RULE #7

7

TAP THE POWER OF MULTIPLE GENERATIONS

Age is only a state of mind.

—Lailah Gifty Akita¹

Navigating Multiple Generations in the Workplace

Every workplace needs age diversity. Why? When organizations encourage employees of diverse ages and cultures to work together products and processes are approached in new and innovative ways. Quite simply, age diversity drives the type of creative thinking that leads to greater engagement and innovation.

Multiple generations in the workplace is the new normal. Workers are staying in their jobs longer. The growth of older workers is driven in part by an increased life expectancy. According to the Social Security Administration, men who reach 65 years old today can expect to live until age 84.3 and women until age 86.6 years.² So if we are living until our mid 80s and want to retire on 50 percent of our income, it is likely we will want and need to continue working until our mid to late 60s and even into our 70s.

What is the implication of living and working longer? We believe we will see more employee compensation packages that include not only salary, bonus, and stock options but also generous learning allowances funding skill development for employees. A company’s commitment to invest in the employability of all its workers will become an even stronger component of its recruiting message.

What generation are you? Figure 7.1 outlines key generational cohorts in the workplace.

Figure 7.1 Key generational cohorts in the workplace

We increasingly see multiple generations working side by side as part of their everyday experience at work. Sometimes this means five generations on a single team!

This mix of generations in the workforce, as shown in Figure 7.2, is as age diverse as it’s ever been with millennials (those born between 1982 and 1993) the largest generational cohort in the U.S. workforce as of 2015. Millennials and Gen Zers are targeted to comprise over 60 percent of the U.S. workforce, with 73 percent aspiring to be leaders in the next five years.³

Figure 7.2 The changing mix of generations in the workforce

One implication of age diversity in the workplace is younger bosses managing older workers. This phenomenon is already prevalent in industries like IT, professional services, and accounting, and it will likely become the norm across all industries as companies promote millennials and Gen Xers into leadership positions while boomers remain in the workplace.

In our “Multi-Generational Leadership Study,” sponsored by Future Workplace and Beyond.com, we found 83 percent of employees have seen millennials managing older workers in their office, and the majority (75 percent) of respondents across all age groups see this is a growing trend.⁴ What’s telling is that 37 percent of millennials admit that it is difficult to manage people who are older than they are.⁵

Dan Schawbel, millennial partner at Future Workplace, shares this; “the sheer size of the millennial generation means more will be in leadership roles and it’s causing anxiety for them because they’ve never had to manage older generations before.” These skills are not taught in school, so millennials are relying on their managers to coach them. Our data supports the importance of this, with 45 percent of boomer and Gen Xer respondents indicating that millennials’ lack of managerial experience could have a negative impact on a company’s culture.⁶

We do see pockets of success among younger manager and older employee combinations, but it takes coaching and open communications among both sides. One of our clients is a 65-year-old instructional designer who needed and wanted to continue to work after getting laid off from her prior employer. She was thrilled to find a new full-time position after one year in the job market, but to her surprise her manager was the same age as her 44-year-old son! She handled this role reversal with humility, emphasizing her desire to focus on her job, not the age difference, and to think positively about the opportunity of sharing her years of expertise with her new manager. Her manager was sensitive to this and today she is celebrating three years working with her younger manager often traveling together to human resources and training conferences.

We will see more of these situations where a younger manager supervises an older worker, so it will be up to the manager and the employee to make this work. Our advice: leaders will need to move beyond focusing on generational differences to build generational intelligence, tapping the power of multiple generations to provide insights into launching new products, services, and markets. We define generational intelligence as the ability to understand the similarities, differences, and expectations of each generational cohort. Understanding multiple employee generational cohorts is important to serving multiple generations of customers. Generational intelligence requires a constant focus on the benefits an age-diverse workforce can bring to the organization.

