The Wendy Project: Part Three. New Job Structures For People Like Us.

By Karen and Erica

Remember Wendy Rhoades? She is a psychiatrist who works as a performance coach for the hedge fund in Billions. She is embedded in the office. Employees can visit to seek advice as needed. She is a trained woman with relevant experience who helps the (mostly much younger) workforce perform to their highest potential.

We think her job is a really good prototype for how companies could use people like us—people who have worked hard at successful careers, who still want to be engaged in the working world, and who no longer want to work 24/7. People who want better control over their time now that they know a thing to two. People who can achieve results faster because they’ve been there. People who have reached the top of the ladder and now want to help younger people climb faster by giving them the benefit of their experience. People who are not trying to take over, and don’t want to displace anyone, but who do have crucial information to share.

Plenty of literature suggests that older people add value in many industries. Mixed age teams are more productive; older workers can train younger workers, and older workers retain institutional knowledge. Real economic gains can be seen in companies that employ older workers.

But there are so many ways to use older people other than just holding on to them for two or three years.

• We suspect people in their 60s would be invigorated by changing their focus, and working in entirely different industries than were the context of their careers. And we suspect inviting people who are expert in one area to provide experienced advice in a different area would provide interesting new insights for their new employers as well.

• We also suspect such people would thrive with an entirely different mode of work as well. Why should someone who has had a successful career punch a clock and report to a line manager if the person is not starting at the bottom, and has no interest in ascending to the top, of the management ladder? Such a person should work in a much more distilled fashion, reporting obliquely because her work is not linear—it is refined and focused. Her job should be fluid. Like Wendy Rhoades’ job.

The pandemic taught us a few valuable things about work. One, in our modern world we can do a lot of certain kinds of work from anyplace, and on Zoom, and many younger workers seem to want to continue to work from home. Two, working from anyplace and exclusively on Zoom is no way to maintain team spirit and institutional character, and no way to learn how to move forward. Together, those lessons suggest that it would be extremely valuable to have a retired person on site a few hours a day, perhaps sometimes on Zoom, to provide younger people with seasoned insight into how to work more effectively within an organization—and how to gain greater personal satisfaction from doing so.

One might imagine a very robust market for people like us. Maybe one of us should start it. Call it The Wendy Project.