Work Ability Is the New KPI: A Leadership System, Not an HR Program
In a conversation with Pavlina Walter and our guest Michaela Hrdličková, a topic came up that most leaders assume they understand and almost always oversimplify: age management. Not as a feel-good HR initiative. Not as “multi-generational collaboration.” But as a measurable, operational approach to protecting the one asset every CEO depends on, and too few actively manage: work ability.
Most companies talk about talent as their “greatest asset.”
Then they manage people like a disposable input.
If you’re a CEO, you don’t get to hide behind culture posters and engagement surveys. You own the conditions that either compound your people’s capability or quietly drain it until performance, innovation, and retention collapse.
That’s why I’ve become increasingly interested in a concept most leaders still misunderstand: age management.
Age management is the discipline of keeping people healthy, capable, motivated, and productive across an entire working life.
And it started, fittingly, in a country that couldn’t afford to ignore the problem.
Finland Saw the Future First and Decided to Measure It
In the 1980s, Finland had one of the oldest populations in Europe. Instead of debating opinions, the government did something rare: it asked for science.
They engaged the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health to help answer a blunt national question:
What do we need to do so people can stay healthy and productive and work longer careers?
The result wasn’t a motivational slogan. It was a system.
Researchers studied how age interacts with work demands, health, and performance. By the 1990s, they had developed guidance and norms for building environments that keep people capable. In the 2000s, they expanded the model with mentoring, ergonomics, structured education, and broader organizational practices.
They also defined a crucial concept: work ability.
And they built a way to measure it.
The Work Ability Index: A Mirror Most Companies Avoid
Age management uses a standardized tool called the Work Ability Index (WAI), translated into dozens of languages, designed to measure an individual’s work ability relative to job demands.
That’s the pivot point: it’s not about age, it’s about fit and capacity.
When you measure work ability across a statistically meaningful segment of your workforce, you get something most organizations lack:
an objective picture of what’s increasing performance capacity
and what’s quietly eroding it
This matters because companies are full of myths:
“Young people are automatically more capable.”
“Older people are automatically less adaptable.”
“Performance issues are personal.”
Age management replaces myth with data.
As Michaela Hrdličková put it in the conversation, it is entirely possible for a young employee to have lower work ability than an older employee, especially as mental health challenges rise in younger populations.
If you’re still managing with stereotypes, you’re not leading. You’re guessing.
Age Management: Caring for People in Any Age, Any Stage
Here’s the clean definition:
Age management is caring for people across any age and life cycles so they remain healthy, educated, motivated, and capable of long careers.
Yes, that includes how generations collaborate. But that’s not the core.
The core is this: work ability is built or destroyed by design.
And CEOs are designers, whether they admit it or not.
The Four Levels of Work Ability (And Where Leaders Usually Fail)
Work ability isn’t a single lever. It’s a stack. Michaela described four levels that shape it:
Health
Knowledge and experience
Motivation
Leadership style
Read that again: leadership style is part of work ability.
That’s a gut punch for any executive still blaming “the labor market” for burnout and attrition.
People can be physically healthy and highly competent and still lose work ability because the leadership environment crushes motivation, autonomy, or trust.
Or because the company has optimized for quarterly output instead of sustainable performance.
If work ability is a stack, leadership is the layer that either holds the system together or causes everything above it to slide.
“So What Do We Do With the Data?” Good. That’s the CEO Question.
In our conversation, I asked the question most leaders should ask:
“We measure it. We evaluate it. Fine. But what solutions can we actually provide?”
Because measurement without response becomes theater.
Here’s the practical implementation flow Michaela outlined: clean, structured, and replicable:
1) Measure work ability (properly)
You don’t need everyone on day one. You need a statistically meaningful sample and a disciplined approach.
2) Add context beyond health
Work ability isn’t just physical fitness. Many organizations also use complementary questionnaires to capture areas like:
leadership style
work environment factors
psychological safety and mental load
learning and development needs
3) Bring managers and employees into focus groups
This is where the work gets real. Not a “town hall.” Not a corporate survey with pre-approved answers.
A working session with data on the table, asking:
Where are we losing work ability and why?
Which job demands are misaligned with capacity?
What are the conditions undermining motivation?
Where is leadership behavior amplifying risk?
4) Redesign the environment targeted, not generic
Then you implement improvements where they actually move the needle. Examples include:
ergonomic redesign
workflow changes
role tailoring and task rebalancing
mentoring systems
coaching and leadership upgrades
prevention-focused health education
psychological health support and manager training
The key principle Michaela emphasized is one many companies avoid because it requires leadership maturity:
Tailor individual workplaces to measured work ability.
Not to preference. Not to politics. Not to tradition.
To reality.
Age Management Is a Life-Cycle Strategy, Not a “Policy”
One of the smartest parts of the model is that it recognizes something obvious we still fail to operationalize:
People go through predictable life cycles, and they need different support at different stages.
