The Golden Age of Silver Workers?

Digitization is progressing intensively, in particular in the world of work. Thereby, intelligent systems, mobile devices, cloud computing, and social media change the development of work and employment by (in parts) replacing employees or changing ways of production. In line with demographic change and in order to face economic, societal, and demographic challenges of a future labor market, it is necessary to consider the integration of aging employees. Therefore, this paper investigates the perception of motivational factors and stress factors triggered by technology in the working context. In addition, factors influencing the individual perception of strains are analyzed. For this purpose, an online survey was conducted (N = 507) asking for agreement to motivational and stressing factors in the context of increasing digital working environments. The results show that the overall motivational factors received a similar evaluation pattern for younger and older participants. However, the younger employees showed stronger agreements to all motivational aspects. Additionally, the results show that the perception of techno-stress factors was significant lower in the older aged group compared to the younger aged group. The study’s findings highlight the importance of user diversity for a successful and healthy transformation to a digital work environment putting employees needs and requirements into the center.