The New Face of the Workforce

Looking across the workplace, in addition to age diversity, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports today’s workforce is composed of more women and is also more culturally diverse than ever before.⁷

According to William H. Frey, senior fellow in the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program and author of Diversity Explosion, “For the first time America’s racial and ethnic minorities now make up about half of the under-5 age children.”⁸

This trend is likely to continue: by 2020, 40 percent of the population will be racial minorities, and more than half of the population under 18 will be racial minorities. By 2023, whites will total less than half of the U.S. population under 30.⁹

What does this imply for your workplace? We expect cultural intelligence to become as important as emotional and generational intelligence. Cultural intelligence requires a combination of knowledge, experience, and social connections of and with other cultures. Author Dr. David Livermore defines cultural intelligence as the capability to function effectively in culturally diverse situations. In his book, Driven by Difference, Livermore shares how Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, deliberately creates multicultural new-product teams to launch new brands: “Novartis uses multi-cultural employee resource groups to provide market research for launching new brands. The company estimates they’ve saved millions of dollars by using built-in diverse multi-cultural teams in the new product development process.”

In addition to the workforce being more age and culturally diverse, it is also now composed of more women, making up nearly 50 percent of the U.S. workforce. They are the majority of students in American colleges and graduate schools, and they own 30 percent of small businesses. Women are increasingly becoming breadwinners in their families. Of the more than 1,400 women surveyed—40 percent of whom were single or divorced—53 percent stated they were the breadwinners in their households. Nearly a quarter of married women surveyed said they earned more money than their spouses.¹⁰ Our Rule #8: “Build Gender Equality” explores the gender equality issue in more detail and provides recommendations to address gender inequality in the workplace

Workplace Generational Intelligence Framework

As we see multiple generations working side by side, we are also seeing attitude, rather than age, characterizing these generational cohorts. The IBM Institute for Business Value conducted a survey of 1,784 multiple-generation employees across 12 countries and found roughly the same percentage of millennials (20 percent) want to do work they are passionate about, as do Gen Xers (21 percent) and boomers (23 percent).¹¹ While these attitudes and desires on what to expect from work may be similar, there are some distinct preferences and goals important to each of the generations. While these key preferences are powerful influencers, ultimately they are only indicators of what’s important to each generational cohort.¹² For example, millennials are expressing a desire for student loan debt repayment while generation Xer’s want help with saving for college for their children. Forward-looking companies are recognizing this and adapting differentiated talent management strategies on personal, team, and organizational levels.

Let’s look at each of the U.S. generations to understand the specific preferences and mindsets each brings to the workplace. After reviewing numerous research studies and working with Future Workplace clients, we created the Workplace Generational Intelligence Framework as a way to highlight the unique needs of the generations within the context of the workplace experience.

Our Workplace Generational Intelligence Framework shares what is important to each generation on three levels:

•  Personal level. What do workers want for themselves? We highlight insights on learning and development.

•  Team level. What do workers seek of colleagues? We highlight insights on collaboration.

•  Organizational level. What do workers expect of the organization? We highlight work preference expectations.

An overview of the Workplace Generational Intelligence Framework is illustrated in Figure 7.3.

Figure 7.3 Workplace Generational Intelligence Framework

Understanding Generation Z

The oldest members of Gen Z are now in the workforce. By 2020, Gen Z will make up one of every eight workers, but Gen Z workers may exert disproportionate influence for their numbers.¹³ Like millennials, Gen Zers are keen to learn, be mentored, and engage deeply in the workplace. Unlike millennials, they are more realistic with their career pursuits and are even more entrepreneurial, with a passion for being ambitious and high achieving.

Personal Expectations: Deliberate and Goal-Oriented Learning

Members of generation Z want to build skills early. While other generations have regarded play as a break from learning, Gen Z views learning itself as play. Eighty-nine percent of Gen Zers state they currently spend part of their free time in activities they consider to be “productive and creative” as opposed to simply “hanging out.”¹⁴ Gen Zers are also more likely than millennials at the same age to have worked on developing a skill or craft (42 percent versus 25 percent).¹⁵ They appreciate on-demand learning and prefer learning to be accessed when and how they wish, exhibiting a high preference for mobile learning.

Gen Zers also show an interest in developing a range of actionable how-to skills, including how to start a business (58 percent), how to use graphics for design (51 percent), how to shoot and edit videos (50 percent), and how to build or create apps (50 percent).¹⁶ Gen Z is a visually oriented group that gravitates to learning via outlets such as YouTube, Instagram, and other social channels rather than written communications. Companies that recognize this will adapt how and where they recruit and develop Gen Zers.

