.

The Swiss particularity: nobody is going to make you do this

Here is what makes this a Swiss argument rather than a general one.

Swiss law contains no general prohibition of age discrimination in private employment. There is no domestic equivalent of the European framework directive. Under the Code of Obligations an employment contract may be terminated for almost any reason; only abusive dismissal under Article 336 CO is prohibited, and even where a court finds a dismissal abusive the employee does not get the job back — compensation is capped at six months’ salary.

The Federal Court has developed a heightened duty of care towards older employees with long service: in a leading case a 63-year-old dismissed after 44 years was found to have been abusively dismissed, and employers are expected to warn, consult and explore alternatives before terminating. But a 2021 ruling made clear that how far that duty extends depends on the employee’s position and seniority, and there is no absolute protection.

The practical consequence is straightforward. In Switzerland, age inclusion will not be delivered by a regulator or a tribunal. It will be delivered, or not, by employers deciding it is worth doing. Which means the business case has to carry the weight that law carries elsewhere — and fortunately, it does.

The arithmetic

In 2025, for the first time, Switzerland had more people aged 65 and over than under 20 — roughly 1.81 million against 1.80 million on provisional federal figures. The workforce has aged with the country: between 2014 and 2024 the average age of the working population rose from 41.2 to 42.3 years, and participation among 55-to-64-year-olds climbed 6.1 points to 77.8 percent. Older employees already carry a large share of the work.

The replacement pipeline is thin. The Swiss National Bank has estimated that, on the current age structure, some 400,000 more people could leave the workforce over the coming decade than young entrants can replace — a demographic replacement gap rather than a forecast of unfilled vacancies, but the constraint every Swiss workforce plan now sits inside.

Nor will automation close it where the gap actually is. Switzerland’s sharpest shortage is in care, and it is demographic in origin. The Swiss Health Observatory projected in 2021 that the country would need 36,500 additional care and support staff by 2029, and separately would have to replace 27,500 tertiary-level care workers lost to retirement and early exits — against a projected supply covering only about two-thirds of tertiary-level demand. Artificial intelligence genuinely helps with documentation, scheduling, triage support and diagnostics; the World Economic Forum’s employer survey projects large-scale role displacement and creation across the economy by 2030. But AI does not get a patient out of bed at two in the morning. The tasks that automate first and the tasks Switzerland is short of are largely different tasks.

The missing capability

What organisations lack here is not another benefit. It is a capability, and it operates at two levels.

I call it Longevity Literacy 2.0: the ability to reason about a life horizon that is uncertain and probably longer than expected, and to understand how four kinds of capital shift across it and convert into one another. Financial capital — income, savings, pension entitlements. Health capital — the years that can actually be used. Social capital — the relationships and care networks that will or will not be there. Structural capital — the systems a person happens to sit inside.

In Switzerland that fourth one is unusually concrete. It is the AVS, the LPP, the coordination deduction, the cantonal care system — and it is the employer. For an employee, the employer is structural capital. Your pension plan design, your leave policy, your promotion practice and your training budget are not a backdrop to someone’s longevity; they are a component of it.

The conversions are what make this operational. A health event is frequently also an income event. A caregiving break is simultaneously a health cost, a social cost and a pension cost. A job loss at 55 removes salary and, for many people, a large part of daily social contact. Employees experience these as one event. Institutions treat them as four unrelated ones.

One caveat belongs here rather than at the end, because without it the argument becomes a way of blaming individuals. Knowing is necessary but not sufficient. People who understand their position perfectly well still do not always act on it, and a significant part of anyone’s outcome is set by pension design, care availability and occupational structure rather than by how carefully they studied. This is not a self-improvement programme. It is a design question — which is precisely why it belongs to employers.

Building that structural capital deliberately is what I mean by a longevity-ready workforce: one where age inclusion, health, care, skills and financial security are managed as a single connected system rather than five separate programmes.

