The employment of older individuals becomes increasingly important in the context of demographic change. To identify organizational practices that foster the motivation, health, and performance of older employees in particular, an efficient, holistic assessment of relevant organizational factors is needed. The Later Life Workplace Index (LLWI) provides such a measure, differentiating nine domains of organizational practices relevant to the aging workforce: organizational climate, leadership, work design, health management, individual development, knowledge management, transition to retirement, continued employment, and health and retirement coverage.
In its original form, the LLWI contains a total of 80 items. The LLWI has been translated and validated across over 17 countries and applied in emerging research in various contexts. More recently, two shorter forms have been developed to enhance the index's applicability both in research and in practice. The short form (LLWI-SF) reduced the original form's scope to 29 items through quantitative and qualitative strategies and has been validated and published across 10 countries. While both measures allow for an in-depth and multi-faceted analysis of organizations' age-friendliness, they remain too lengthy to be applied in large-scale surveys (e.g., Health and Retirement Survey) or organizational screenings. Therefore, an extra-short form was developed by an expert focus group over several discussion rounds. The LLWI-XSF features nine single-item measures, each capturing one LLWI domain, and has so far been validated in German and American English.
The three different forms of the LLWI provide researchers and practitioners with validated instruments to measure organizational practices for older employees. Each instrument provides unique strengths which are leveraged depending on the context of and needs for application, e.g., in-depth analysis or organizational screening. We present and compare all three forms, their development methods, implementation, and implications.
