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Boomer Reality

I’ve got nothing good to say.” That’s the answer I got when I asked a senior executive in a large Saint Louis marketing firm to talk with me about his experience with Millennials in his workplace, where more than fifty out of the 120-person staff are between twenty-two and thirty years of age. While it’s perhaps a bit extreme, this executive’s attitude sums up the general feeling I’ve encountered from Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964) and late Gen Xers (born 1965–1979) as I explored ways to bridge the gap that seems to exist everywhere between older management and Millennials (born 1980–2000), particularly the younger of the cohort.

A quick Internet search on working with Millennials, also known as Generation Y, gives the impression that bitter feelings about the younger generation are a new phenomenon and that Baby Boomers are the first generation to deal with the “ungrateful youth” around them. Ha!

Thousands of years ago Plato wrote in Socrates’ voice,¹ “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” Sounds pretty current, although I’m not sure I’ve ever had a “dainty.”

The Bible is full of stories of generational discontent; the Middle Ages progress from one contentious generation gap to another over a period of five hundred years (finally, my degree in medieval history is applicable!); characters in Jane Austen’s Regency novels comment on “young men these days;” and, of course, Paul Lynde in Bye Bye Birdie summed it all up when he sang, “What’s the matter with kids today?” Generational divides are nothing new: but now we’re the ones who have to deal with it, so it feels like a new, heavy, and more important dilemma.

While I generally dislike generalizations, I think many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers have talked themselves into bitter discontent about the Millennials in their workplaces based on (1) the reality Boomers and Xers face in their own lives and careers and (2) a set of misappropriated myths that perpetuate complaint. These two dynamics combine to create a negative point of view for many Boomers and Xers as they enter the last decade, or more likely decades, of their careers. And we’ve got a long way to go; the vast majority of Boomers can’t just retire their way out of working with younger generations. If you’re anywhere between forty and sixty, you may have ten to thirty-five years left in your working life. Now is the time to find a way to work more productively with the younger cohort; to ignore this opportunity is to consign yourself to misery.

My own plan to retire by age fifty was a pipe dream to start with, and it is nowhere near a possibility today—and not only because that birthday passed in March. Part of this change in plan is because of the way my husband and I have chosen to educate our children; part of this is having a special needs child and the unplanned costs associated with that; part of this is the reality of entrepreneurship; but most of this is because I’ve had to recover large losses in my conservatively invested savings four times since I started working after college, and my salary stalled at points during trying economic times over the last twenty-five years.

Boomer Reality

And I am not alone—Boomer after Boomer shared with me stories of having to work longer because they have not saved enough and because they lost so much of their retirement savings in the downturn of 2008 and 2009. People are living longer and need more money than they had planned. Health care is expensive, and with our longer lives we can expect that health-related expenses will grow larger than anyone had anticipated. Housing is finally starting to catch up to pre-2007 valuation drops, but according to Zillow, at least 20 percent of all U.S. homeowners are still either underwater, recovering from foreclosure, or catching up from selling short. As Paul Taylor describes in The Next America, “more than 10,000 Baby Boomers are retiring every single day, most of them not as well prepared financially as they’d hoped.”³ A 2013 Gallup Survey showed that “more than a third of workers expect to retire after sixty-five, up significantly from 14 percent in 1995 … and only a quarter of adults are hoping to retire before age sixty-five, down from 49 percent in 1995.”⁴ What looked sweet and possible in the prosperous 1990s is a distant and misconstrued memory.

If the full retirement age moves from sixty-seven as the age at which standard Social Security Benefits can be taken for people born in 1960 or later to seventy, as is currently under discussion in certain corners of Congress, the issue will be compounded. “Everyone is going to have to run faster and faster to stay in place at work, and that makes it more difficult for us to remain employed,” explains Sara Rix, PhD, senior strategic policy advisor at AARP. And once older people leave their longtime jobs, she adds, “In this economy, it’s pretty tough to find something else.”

If you’re a woman bringing home the bacon for your family, as more and more women are today, the fact that you will likely earn seventy-seven cents⁵ to eighty-two cents⁶ on the dollar, depending on the report, compared with men in the same position makes the picture a bit bleaker. Employed women will need to work even longer than men, or save a higher percentage of their income every year, to build the nest egg they will need to retire and not need financial support from their families in their later years.

The forty-nine-to-sixty age group is a really “tricky spot to be in,” says Ted, forty-eight, the general manager of a large international enterprise software company. “You can see people get pushed to the sidelines. They’ve reached their peak or slowed down, and it can be both demotivating and scary to everyone around them. They’re constantly on the watch to being replaced or displaced.”

One Millennial posted in the comments section of an online story about why Millennials are unhappy: “Now hurry the hell up and retire … it’s time to make some god damn room for a … generation that’s clambering to find a decent entry level job but can’t because you’re holding all the cards.”⁷

In response, a late Baby Boomer put this issue in perspective by posting back, “A lot of us STILL haven’t gotten where we were heading. Regardless of our education level, if we didn’t have powerful family connections, we had to work at McJobs and build our resumes on volunteer work before we got our first ‘real’ jobs that had anything to do with the degrees we earned. Many of us are still not where we wanted to be, and we’re pushing retirement age, so we can’t just step aside.”

Personally, I’m anticipating needing to work at least another fifteen years to earn what my family needs for retirement, and so are so many millions of fifty-year-olds across the country. That means I need to be productive and consistently relevant in the workplace for a long time to come. I believe nothing will keep me more relevant than being recognized for understanding Millennials and optimizing my working relationship with them.

What About Generation X?

With most Boomers anticipating longer working futures and Millennials growing in sheer numbers and percentages in the office, the squeeze is on for Generation X. The smallest cohort in the workplace, Xers find themselves in the tough position of waiting for Boomers to exit and/or in the hugely opportunistic position of creating a bridge between the two generations on either side of them.

For the GenX man ready to step into Gail’s position when she first anticipated her retirement in 2008 before she lost 40 percent of her retirement fund, and for many others like him, advancement was delayed for more than five years. And with the delay came less compensation, less opportunity, and less security for millions of GenXers waiting to fulfill their careers.

In 2012, Dimensional Research, a provider of technology market research, found that “Gen X is the most demanding age group” in the global workplace. Gen X employees are more likely than either Millennials or Baby Boomers to ask for higher job titles, promotions, off-cycle bonuses or salary increases, flexible hours, reduced hours, and flexible work locations.⁸

Delayed salary increases or job interruptions due to the Great Recession coupled with financial responsibilities such as children and aging parents are definitely creating a squeeze for Gen X. “We’ve all waited to be able to get what the Baby Boomers had and now the Millennials are demanding benefits and salaries that we had to wait for,” wrote an anonymous Gen X woman in my survey. “No wonder Millennials are driving us crazy.”

The opportunity for Generation X is to become an effective bridge between Boomers and Millennials. The first step is to understand the dynamics on both sides of the bookends, and to grasp and master the mind-set of Millennials, who are products of a different environment, culture, education, and upbringing.