What changes across a longer working life

The needs of a 52-year-old differ structurally from those of a 32-year-old. Running one identical offer for both is not equality; it is a design failure. Four things change, and they tend to arrive together.

Care. On one commonly used Swiss measure, 22.8 percent of people aged 15 and over — more than 1.6 million — provide support to a relative at least weekly; broader definitions including childcare give figures around 35 percent. The concentration falls between 45 and 64, and the burden is uneven: about a quarter of the women concerned report negative effects on their professional activity, against under a fifth of men.

Health. We are living longer, but not gaining healthy years as fast as we are gaining years. In Switzerland healthy life expectancy at 65 has genuinely risen — from 11.1 to 14.4 years for men and 11.9 to 14.9 for women since 1992, on the federal indicator. But total life expectancy at 65 now stands at 20.7 years for men and 23.2 for women, so a substantial part of later life is spent in less than good health. Internationally the gap is widening, and it is wider for women than for men.

For employers, the relevant part happens long before 65, and it is mostly invisible in absence statistics: fatigue, disrupted sleep, reduced concentration, slower recovery.

Which brings us to the transition that affects roughly half the workforce and is almost never named at work. Between March and July 2025, the MenoSupport Suisse study — run by The Women Circle with Prof. Petra Stute of the University of Bern — surveyed 2,259 working women aged 30 to 67 in Switzerland. The University of Bern reports that almost all respondents experienced sleep problems and physical or mental exhaustion, and that two-thirds found it harder to concentrate at work.

The career consequences are the part to read twice. A third of respondents cut back on work because of menopausal symptoms — within that, around 21 percent reduced their hours, 16 percent changed jobs, 13 percent took an extended break and close to 6 percent retired early, categories that overlap and should not be added. Fifty-seven percent did not feel their employer provided a supportive environment. The measure most often requested was not a medical benefit. It was that managers be made aware of the subject at all.

Perimenopause typically begins in the mid-forties and can last a decade, commonly coinciding with peak caregiving load, with the first chronic health signals, and with the point at which advancement is quietly assumed to be over. And every reduced hour in that list is also, mechanically, a smaller LPP account.

Financial security. This is where the Swiss system does something specific, and where employers have more room to act than they realise.

Women in Switzerland receive old-age pensions roughly 30 percent lower than men’s across the pillars combined, with the widest gap in occupational provision. That reflects both unequal earnings and unequal employment trajectories — part-time work, interruptions, unpaid care, occupational segregation — and the architecture of the second pillar amplifies them. In 2026, an employee earning less than CHF 22,680 is not covered by mandatory occupational provision at all, and the coordination deduction removes a fixed amount from insured salary regardless of workload, which hits part-time employees hardest.

Swiss voters declined to change this. The LPP reform, which would have lowered the entry threshold and restructured the coordination deduction precisely to improve cover for low earners and part-timers, was rejected on 22 September 2024 by 67 percent of voters, in every canton. The structural gap remains.

But it remains at federal level. Individual pension funds can and increasingly do apply a coordination deduction proportional to the employment rate, or scale it by salary — which materially improves the position of part-time employees without waiting for another referendum. That is a decision a Swiss employer and its foundation board can take on their own. Very few employees know it exists, and many employers have never examined their own plan through that lens.

Nor do most people know where they stand. Raiffeisen’s 2025 pension barometer, surveying 1,000 people aged 18 to 65, found only about half knew what the conversion rate means and 38 percent knew their pension fund invests in financial markets. Life expectancy, meanwhile, is an average rather than an expiry date, and a substantial proportion of people live well beyond it — but nobody can plan for a horizon they have never been shown.

Horizon. Swiss law has already moved here, and workplace practice has not followed. Under AVS 21 the reference age is harmonising at 65 for women by 2028, a pension can be drawn flexibly between 63 and 70, and it is now possible to draw between 20 and 80 percent of it while continuing to work. The legal framework assumes a longer, more gradual exit from working life. Most career and development practice still assumes a cliff. If development stops at 50 and someone works to 67, seventeen years have been written off.