Gen Zers focus on goal-oriented learning, and this has resulted in a number of new start-ups, led by Gen Zers themselves. Consider Zach Latta, who tested out of his Los Angeles public high school at 16 to work as an engineer and web developer. After receiving Peter Thiel’s $100,000 fellowship to defer college, Latta, at the age of 18, started his own organization, Hack Club, a coding curriculum offered to high school students, and is honored as one of the youngest on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. In just one year, Hack Club has been adopted in 62 schools across 16 states. The vision, says Latta, “is to offer a turn-key coding curriculum, using the latest coding software, and to encourage a more diverse segment of high schoolers, women and young people from multiple ethnic backgrounds, to learn coding.” To capitalize on the growing global phenomenon of developing coding skill for school aged children, Latta is expanding Hack Club globally. There are currently clubs in Australia, Canada, Estonia, India, the United States, and Zimbabwe, with further countries to come.

Within Teams: An Experimental Mindset

Gen Zers exhibit more entrepreneurial interest than millennials. Their prevailing attitude is very much “Be experimental—let’s try and see.” In fact, Lotta points to one of the high school students in the Hack Club who is working to kill the collaboration tool Slack by building a better app for real-time messaging, quite an ambitious goal as Slack generated more than 1 million daily active users in just three years! You can read more about the experimentation mindset in the “Be Intrapreneurial” section of Rule #3: “Be an Agile Leader.”

We also see Gen Z questioning the value of higher education. Lotta (whose parents are social workers with graduate degrees) never attended college, and he believes a college degree simply is not essential to ambitious 16-year-olds or even to employers. According to research by Universum, among a global sample of 49,000 Gen Zers, 55 percent say they are interested in starting their own company—a figure that is even higher in emerging markets. And when asked if they would join the workforce instead of pursuing a college degree, 15 percent in North America said yes, and 47 percent said maybe. Nearly 60 percent of global Gen Zers are open to learning about an employer’s investment in continuing education in the job search process.¹⁷

From the Organization: Early Career Connections

Gen Zers exhibit an early interest in experiential volunteering and job shadowing as a preferred development need. Secondary schools are addressing this need by incorporating internships and job shadowing into the curriculum. While internships are understandably important during college, they are now cropping up as commonplace among 13- to 17-year-olds as well. One partnership, the Minnesota Center for Advanced Professional Studies, provides high school juniors and seniors with the option of working half time with a local employer to learn a skill, job-shadow, or be involved in a mentoring program to acquire real-world skills. Kristi Broom, the parent of a 15-year-old living in Minneapolis, enrolled in this program and is herself a mentor to students in the program. She sees huge benefits to this: “This is what more high schools should be doing, nurturing their students’ entrepreneurial bent and giving them an opportunity to view various professionals firsthand.” Interestingly, according to Broom, the school system came to form the partnership when it ran out of space in the local high school and had to think creatively about what to do with the student population. “In the end, this opportunity to get involved in the workplace early is a win-win for employers and students,” says Broom.

Questions to Ask About Gen Z

1. What can we show Gen Z in visual form (video, infographics) to convey our employer brand?

2. What opportunities could we provide for Gen Z to learn in a self-directed way?

3. Could our organization create opportunities to recruit local Gen Zers to job-shadow key managers in our organization?

4. How could we develop partnership programs with secondary schools in our area to build career discussions with Gen Zers?

5. How is our organization touting our investment in new-hire training and development to college recruits and those in secondary school?

Understanding Millennials

As millennials are now the largest generational cohort of the U.S. workforce, it’s the millennial mindset that business leaders need to be cognizant of. Millennials want to collaborate and cocreate with their employer, and this translates into creating a product, a new service, and even the workplace experience.

Alex Castellarnau at Dropbox, the file transfer service, says, With millennials, “a new brand, service or product is only started by the company; it’s finished by the customers.¹⁸

Leaders need to recognize the importance of building cocreation into various aspects of the workplace experience and allow millennials to contribute their input and learn from each other.

Personal Expectations: Mentorship

Millennials recognize the competitive landscape for new jobs. More than 70 million boomers will be vacating the workforce over the next decade, and there is plenty of competition for the new positions from the more than 80 million millennials on top of the 50 million-plus Gen Xers. The millennial solution to this: learn from each other in stretch assignments and mentoring relationships. In fact, 53 percent of global millennials surveyed say mentoring is the most effective way for them to learn and grow on the job.¹⁹ Companies are listening to these requests for mentoring and are launching programs such as PepsiCo’s “Conn3ct,” which pairs millennials with executive sponsors who mentor them. But millennials are not waiting for their company to create a mentoring program; they are finding mentors on their own and persuading them to help accelerate their career development.

