Work and Life is a radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by The Wharton School. Every Tuesday at 7:00 PM EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community and the private self (mind, body and spirit).
On Work and Life, Stew Friedman spoke with Sarah Kagan about the impact of aging on our work lives.
The following are edited excerpts of their conversation:
Stew Friedman: Why is aging an important issue for employers and employees?
Sarah Kagan: 
We’re seeing a big demographic shift. We’re becoming much older as a society and all sorts of things cascade from that. Your example of midlife women having to make choices about career and family responsibilities.
SF: And leaving the workforce because they feel compelled to take care of aging parents, disrupting their career progress and future earnings, as noted in The New York Times article at the top of the hour, For Women in Midlife, Career Gains Slip Away.
SK: You can see that as an economic cascade. It influences them financially but it also changes the workforce. We lose really valuable workers from a sector like education. How do we mentor and support younger teachers if everybody in that generation is busy taking care of mom, grandma, grandpa? All of a sudden we have a dearth of experience that has social implications, financial implications, families suffer financially and our economy suffers as well.
Around the world most elder care is direct care provided by women and the “instrumental caregiving” – organizing things, financing things is being done by the men in the family. For the most part wives and daughters and daughters-in-law are doing a lot of direct caregiving which means that they have high absenteeism. The work can’t be done remotely. Unless you have a great deal of money you’re the one taking your father-in-law to the doctor.
SF: Wait. What about the man? If it’s his father, why isn’t he taking him to the doctor? Why the daughter-in-law?
SK: Well, we still have a gender divide there.
SF: The study referred to in the article finds the burden is disproportionally borne by women.
SK: This means that stress is borne disproportionately by women, too. If you’re caring for an aging parent with dementia, for example, it’s a big family stressor. And if you’re facing that every morning it’s going to take a toll on you – the primary direct caregiver.
SF: What suggestions and advice do you provide for your students and others and what advice do you have for our listeners who might be in a similar situation?
SK: The first thing a recommend is to step back, even if only for one hour, take a breather and think about what really needs to get done and when, what’s a top priority, what’s a lower priority. Then think about who needs to do it and what resources are available to relieve some of that load. And it helps to write out a plan and assess.
SF: But how do you do that when you’re in the throes of the problem?
SK: Sometime you need help to take a step back.
SF: But doesn’t everyone need that?
SK: We’re social animals. We need to crush that myth of independence, and say, “hey, who can I reach out to?” A friend, a neighbor, somebody in a similar situation who can help you step back and take a survey of the situation.
SF: So what more can this “sandwich” generation of women, especially, do to get help so that they can remain engaged in their work lives?
SK: After assessing, the next step is to think about other resources. And we have a tendency to think they have to do it alone. I recommend that people look for their local Area Agency on Aging. And other people want to help. Perhaps set up a meal schedule so you’re not doing all the cooking. Maybe the kid down the block who’s thinking about college would like some kind of service experience, resume builder, and something that brings generations together. Put an 18 year old with an 80 year old and both of them are going to learn good things.
SF: So you’re thinking of the health benefits for teenagers and seniors for them to be working together.
SK: Real relationships not mediated by phones, computers, other technology and distractions and pressures. Instead, slow it down.
SF: What about FOMO? Kids have a Fear Of Missing Out.
SK: I think we have to push back on that. FOMO should be replace by Slow-Mo. Slow down and recognize that thinking about and caring about someone else, means we’re all stronger, we’re all better off. The Druker Center for Health System Innovation at The Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF) is doing some amazing work with “time banking.” It turns out that social interaction is more important than physical activity for keeping your mind sharp. They’ve created a “time bank” where people donate time to help with specific activities (driving someone to a doctor’s appoint, garden clean up, piano teaching, driving to worship, getting to a friend) and others can use that time. So it becomes a social exchange.
SF: It’s part of the new sharing economy.
Kagan is a MacArthur Fellow and the Lucy Walker Honorary Term Professor of Gerontological Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing who writes a column, Myths of Aging, and teaches a popular MOOC on Coursera, Growing Old Around the Globe. Hear more from her on Twitter @SarahHKagan and @OldGlobeMooc and read her Myths of Aging column at http://www.calkins.com/digital.html
Join Work and Life next Tuesday, July 22 at 7:00 PM ET on Sirius XM Channel 111 for conversations with Herminia Ibarra and Sam Polk. Visit Work and Life for a full schedule of future guests.