Beyond stress management

Ask a Swiss employer what they do for well-being and you will usually hear about stress. They are not wrong to. The 2022 Job Stress Index found 28.2 percent of working people in the critical zone where demands exceed resources and more than 30 percent emotionally exhausted, with associated productivity losses estimated at around 6.5 billion francs a year.

But stress management addresses one part of a larger question and sets the ambition low. The goal is not that employees feel comfortable. It is that they remain capable — able to absorb the shocks a forty-year career now contains and still contribute afterwards.

The model I use is the Wellthspan 5+1 Framework: five dimensions of capacity plus one constraint. Physical health — function and recovery. Mental health — cognitive fitness and the confidence to keep learning, which also determines whether a 55-year-old engages with new technology or retreats from it. Social health — connection, and the network that determines what happens when something goes wrong. Purpose — the reason someone is still in the room, and in my experience the most underused lever for retaining people over 50. Financial health — security, and the literacy to maintain it.

The constraint is time. Time governs the other five and is the only one that cannot be recovered. Health and money both compound, in both directions. A decision taken at 30 costs a fraction of the identical decision at 55. The knowledge is most valuable exactly when it feels least relevant — which is why leaving it to a pre-retirement seminar at 60 is the most expensive available timing.

The architecture is straightforward. Longevity Literacy 2.0 is the understanding — how the four capitals move and convert. The 5+1 is what an organisation actually builds. Both are my own synthesis, drawing on established evidence in each component rather than being validated instruments in themselves, and I would rather say so plainly.

Is your organisation longevity-ready?

Five questions, answerable with evidence or not at all.

Do you analyse hiring, promotion and training by age band — not only headcount? Has anyone examined whether your pension plan’s coordination deduction is proportional to the employment rate, and what that means for your part-time employees? Are managers equipped to discuss menopause and caregiving without requiring anyone to disclose anything? Do employees over 50 get the same access to AI tools and skills development as those under 35? Does your career and development practice reflect that people can now draw a partial pension and keep working to 70?

If you cannot answer these questions with evidence, your organisation does not yet have a longevity strategy. It has separate programmes.

What to measure instead

Most of this can be built from data organisations already hold.

Dimension	What to measure
Age inclusion	Hiring, promotion, training and involuntary-exit rates by age band
Health capacity	Sustainable-work indicators, recovery and absence patterns, accommodation uptake — never individual diagnoses
Care	Caregiving-related flexibility requests, return-to-work and retention after leave
Menopause	Manager training coverage, accommodation uptake and retention — without requiring disclosure
Skills and digital confidence	Training participation, tool adoption and skills progression by age band
Financial resilience	LPP coverage and coordination-deduction effects by employment rate, contribution gaps, pension-understanding scores, access to neutral advice
Career horizon	Internal mobility, stretch assignments, development participation after 50, and use of partial retirement

Two guardrails. Health data must never enter performance assessment, and no measure should require an individual to disclose a diagnosis or a life stage in order to benefit from the response.

The 360 that matters

This special edition is called Inclusion 360, and the number is well chosen, because this is a 360 argument about the employee as much as the organisation.

The question is not whether your workforce is ageing. It is. The question is whether the conditions you have built will allow people to remain healthy, financially secure, skilled and able to contribute across a longer career.

That cannot be answered by an annual well-being survey or a pre-retirement seminar. It requires examining age inclusion, health, care, financial security and skills as one connected workforce system. And in Switzerland, where the law will not require it of you, doing so is a competitive choice rather than a compliance exercise — which is exactly why the organisations that move first will find the talent still available to them.

Longer lives are not the problem. Institutions and workplaces designed for shorter ones are.

This is what a longevity-ready organisation does differently — and it can be measured.

Text Nadine Esposito, Founder & CEO, Wellthspan Advisory