Some are finding mentors only a few years older. For example, Andi Litz, a millennial who formerly worked at General Electric and is now a senior HR manager at Activision Studio, explains, “I look for mentors who are only a couple of years senior and can relate to my experiences. Their input and advice will be realistic and achievable.” Additionally, as she points out, it’s often “easier to develop a trusting relationship” with them, because they’re more accessible than senior executives.

In Litz’s case, she took a new position in Selma, Tennessee, working for GE, and she knew almost no one. “It can be quite difficult to move into a remote job in a small town, while working with a big organization like GE,” she said. “I decided to reach out to the person who had been in my job, even though he was now in Georgia. Since he had just left the job, he was really helpful on things from what to do on the weekends to navigating the big picture at GE. We had lots of phone calls, text messages, and instant messaging. I’d be on a call with people from all over the place, and I could IM him to find out what an acronym was, or what significance there was to the initiative we were discussing. The funny thing is, I never even met him in person until I’d been there a year.”²⁰

While some millennials are taking mentoring into their own hands, others are being paired to mentor a senior executive in what is being called reverse or reciprocal mentoring. MasterCard has been an early adopter of reciprocal mentoring where senior business leaders at the firm are paired with millennials, often to build their social media expertise. Ron Garrow, formerly chief human resources officer of MasterCard, took advantage of this. Garrow’s reverse mentor was Rebecca Kaufman—an avid social media user in her mid-twenties—who worked with Garrow on using Twitter and LinkedIn to drive business results. Across MasterCard, this reciprocal mentoring program now has over 300 participants. Janice Burns, chief learning officer at MasterCard, sees multiple benefits here; an important one is having senior executives develop an understanding of how millennials consume information differently and examine the implications of this on creating a more consumer-driven HR organization.

Within Teams: Synergy of Employee Affinity Groups

Employee affinity groups (also known as employee resource groups, or ERGs) started in the 1960s. The first one was at Xerox Corporation in 1964. Today, they bring employees together to discuss common issues within groups such as female leaders, veterans, people with disabilities, working parents, single parents, LGBT employees, Latino leaders, and now generational groups. Among the most innovative of the generational employee affinity groups is a group known as the Millennial Corps and led by Samantha Klein, a millennial at IBM, who, with three other IBMers, started the Millennial Corps in 2014 after presenting the idea to senior executives.

Today the Millennial Corps includes more than 4,000 IBMers in over 70 countries and is a community of millennials and millennial-minded employees who come together both in person and online (using IBM Connections, the online collaboration portal) to spark innovation and share feedback with senior leaders on key initiatives within the company. The Millennial Corps consists of both millennials born between the years 1982 and 1993 and those who describe themselves as “#MIBB!” (“Millennials in Boomer Bodies”).

Says Klein, “Millennial Corps is a volunteer group and while it is not a formal ERG, we act like one, advising IBM leaders on how to better create IBM products and services appealing to those with a Millennial mindset.” Klein goes on, “Millennial Corps has sparked a number of new insights for IBM in the past year. We were advisors to the IBM + Apple partnership and generated more than 500 ideas for industry-specific enterprise apps. In the last year, Millennial Corps forged a partnership with IBM’s Transformation & Operations executive and advised IBM on the development of a real time app to provide instant feedback anytime, anywhere.” The Millennial Corps’ input ranged from identifying the need for an agile approach to giving and receiving feedback, proposing specific capabilities for the app, and then assisting in naming it. It is officially called ACE, which stands for appreciation, coaching, and evaluation, and as noted earlier in Chapter 1, it is now part of IBM’s global performance management program allowing IBMers to receive real-time feedback from managers and peers.

Klein is now expanding the Millennial Corps globally with other millennial employee affinity groups that currently exist at IBM customers and partners, including PepsiCo and MetLife. These multiclient gatherings of millennials will discuss the changing needs and expectations of millennials in the global marketplace.

From the Organization: Purposeful Work and Financial Support

What do millennials want from work? At a macrolevel, millennials want what we all want from work: purposeful work, flexibility to work where, when, and how they want, and access to continuous on-demand learning! Millennials are simply the first to so clearly voice their needs and expect them to be met.

