Communicating across the ages

You’ve all heard the statistic: nearly 40% of the current workforce is estimated to retire in five to fifteen years. Everyone is talking about the “Brain Drain” – the Baby Boomer exodus that has already begun to eat up corporations’ intellectual capital. However, it’s important to realize that today’s corporations are not aging they are becoming multigenerational. For instance, if you look at a company today who’s average employee is 52 years young, the average age in the next ten years would be likely to drop, not rise. While the average age of the working population is going up, companies are going through a massive influx of younger workers. The result is that today’s corporations are likely to have four distinct demographic groups, all working together.

Communicating across the “ages”

It is more than likely that Generation X managers at your company will some day, if not already, be supervising Baby Boomer employees who are twice their age and five time more experienced. It is possible for these groups to successfully work and learn together but organizations must first train employees to throw out all the traditional ways of thinking. The new workforce does not have a place for thoughts like, “He’s too old to grasp this new technology,” or “There’s nothing this college graduate can bring to the table that I don’t already know.”

In the old days, companies had a “wait-your-turn” philosophy. One generation takes its turn to solve the problems of the day and then the next generation took its turn to solve their problems and any leftover from the previous generation. Today, that will not work.

A new model might involve a collaboration of generations that work together in leadership roles, where all employees can contribute their ideas and experiences. It will be important to train employees to welcome and understand the differences and learn how to value each group. In the past, the younger generation awaited the baton hand-off from their older peers. Today’s successful workforce will be trained to accept wisdom, knowledge and ideas as being dominant – not people.

Changing Direction

Changing the mindset and historical workplace philosophies will not be easy. The best supervisors will have a difficult road persuading employees to embrace the wisdom of all ages. In order to be successful, your company must continue to ask very challenging questions:

• How do we tap the wisdom of the younger generation?
• How do we tap the wisdom of older generations?
• How do we create two-way interaction where we learn from each other?
• What do younger/older employees see from their perspective that I cannot see from mine?
• When you decide to teach employees to work together across traditional age biases, you will be rewarded with new opportunities for success—the means will be tapping the wisdom of the ages.

About the Author

Mary Kausch has more than 20 years experience in the human resources and consulting fields. Her company, HR etc!! “helps good people produce great results”. She has become known as St. Louis’s “generational guru,” having worked with more than 13,000 employees across the United States, bridging the gap of generational values, attitudes and behavior expressed in the workplace.