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Hearing loss is an all-too-common problem for Americans, affecting about 14% of the total population. As we age, hearing loss becomes more and more likely, though many people working in high-risk professions are likely to experience problematic hearing loss well before retirement age.
For those who begin to experience hearing loss while still in the workforce, it can pose additional difficulties. With the right approach, hearing loss does not have to put an end to our careers, though some roadblocks will require some attention.
Hearing Loss is Exhausting
Everyone who has worked a full-time job will be familiar with the experience of becoming tired toward the end of the day—or even all day, by the end of the week! Hearing loss tends to make this exhaustion set in much sooner.
This is because hearing loss taxes our brain. Under normal circumstances, our brains easily and automatically understand the speech we hear. With hearing loss, we need to work harder to put the pieces of speech that we understand together into coherent sentences. The result is earlier fatigue, and if our jobs are heavy on spoken communication, we will wear out very quickly. Many people who experience age-related hearing loss or noise-induced hearing loss in their 50s or 60s may interpret this fatigue as a separate age-related phenomenon, when in fact hearing loss is the root cause.
Communication Problems
It may seem obvious, but hearing loss causes communication difficulties. Did your boss say seven or eleven? Fifteen or fifty? These types of miscommunications occur even with normal hearing, but they’re much more common when hearing loss enters the picture.
Communication issues are the most visible sign of hearing loss and are the most likely to cause the kinds of problems that can make employees feel untenable. It’s vitally important to find ways to make communication clear despite the onset of hearing loss. Disclosing hearing loss to your boss and coworkers is an important step, and will allow you to work with them to determine the best methods of effective communication.
In a meeting, you can ask to be seated closer to the main speaker. When possible, communication can be conducted through email or messenger apps rather than in person or on the phone. If your desk is situated in a noisy area, you can move to a quieter part of the office. There are a variety of ways to help the situation, and the ones that will work best will depend on your individual needs, the workflow of your organization, and trial and error.
Salary
Studies have found that those with hearing loss tend to earn an average of $10,000 less per year. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact causes for this, but it is likely that communication issues combine with an employee’s subjective understanding of their value to an organization, and result in fewer and/or lower pay raises. Remember that your hearing loss does not mean you are less valuable to your organization, and make sure you’re being paid fairly in comparison to others who occupy a similar position.
Earlier Retirement
Everyone has a different idea of when they’d like to retire, but the onset of hearing loss can propel us toward retirement earlier than we would like. Above, we mentioned how hearing loss makes us feel exhausted, and this can be mistaken for a separate age-related issue. When we’re tired on the job more often, we enjoy ourselves less. It might start to feel like retirement is the best option.
Similarly, if we are having more difficulty communicating and seeming more exhausted on the job, our employer might reason that we are ready for retirement. If you are ready to retire, you should by all means do so. But if you are thinking about retiring because of difficulties you’re having at work that may be related to your hearing loss, you may wish to pursue other options first.
Hearing Aids Can Help
Hearing aids are a major help to those with hearing loss in the workforce. Depending on the severity of hearing loss, hearing aids can all but eliminate miscommunication and hearing loss-related fatigue.