However, some of the millennial expectations are unique to this generation. One continuing millennial request is the desire to experience global opportunities at a young age. One in ten U.S. undergraduates now studies abroad before graduating. A PwC global survey of millennials finds that 37 percent of millennials view working abroad as a desired career path and are requesting this as early as possible compared with 27 percent of nonmillennials.²¹

Dow Chemical company was one of the first organizations to combine sustainability efforts with leadership development. Dow along with IBM, Deloitte, Accenture, and EY has created a powerful alliance between global citizenship and human resources to provide future leaders with firsthand exposure and experience in the regions of the world where the company is poised to grow. At Dow Chemical, the program is called Leadership in Action. Employees work in teams of five to solve some of the challenges facing local organizations. The countries Dow has focused on include Ghana in 2013, Ethiopia in 2014, and Indonesia in 2015. Dow employees work on projects such as addressing STEM education, providing sustainable farming techniques, and ensuring access to safe high quality drinking water. While these programs are good for society and the world, they are also beneficial to Dow. “There are multiple facets of this project that are exciting,” says Johanna Soderstrom, vice president, Human Resources at Dow Chemical, namely to expand our future leaders, understanding of Dow and what we are doing for society. We believe if we can make our employees’ jobs more purposeful, then we can earn their engagement and loyalty. We have anecdotal stories of prospective employees who hear about the Leadership in Action program and apply for a job at Dow. That’s pretty powerful in terms of talent attraction.” Dow employees are nominated for participation in Leadership in Action, and this includes seven months of virtual consulting with one week on the ground consulting with a local community.²² Programs like Leadership in Action and IBM Corporate Service Corps are building the type of globally minded leaders needed for future growth.

In addition to incorporating global citizenship into human resource programs, companies are also creating customized benefits targeted to attract and retain millennials. One of the most innovative is student debt loan repayment. According to a U.S. White House report, the total student outstanding loan debt surpassed $1.3 trillion, making it the second largest category of household debt. The national default rate on student loans made by the government is now 11.8 percent. The average student loan debt for graduates with a bachelor’s degree is $37,000, up 78 percent from a decade ago.²³

A small but growing number of companies are stepping up to address this. While the Society for Human Resource Management reports only 3 percent of businesses offer a student loan repayment benefit, forward-looking companies competing for top talent, such as PwC, Fidelity Investments, Natixis Global Asset Management, and NVIDIA, have recently announced student loan debt repayment as a new benefit to recruit and retain millennials. The loan repayment a company funds varies, from $٢,٠٠٠ per employee per year at Fidelity Investments to $١,٢٠٠ per employee at PwC with a maximum benefit of $١٠,٠٠٠. These funds are directly deposited into an employee’s student loan account and taxed as ordinary income. “Since offering this benefit in January ٢٠١٦,” says Jennifer Hanson, Head of Associate Experience at Fidelity Investments, “Our employees who have taken advantage of this have collectively saved $٥ million in principal and shaved off an average of eight months of loan payments.”

As more companies add this benefit, the government is taking note. Representatives Rodney Davis, Republican of Illinois, and Gwen Graham, Democrat of Florida, introduced a bill to allow workers to receive up to $5,250 in tax-free payments each year to help repay student loans. This is on par with the existing benefit for employer tuition reimbursement.²⁴

Look for continued innovation in how companies assist millennials in repaying their student loans as a lever to both attract and retain talent.

Questions to Ask About Millennials

1. Does our organization have an employee resource group for millennials?

2. Does our organization link organizational purpose and global citizenship to developing future leaders?

3. What is our organization doing to develop millennials as cultural leaders?

4. What new benefits could our organization create to target the unique needs of millennials?

5. Has our organization considered a reverse mentoring program pairing millennials with more senior executives?

Understanding Generation X

The youngest of Gen Xers are 36 and the oldest 52. Generation X is often referred to as demography’s long-neglected “middle child.” Numbering just 46 million in the United States, Gen X is small compared with the 76 million boomers and 80 million millennials. Yet Generation X makes up the bulk of potential successors for many management jobs.