I started at New America after receiving a fellowship from the Foundation to write my last book; it was a real source of intellectual stimulation and support and a wonderful community. Now that I’m taking over as Director of our work and family program, Breadwinning and Caregiving, the aim is to continue to reframe the conversation. I think this is a really interesting moment for these issues – there have been some significant books and articles, and a stream of research in the last several years. The more we can talk about work and family and bring these issues into the public domain, the more we can help people understand that we are all breadwinners and we are all caregivers at some point in our lives. Those two responsibilities are shared by every citizen, and I think it’s fair to say that our laws and policies haven’t changed to enable people to fulfill both sets of obligations, and the workplace is changing in ways that in some respects make it easier and in some respects make it harder to play both roles.
received her MBA from The Wharton School in 2014. 
I was writing an economics, business book, and I was trying to describe how the way we create value has changed, and I was trying to say “that thing that only you do.” I was twiddling with words like “uniqueness” and “distinctive,” but none of them told the full story, so I said let’s make up a word. It refers to that spot in the world that only you are standing in. It’s such a distinctive point of view. It’s your creative source. It’s the perspective that allows you to challenge convention. It is that idea that only you have.
studied Management at The Wharton School and English (Creative Writing) at the College of Arts & Sciences. She graduated in 2014. 
It’s not surprising to me. I find that there are two stigmas fathers face in trying to accommodate their work to their family lives. The first cuts both ways, for men and women – that if you accommodate your work to your family life, you’re seen in the workplace as less committed and not all-in. The second stigma which keeps men from using flexibility as much as they would like, or hiding it when they do, is that they’ll be seen as violating a gender norm by being less manly than society expects.
they were really all pros – the business and the people who were coming to the firm at that time were so exciting. It was like a giant lab.
The idea behind Warby Parker was that glasses are too expensive. Jeff, Andy, Dave and I had just started our MBAs and were sitting in a computer lab at Wharton, complaining about how expensive glasses are after Dave lost his $700 glasses in the seat pocket of an airplane right before school started. We thought, “Could we do something about this?” Andy had a great idea to sell glasses online; we had seen category after category move online, from Blue Nile selling engagement rings to Zappos selling shoes. And before business school, I had trained low-income women to start their own businesses selling glasses in the developing world with 
As you know, Stew, it really has to do with giving people a simple framework to begin to think through how their work and life fit together and helping them be as intentional as they can about that fit, both day-to-day as well as through major life transitions. It starts with understanding what flexibility is available in their lives and what makes sense for their jobs, and then within that context, thinking about what they could do to be, work, and live smarter and better. One of the most fascinating things I’ve seen in my work is an ongoing struggle to get people to understand that there’s more that they could do to live better.
is a rising undergraduate senior in the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business at Penn focusing on Management and Latin America.
For one, I have come to the realization that work and play are not opposites – they are complementary. It’s certainly not the case that you could have a workplace that resembles the playground during recess, for example, because nothing would get done, but there’s good evidence that humor complements many of the things you want to get done in the workplace. One thing, for instance, is that people want to enjoy where they work. Good predictors of workplace retention are questions like – Do you have a best friend at work? Do you have a good relationship with you supervisor? Those kinds of things are facilitated by being able to have a good time and being able to have some fun. Workplaces are often stressful places, so being able to enjoy a few jokes along the way can help us get through the difficult times. Some of the work that we’ve been doing in the Humor Research Lab looks at “humor as complaining.” You take a situation that you are trying to complain about and instead you make humorous complaints about it. That tactic seems to be largely beneficial, especially when it comes to the idea of having other people support you.
A couple of things have changed. When I wrote that article, I started out with the same question 
Broadly, our mandate is to make sure that all the people decisions we make at Google are based on good data and information. An organization our size makes thousands of people decisions every year – who we should hire, who we should promote, how we should pay people. In a lot of cases, it seems like those decisions are based on emotions, instinct, or perhaps politics; we want to try and make them more rigorous. At Google we are all about innovation and we believe that innovation comes from the smart, talented Googlers we hire. Therefore, we think that people decisions are no less important than any other business or product decisions we make so we want to base those decisions on data.