Are you ready for a boss half your age?
By 2030, five generations will be working in the same office – but who will be leading who,
Is your office prepared for the 5G workforce? That’s not the company Wi-fi getting an upgrade, but Apple-speak for the fact that five generations – from Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, millennials and Gen Z to the currently infantile igen – will all be working in one office by 2030, according to a report from Moreysmith, the design and architecture studio, in partnership with The Futures Laboratory.
Of course, most of us already work in a 4G workforce. Anthony Brownstein, a 69-year-old financial consultant, tells me he has mastered “remote working” for the first time in his life, thanks to Gen Z colleagues teaching him how to use Skype. And Gen Z Ana Stark, 22, calls her cross-generational office “a working family”, where the Boomers act as wise older statesmen.
Not everyone is so age-agnostic. Over-50s roll their eyes at Gen Z upstarts’ sense of entitlement and lack of respect for authority. Millennials are angry with Baby Boomers not just for pulling up the property ladder from underneath them, but for sitting pretty at the top of the corporate pile, kiboshing any hopes of promotion. Occupational psychologist Cheryl Isaacs, a Gen Xer herself, flags longer working life as a prime challenge of the 5G workforce: “The good thing is that you are not losing the skills this older generation has. But younger generations will feel they can’t go anywhere if those positions are never vacated.”
This young generation may well feel stagnant. Tiffanie Darke, author of Now We Are 40: Whatever Happened to Generation X, sees millennials, in particular, as the demographic most in need of a hug: “They were adolescents in 9/11 when the whole axis of safety in the world shifted and then they graduated in 2008 when there was a huge economic crash and there were no jobs. It’s no wonder that they are angry and they demand stuff now.”
And perhaps that is why millennials, the Mark Zuckerberg generation, bring disruption to the workforce. “They are the first to ask questions about ethics and corporate responsibility,” notes Isaacs.
Melissa Townsend, a 29-year-old investment banker, agrees: “We want to be agents of change and everything is ‘up for grabs’ to be questioned or explored, from small things like the dress code to more fundamental business decisions.”
She cites a workshop her company ran on inter-generational work practices: “In response to the question ‘what motivates you in the workplace?’ all of the millennial groups had written pages full of things like ‘making a difference’ and ‘intellectual challenge’.” Conversely, the older generations wrote “money”.
Darke feels this is why Baby Boomers, who “have a very preconceived notion about how things should be”, struggle working with millennials. But millennial chef Chris Evans Gordon, 25, who runs a highend catering company, thinks there is a lot to learn from the loyalty and self-sacrifice of the Baby Boomer: “I was trained by chefs who would follow their head chef into the eye of a storm on a weekly basis without dreaming of quitting or changing jobs. I think this is something that is lacking from my generation.”
Gen Z, meanwhile, is the even morepolitically conscious successor to the millennial. Scarlett Curtis, 22, who writes about her demographic prolifically, is keen to debunk misconceptions, like the “lame and inaccurate” assumption that they are on their phones any more than the rest of us, and praises their determination to “work twice as hard and expect half as much”, having grown up in the aftermath of the 2008 crash.
She co-founded The Pink Protest, a feminist activist platform, with a mix of Gen Z-ers and millennials, which frequently collaborates with Gen X and Baby Boomers – and which organised last month’s #Freeperiods march on Westminster, demanding that girls who receive free school meals also be given free sanitary products, an innovative move that she sees as typical of her generation.
And what of Gen X? Darke sees her cohort as the first to revitalise the workforce, with mid-career jumps and passion-projects, after the breakdown of “the received wisdom of a job for life”; a staple of the Boomer job market. Her contemporaries make up 47per cent of the workforce and Darke believes their rebellious nature but traditional background makes them uniquely placed to bridge the gaps in inter-generational understanding.
But just how big is the divide? Research from consultancy group Towards Maturity shows minute differences. CEO Laura Overton tells me it is the unifying factors, such as the fact that the majority of under-30s and over-50s want to share their skills with colleagues, that we should focus on.
Jackie Annesley, 55, creative
director of women-friendly tech shop Soda (School of the Digital Age), couldn’t agree more. Having left her journalism career just over a year ago, she now works for a boss half her age, in a generation-spanning team where “the most impressive and well respected” is the 70-year-old.
Though she is frequently confounded by their differences – Gen Z live on Snapchat; the Boomers began their careers on a typewriter – it is this merging of differing perspectives that she loves: “We can all learn a lot from each other: technology, management skills, compassion.
“Ageism is so small minded,” she concludes. “Embracing skills from a multitude of generations just seems the smart way to do business.”
The Workplace Futures Report by Moreysmith in partnership with The Future Laboratory is launched today and will be published in full in March