Personal Expectations: Customization of Job and Benefits

As Gen X workers move out of their thirties and into their forties and fifties, they are increasingly interested in workplace flexibility. While this is of interest to all the generations, Gen Xers are one of the first generations where both parents are working full time and juggling the demands of a growing family with the demands of a career. In regard to benefits, 40 percent of Gen Xers report that they worry about reduction in work benefits, in contrast to 33 percent of millennials and 26 percent of boomers. As companies create customized benefits targeting millennials—such as student debt loan repayment—Gen Xers are also looking for customization of benefits, especially as many are saving for their children’s college educations. As Gen Xers voice their needs for benefit customization, expect more innovation in policies customized to retain Gen Xers such as offering contributions to 529 college savings accounts. Since Gen Xers are in the prime of their careers and prone to job hopping, this could be a smart move for companies.

Within Teams: Structured Development Opportunities

Job hopping is now how we manage our careers, as we noted in Rule #5 with the advent of the continual job seeker. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average worker today stays at each job for only 4.4 years. The expected tenure of the workforce’s youngest employees, millennials and Gen Zers, is about half that time.²⁵

While the media focus has been on millennials job hopping, it turns out that talented Gen Xers are also prone to job hopping. A study by Deloitte Consulting reports that only 37 percent of Gen Xers plan on staying with their current employers, compared with 44 percent of millennials and 52 percent of boomers.²⁶

High-performing Gen Xers are in demand as companies target employees with specific skill sets. All this points to a new focus on retaining Gen Xers and keeping them engaged with the company either through customized benefits or structured company development programs. One company exploring this is JetBlue with its JetBlue Scholars program, which acknowledges talented Gen Xers who have amassed both job experience and certifications at the company but do not have a college degree. The JetBlue Scholars program provides both mentoring and career counseling to JetBlue crew members (employees) who want to gain college credit for their work experience.

From the Organization: Future-Focused Career Opportunities

Some forward-looking companies are creating special developmental stretch assignments and opportunities to keep talented Gen Xers who are susceptible to poaching from recruiters and former employers.

According to research from the Center for Work-Life Policy, nearly 40 percent of Gen Xers report they eventually want to become entrepreneurs.²⁷ One way that companies are addressing this need, is to build an intrapreneurial mindset through assignments at a company innovation center. According to research by Capgemini Consulting, 38 percent of the leading 200 companies have set up an innovation center, or a physical space in a global tech hub, to test new disruptive solutions and business models in the marketplace.²⁸

These innovation centers provide high-performing Gen Xers and others with a passion for new-product development to work on disruptive business models. Examples abound: BMW is setting up an innovation center in Mountain View, California, to develop new digital product offerings to add to the BMWConnectedDrive. And Axa Lab is the insurance company’s innovation outpost in Silicon Valley launched to better understand the insurance needs of the digital customer.

Questions to Ask About Gen Xers

1. Does our organization track the workforce needs of Gen Xers?

2. Is our organization tracking the retention of Gen Xers? What are we learning over time?

3. Are there opportunities to create stretch assignments for high-performing Gen Xers?

4. Could our organization offer customized benefits to help with the education of their children or the elder care of their parents?

5. What could we do to better address the specific mid-career challenges of Gen Xers through more online continuing education opportunities?

Understanding Boomers

The average age at which U.S. retirees are leaving the workplace is 62, up from 57 in 1991 when Gallup first began tracking this data.²⁹ Recent studies by Wells Fargo suggest that only 48 percent of Americans aged 60–75 have saved enough to live comfortably in retirement, demonstrating that many older Americans will stay employed longer out of financial necessity. Others remain working for the intellectual challenges and the sense of continuity and identity that work provides.

Boomers constitute the most experienced generational cohort in the workplace. The challenge for employers is how to best leverage their knowledge and experience while providing them ways to continue to contribute in the workplace, and when they are ready to exit, to pass along their institutional knowledge.

Personal Expectations: Opt-in Learning and Development Opportunities

While the myth is that boomers are stuck in their ways and resistant to change, a number of more recent studies suggest that boomers are highly adaptable workers and respond particularly well to opt-in learning opportunities and temporary in-house job rotations.³⁰

Some companies, like MasterCard, have launched career mobility centers similar to the in-house career centers often found in universities. These career mobility centers allow employees to work on company projects that are not associated with their daily roles. The initiative, called Smart Steps, allows managers to post the details of a project in the system, and employees from all across the company register their interest. Employees do not need the approval of their managers to apply for a project, mainly because the experiences are in addition to their day job.