Michaela described it simply:
Early career: education, onboarding, capability building, clarity
Mid-career (“sandwich generation”): pressure from career demands plus family, children, mortgages, support, and flexibility become productivity drivers
Later career: sustaining work ability for longer careers, preserving health and relevance, leveraging experience, and mentoring
This isn’t about making work “easier.”
It’s about making work sustainable so performance doesn’t collapse under invisible load.
Many Managers Are Still Operational, Not Human-Centered
When asked who tends to engage with age management programs, Michaela’s answer was quietly damning:
It’s not about age. It’s about whether someone is a leader.
The leaders who lean in tend to be:
visionary
people-centered
innovative
willing to challenge assumptions
The ones who resist tend to be stuck in operational control mode, often carrying stereotypes like:
“Older people can’t keep up with new media.”
“Young people don’t want to work.”
Age management is a forcing function because it replaces bias with facts.
And facts are inconvenient if your leadership model is built on assumptions.
Why Czech Companies Are Warming Up (And Why Many Countries Moved Faster)
Michaela shared something important: in the Czech Republic, many people still equate age management with generational collaboration. The deeper Finnish concept hasn’t been fully adopted at the government level.
But across Europe, Germany, Scandinavian countries, Holland, and, more recently, Slovakia, the concept is being used more systematically.
In the Czech market, progress is coming through advocacy and pilots, including grant-supported programs that help companies learn the system and implement it.
That matters for CEOs because the question isn’t “Is this trendy?”
The question is:
Are you building an organization that can operate in a world where careers are longer, and capacity risk is rising?
If not, someone else is.
A CEO’s Blind Spot: We Ask Questions We Want to Hear
There was one line in the discussion that should make every executive uncomfortable:
Companies often ask employees questions…
…but they ask the questions they want to hear, not the questions that reveal reality.
Age management breaks that pattern because it’s structured, measurable, and harder to manipulate.
It forces you to confront trade-offs you may have been deferring for years:
Do we value speed more than sustainability?
Are we optimizing for output or resilience?
Is our leadership system scaling capability or extracting it?
You can’t “culture” your way out of a work ability crisis.
You have to redesign the machine.
Why Michaela’s Story Matters: Science + Leadership + Systems Thinking
Michaela didn’t arrive at age management through HR. Her background is in scientific biology, microbiology, and molecular biology, starting in hospital labs, then moving into pharma and biotech.
She worked on innovative therapies, including launching treatments in the Czech Republic for serious conditions like spinal muscular atrophy, and spent years inside global organizations with strong leadership and culture disciplines.
Then she made a choice many high-performing executives quietly crave:
She left corporate life to build something more balanced, using her experience in healthcare systems, leadership, motivation, and demographic realities to do consulting, mentoring, and age management advocacy.
That combination of science and leadership is exactly what age management requires.
Because this isn’t “soft.” It’s not vibes.
It’s a performance system.
Where This Goes in the Next Five Years: Longer Careers, Higher Stakes
One of the most human moments in the conversation came when Michaela talked about the next five years. She wasn’t chasing status. She was speaking about longevity, how many people, if healthy, still have decades of active contribution ahead.
That’s the point CEOs keep missing:
We are entering an era where long careers are the norm, not the exception.
If you don’t build for long careers, you will get:
Higher burnout
Higher disability risk
Higher churn
Higher knowledge loss
Weaker leadership benches
And slower execution over time
Age management is the opposite of “a nice-to-have.”
It’s a competitiveness strategy.
“Why” Is Not a Poster. It’s a Survival Skill.
At the end, Michaela gave advice that applies to every age group:
Think about your why
Take care of your health
Do what you want, not what others want for you
Protect your work ability over the long term
I’ll add a CEO lens:
When you hire, develop, and promote people who can’t articulate their why, you don’t just get disengagement, you get drift.
And when an organization drifts, it becomes fragile.
I mentioned I’ve asked young candidates “why” and gotten blank stares. Michaela’s response was provocative and, frankly, believable:
Many young people are living decisions that were made for them by parents or expectations rather than by internal conviction.
That’s not just a “youth” issue. It’s a workforce issue.
And it’s a leadership issue, because leaders either create environments where people find meaning and agency, or they create systems where people comply until they break.
Treat Work Ability Like You Treat Cashflow
If you want to implement age management, don’t start with a program.
Start with a decision:
We will manage work ability as a core business asset.
Then do the work:
Measure it
Confront the truth
Redesign what’s breaking people
Upgrade leadership where it’s eroding motivation
And build a life-cycle system that sustains performance
Because the hidden cost in most companies isn’t salaries.
It’s lost work ability, the slow leak of health, motivation, and capability that never shows up as a line item until it shows up as a crisis.
If you want a burning platform, here it is:
You can’t scale performance on a shrinking base of human capacity.
Age management is how you stop the leak and build an organization that lasts.
Dr. Peter M. Kovacs