Generational symbiosis very good for workplace
THE COMPLEXITIES and challenges that punctuate any crossgenerational relationship are not new.
Whether in the workplace or home, communicating, relating to and respecting one another despite vast age differences requires life skills such as patience, compromise, communication, trust and commitment.
“The workplace is a microcosm of the society we live in,” says Kay Vittee, chief executive of Quest Staffing Solutions. “We are forced into each other’s space and expected to work together to achieve common goals, often without thought and guidance on how to bridge the generational gap.”
Vittee recommends job shadowing and reverse mentoring as ideal ways to meet this challenge.
She explains that job shadowing enables the new staff member to experience the workplace and positional responsibilities, thereby observing and learning and asking questions as they go about their day.
It is also an opportunity to get a sense of the values and atmosphere of the working environment while developing valuable relationships with existing staff. It allows older staff to use their knowledge and experience in a way that keeps them relevant and engaged in the workplace. Blending tradition and the tried-and-tested way of doing things with the innovation and new thinking that new staff injects into an organisation is key.
“Reverse mentoring” was first popularised by Jack Welch, chief executive of General Electric. He instructed his top executives to identify a younger employee below them to teach them how to use the Internet. Welch, himself, partnered with a young woman in her 20s.
“Knowing how to identify and utilise the unique strengths of each generation in your workforce is critical in today’s competitive and ever-changing business landscape. Not only to ensure effective seamless internal relationships that power teams and in turn make a positive impact on your business performance, but also to understand your customer base better and, in so doing, know how to service them,” says Vittee.
In a recent Ernst & Young survey, professionals from the three “working” generations some interesting and notable differences were discovered:
• Baby boomers (people born between mid-1940s and ’60s) were found to be the most cost-effective and hardworking, yet the least entrepreneurial.
• Generation X (people born between mid-1960s and early ’80s) were found to be great team players with strong entrepreneurial and problem-solving skills, but poorly represented at executive level.
• Generation Y (people born between early 1980s and mid-’90s) were found to be the most techsavvy, but the most difficult to work with.
Generation Y prioritises workand-life balance, flexibility and transparency, ideas that contradict the workplace norm that baby boomers, for example, are accustomed to. This further explains the global concern of Generation Yers’ “job-hop” tendencies, making training investment risky.
The reality is that Generation Ys are our future workforce and leadership, it is rare that they will change to the current norms, but may rather redefine them.
Businesses need to keep the values of the previous generations alive by instilling their hardworking loyal culture in the younger generation through mentorship and coaching programmes and keep the business future-focused, agile and relevant through the use of reverse mentoring.
This is of particular importance when one considers that Generation Z are now starting to work. And while not much is known of their working behaviour yet, the signs are that they will be more technologically sophisticated and Internet-savvy than their forerunners.