“When we started this,” explains Janice Burns, MasterCard CLO, “we were thinking this would be ideal for our Millennial employees, but we have been surprised to see the uptick among our Boomers as a way to keep learning on the job!” She continues, “Registering for the Career Mobility Center allows employees to manage their own development. It’s not quite mentoring but it does expose our employees to a range of new functions and roles inside the company.”

Within Teams: Younger Manager–Older Worker Training

Younger leaders managing older workers is becoming increasingly common in the workplace. A CareerBuilder survey of 3,800 full-time workers and 2,200 hiring managers found that one-third (34 percent) of U.S. workers say they have a younger boss, and 15 percent work for someone at least 10 years younger.³¹

These new reporting relationships can take getting used to. Keith Craig, a boomer who is a public relations manager for Linode, a cloud-hosting provider, reports to Casey Smith, the company’s VP of marketing, a Gen Xer who is more than a decade younger than Craig, who is in his fifties.

While this can create generational conflict, Keith sees the reporting structure as a partnership just as we profiled earlier in this chapter with the older instructional designer working for a younger manager. As a boomer parent, Craig identified a new market segment for the company: targeting high schools with computer science clubs. With his manager’s approval, Craig presented new offerings for both internships as well as guest lectures by Linode employees.

Craig does admit to feeling his age. “I am a Boomer who grew up on Captain Kangaroo. I talk differently and dress differently than most of the people I work with,” he says, adding that when his colleagues’ water cooler chat crosses into unfamiliar territory, he returns to his desk and does a quick Internet search. “Google is a great cheat sheet.”³²

From the Organization: Support to Work Longer

Many boomers want and need to work longer. A 2015 study by Allianz found that 82 percent of boomers claim that a traditional retirement is a “romantic fantasy of the past.” And some plan never to retire, according to a Allianz.³³

This is reinforced by a Bankers Life study reporting 41 percent of boomers still in the workplace expect to work until age 69 or never retire! Six in ten boomers say they work for nonfinancial reasons, such as staying mentally sharp (18 percent), keeping physically active (15 percent), and maintaining a sense of purpose (15 percent). Of those already retired, 69 percent of boomers say they would have liked to have been able to work longer.³⁴

Some companies are recognizing this and starting to recruit boomers for new jobs. TD Ameritrade recently launched a recruiting program called “Grey Is the New Green,” inspired by a line in the film The Intern, profiling a boomer (played by a 71-year-old Robert De Niro) who interns for a millennial (played by a 31-year-old Anne Hathaway). TD Ameritrade’s rationale was to identify boomers who want to return to the workplace and specifically work in their call center. As Catherine Manginelli, managing director of Talent Management for TD Ameritrade, reports, “I’m noticing older generations still want to work and we as a company have to do a better job of recruiting them and identifying job opportunities for them. While we focus much of our recruiting efforts on Millennials, we are now turning to Boomers who want to return to the workplace on a flexible schedule.”

Questions to Ask About Boomers

1. How common is the younger manager and older worker trend at our organization and do we need to explicitly address this?

2. Is our organization creating opportunities for boomers to be mentors and coaches and be involved in employee resource groups targeted to multigenerational employees?

3. Are there opt-in learning and career development programs to allow boomers to learn new skills and job roles?

4. Are we involving boomers enough in formal and informal job rotations as part of continuing education?

6. Is our organization conducting enough workforce analytics to estimate the percentage of boomers eligible to retire in the next two to five years? What are we doing about this expected exit of boomers from the workplace?

Generations Are a Global Phenomenon

Political, socioeconomic, and cultural events in a country have a transformative impact on shaping generational cohorts. The generational cohorts commonly defined to date have been those in the United States. The defining year was 1945, the year that marked the end of World War II and the beginning of the boomer generation. But what about globally?

While distinct generational cohorts reflect a country’s socioeconomic and political events, the same technology that enables millennials to post a million selfies a day also gives them a window into the lives of people around the globe. In this sense, present-day millennials have been called the first global generation. Millennials born in the United States (between 1982 and 1993) may be more similar to their generational cohorts in China, India, and South Korea than they are to people of different ages in their own country.

Consider China, where the defining year was 1949, the foundation of the People’s Republic. What followed was 30 years of economic and political turmoil that had a significant impact on the attitudes, aspirations, hopes, and fears of the population. Change in China introduced cultural and economic transformation in each decade, causing four generational groupings: post 50s, post 60s, post 70s, and post 80s. However, the generations present in China mirror the broad generational cohorts of boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials found in the United States.

