The intergeneration is here, let's deal with it
Life is such that today Boomers, born before 1964, live alongside Zs, born after 1997, and that all these people evolve in more or less harmony.
If everyone has preconceived ideas/clichés/prejudices about the other generations (they are careerists/materialists/hedonists/jemenfoutists/workaholics/resistant to change...), the reality is perhaps simpler. As a person, manager or team member, the first reflex should be not to look for the differences, not to label and instead to favor the commonalities that will inevitably surface.
It is always amusing to recall that the young generations of today are not very different from those of yesterday. In ancient Greece, Socrates said "young people love luxury, have bad manners, mock authority and have no respect for age". Centuries pass, but not perceptions.
So the issue is not one generation or another, but the fact that perspectives are different depending on our age. Another factor to consider is distance. Normally, a recruit will acquire the codes of the host organization fairly quickly, by mimicry. But the pandemic and the distance have blurred certain elements. If no one has ever told you that "no, you can't join a video conference in your pajamas just because you're at home", how will you know? Especially since this is what you may have been doing for the past few years at Cegep or university.
Beyond this rather extreme example, distance, physical or moral, can be detrimental when the organization plans to train the next generation: a minimum of proximity greatly helps in the transmission of knowledge.
Bringing generations together around a project and values
The organization has values and these must help it in its management of projects, priorities, daily life and recruitment. With the multitude of offers available, it is clear that candidates, regardless of their age, have plenty of time to research the organization and choose the one that best suits them. It is just as beneficial for the company to recruit personnel who adhere to its vision and thus limit its turnover rate. It is therefore important to reaffirm the organization's values, or to ensure that they are well conveyed internally. Working on your employer brand is part of this process.
This is where it can hurt: with the turnover that organizations have experienced, they must validate that there are still enough employees with a minimum of seniority to represent them and thus help new employees to become imbued with them.
Whatever the generation concerned, giving meaning to work
A notion that is not so far from the previous one. Meaningful work tends to mean that it allows us to accomplish ourselves and to be recognized. This is a bit limiting, not to say caricatural, unless your work actually consists of saving lives. Especially since the notion of "meaning of work" is variable depending on who you talk to. A job that is meaningful to one person is perfectly meaningless to another. This means that the notion of meaning depends first of all on ourselves, then on our manager and his or her leadership skills and, finally, on the corporate culture.
In concrete terms, this means that managers must emphasize the link between an employee's work and the company's business objectives: to remind people of the organization's objective, its meaning, why it is important and how it is reflected in the work of each and every one of them, no matter how small (yes, the janitor who keeps the NASA corridors clean also contributes, in his own way, to sending people to the moon).
On the one hand, by placing the daily work in the logic of the company's mission.
On the other hand, by emphasizing how the overall business objectives are also consistent with the company's vision.1
By succeeding in this big gap, the manager nourishes the feelings of trust and belonging of his employees. This implies that he or she must ask what matters to them, what motivates them. The levers of the SCARF model can help him to do this:
- Status or recognition: the individual's place within a group;
- Certainty or confidence in what tomorrow will bring;
- Autonomy or the possibility to make choices, to influence decisions, to develop oneself;
- Relationships or belonging to a healthy environment;
- Equity or the need to evolve in a fair and equitable environment.
In doing so, it is able to rally its troops around a common goal, which responds to individual aspirations, taking into account the generational aspect.
Building on respective strengths
Since perceptions and expectations vary from one person to another, one possible way to manage intergenerational issues is to ensure project-based management, where roles are defined according to skills and needs. These roles will then change according to the projects. This is a good way to play on complementarities and to take advantage of the potential of a heterogeneous team. Maintaining a certain difference within the team is also good, it avoids that everyone thinks the same.
In the same vein, we can foresee that the older members coach the younger ones to help them develop their potential and assume their role as future successors... and that the younger ones practice reverse mentoring to help their elders keep up with the latest developments.
Different generations it's true... but that's okay
And it's even an advantage: more different profiles in teams means greater adaptability for the organization.
If it is true that a Boomer does not have the same expectations as a Z, it is not impossible to get them to collaborate, provided that their respective expectations are taken into account and included in their deliverables. These deliverables must in turn reflect the values and mission of the organization.
This requires managers to develop their communication skills, among others, to be able to adapt to different generations. Another necessity is to promote open and collegial management and to create intergenerational pairs that help each other, whether within the team or across the company.
And since the company's values and mission have often been mentioned, it would be logical to have a company policy in place, validated by senior management, that contributes to this generational mix.
To go further:
Intergeneration: ensuring cohesion and performance in the team
