Building an intergenerational workplace strategy is more beneficial than a Gen Z approach, explains Bobby Duffy, Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Policy Institute.
You don’t need a Gen Z workplace strategy; you need an intergenerational workplace strategy.
That’s the conclusion I get to after writing about generational myths and realities for decades, and being called to talk at strategy awaydays, seminars and conferences by employers who feel they are struggling to engage with coming generations of employees.
My route to that conclusion starts from an in-built suspicion of claimed generational differences, based on years of verifying supposed generational breaks that turn out to be complete myths or misunderstandings.
Generational analysis
Generational thinking was developed by some of our most brilliant philosophers and sociologists.
French philosopher Auguste Comte, for example, thought that the speed of generational change was the key determinant of the speed of societal change – because we all tend to get stuck in our ways once we get past a certain age, and we therefore need new generations to come in to keep things fresh.
These are really big ideas, so it’s sad to see the type of generational analysis we get today. This more of the level of Millennials supposedly killing everything from marriage to the napkin industry, the Olympics to marmalade, Baby Boomers ‘ruining everything’ and Gen Z being ‘the most annoying generation’.
And the workplace is one of the noisiest engines of these shallow stereotypes, with Gen Z bearing the brunt. They are supposedly ‘proudly shirking from home’. They ‘can’t be bothered to read emails’. They ‘can’t cope with the real world’, according to this piece, where a more a middle-aged journalist who ‘tells us why’.
But the evidence for all this is extremely thin, beyond anecdotes from grumpy older bosses.
Generational differences
We have a rosy retrospection about how driven and amenable we all were as younger workers, and fall into the deeply human trap of thinking the latest generation of young are the worst ever.
You can go to any era in history, all the way back to Socrates’ supposed long rant against young people in his day, and find very similar sentiments.
This is not to say there is nothing different about younger workers today compared with the past. I would pick out three aspects that are true ‘cohort effects’, that is, different for this generation compared with previous generations when they were young.
The first is their economic circumstances are just tougher. Wage stagnation, hugely higher housing costs, a more general cost of living crisis and little wealth, are in an economy where private wealth has become much greater, and much more important to how you feel about your financial situation. They will naturally need to be more focused on wages and benefits than in better circumstances.
The second is on mental health. The extraordinary rise in common mental health disorders also seems to have a clear cohort element to it, as it’s affected young people at this point in time more than older people. They will need and expect more support on this aspect of life.
And finally, there is a more general trend of ‘delayed adulthood’. Younger people are just doing things later than previous generations, whether that’s leaving education, leaving home, getting married or having kids. They also have less experience of the workplace before their first post-education job, as Saturday and holiday jobs have declined.
Of course, this way of living is only ‘delayed’ compared with what we got used to from our upbringing, rather than some natural order of things.
I think back to my mum’s life experience, where she left school at 14 and went straight to work – which is not something we could imagine as a sensible rate of progression, but was seen as utterly natural in the 1940s.
Workplace strategies
Employers should be sensitive to these pieces of context, but they shouldn’t build an employment strategy around them that specifically targets Gen Z.
That’s partly because, while these circumstances are more common among Gen Z, they clearly do not apply to all of such a varied generation. Also, many people in older generations face similar challenges and contexts.
More importantly, setting workplace strategies up as a response to the ‘Gen Z problem’ inevitably reinforces the stereotyping that we see way too often in poor quality generational ‘analysis’.
This caricaturing is driven by the really big, and actually true, trend that I see in generations – separation.
Separation
We’re living more separately by age than we have at any time in human history, with young people sorted into cities and large towns and older people outside of these to a quite remarkable degree.
These are relatively new trends: we have a sense that this has always been the case, but it’s actually very recent, with little sign of this separation until the 1990s.
On top of living more separately, our digital lives are also now much more important to us – and remain very separate across the age groups, with different generations doing different things, on different platforms at very different levels of intensity.
The workplace, then, has become one of the few areas of life where different generations are pushed together regularly. But instead of taking advantage of this to promote intergenerational connection and understanding, we’re fuelling a fake sense of conflict.
This is a huge shame, and missed opportunity. We know that both sides of older and younger people benefit from greater intergenerational connection.
We’re starting to see evidence that those organisations who find ways to bring generations together benefit from increased productivity or innovation, by promoting better understanding and drawing on more of the available ideas and talent, working together.
Creating a Gen Z workplace strategy misses all these benefits and instead risks inadvertently reinforcing or creating a problem. Build an intergenerational strategy instead.
Bobby will be talking about connecting different generations at work at the forthcoming ISE Student Development Conference.