Take two of these Chinese generational groupings, post 70s and post 80s. The post-70s generation (including those born between 1970 and 1979, analogous to Gen Xers in the United States) are more Western in outlook than preceding generations because they include the first college graduates who choose their own careers and benefited from on-campus recruiting at college.

By comparison the post-80s generation (including those born between 1980 and 1989, analogous to millennials in the United States) is the first generation of single children following the introduction of the one-child policy (abolished in 2015). Members of that generation have a reputation for being confident and individualistic. Post-70s leaders who manage a post-80s team find these younger team members more focused on career self-development than they are, and the post-70s leaders experience similar generational tensions as their American counterparts who manage a millennial team.³⁵

What this implies is the importance of leaders to understand the demographics, values, beliefs, and expectations of talent in each country and how these are both similar and different and then adjust recruitment, development, and retention strategies accordingly.

What Will the Next-Generation Workforce Look Like?

While we have examined the major generations in today’s workplace, we also need to recognize the generation beyond Gen Z. This is Generation Alpha, only 7 years old in 2017 and 15 years old by 2025. Generation Alpha members will be the most diverse of all the generations. In 2011, Generation Alpha reached a demographic milestone: there were more Generation Alpha babies born to minority families than white families in the United States. By 2020, more than 50 percent of high schoolers, the foundation of the future workforce of the 2030s, will be non-white.

In addition to being ethnically diverse, Generation Alpha members are literally growing up with a connected, interactive device in their hands and with their millennial parents chronicling their every move on social platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Even more than millennials and Gen Zers who use technology extensively, many alphas will spend the bulk of their formative years completely immersed in technology, growing up in environments where their actions and movements are quantified, and will see this as part of how they experience the world around them.

If you have not already seen the popular YouTube video A Magazine Is an IPad That Does Not Work, it is worth the 90 seconds of your time. The video shows a one-year-old girl playing with an iPad. She is then handed several magazines. She tries to turn the print pages of a magazine by touching them. Nothing happens, and she quickly returns to the iPad as she is accustomed to making something happen by her touch. The popular YouTube video (seen nearly 5 million times) ends with this statement: “A magazine is an iPad that does not work. And it will be so for the rest of her life! Steve Jobs has coded a part of her OS (Operating System).”³⁶

Members of generation alpha will likely enter the workplace as 15-year-old interns by 2025, driven by the ambitions of their millennial parents. As they have grown up with technology built into many of their toys, from customizable robots teaching engineering concepts to mobile apps accompanying toys, we can expect this generation to be the most hyperconnected of all.

Just as IBM is using the Millennial Corps to inform the company on the needs of millennials in both the workplace and the marketplace, we will see companies tapping both Gen Z and over time even Generation Alpha to inform them on the needs and expectations these next generations will have in the workplace.

The Diverse Next-Generation Workplace

The key to navigating a workplace with multiple generations and cultures along with increasing numbers of women is to recognize that all of this adds to the diversity of thought in solving today’s pressing business issues. The opportunity for leaders is this: use workplace diversity to your advantage and build an inclusive work environment where diversity adds to innovative thinking.

Perhaps most importantly, leaders need to recognize that the age, gender, and cultural diversity of a company’s employees mirrors the diversity of its customer base. So this is not only a human resource issue; it is a business issue and an opportunity to better serve your organization’s diverse market segments.

MY ACTION PLAN

Myself

•  How do I fit into the generational preferences described in the Workplace Generational Intelligence Framework?

•  Which of my preferences reflect those of my generation, and which are different? Am I a millennial in a boomer body (#MIBB)?

•  What biases do I hold about the different generations or cultures that I work with?

My Team

•  Do we exhibit “unconscious bias” in how we treat the different generations, cultures, or genders that work for us?

•  What are the various generations represented on our team? How does this affect our team dynamic?

•  Do we take into account the different cultural preferences of team members in our organization?

My Organization

•  What are the age demographics of our organization’s global workforce today, and what do we project this to be over the next three to five years?

•  Does the age and cultural makeup of our workforce resemble that of our customers? What are we doing to learn about both?

•  How do we proactively plan ahead for the generational and culture shift of our future job candidates?