“This youth is spoiled to the core. It will never be like the one of the past. Today’s will not be able to preserve our culture…. ” so wrote Socrates in the fifth century B.C., and similar sentences are repeated even today when previous generations look to the young, reflecting the extent to which a perceived difficulty of intergenerational collaboration has always been present.
The difficulty of working together across generations: an evergreen
The topic of “generations” came to scholarly attention in 1991, when in the book “Generations: The History of America’s Future,” Howe and Strauss defined them as sets of people who, having had experiences in common until the age of majority, share similar typical values and behaviors.
If the issue of the relationship between generations has always existed, why is it a particularly hot topic today?
For the first time in history, abetted by improved quality of life and sudden changes that increasingly narrow the gap in years between one generation and the next, of the 7 generations coexisting in the world, 5 are still actively engaged in work, posing critical issues within organizations.
Generational difference in business and Interaging: a threat or an opportunity?
The literature has identified a specific barrier to the relationship between generations, referred to as ageism. This bias emerges when people are assigned tasks based on their age.
For example, when faced with a technologically complex project, unconscious bias leads to the assumption that a younger person may be better suited to handle it.
Biases take shape at several key moments in an employee’s life cycle. Let us examine three of them:
- Recruitment and hiring: when younger candidates are favored simply because of their age
- Development and training: when older workers receive fewer opportunities for training, promotion, and rewards, or are discriminated against
- Termination of employment: when a company “refreshes” its workforce starting with the most senior employees, creating encouraging opportunities for exit.
But beyond the age difference, are we so different?
People are looking for flexibility, support, appreciation, safe contexts where there is trust, they want to share good coffee: none of these needs are tied to one generation. Recent studies, moreover, show that people have much more in common than they think, such as a drive for innovation, an orientation toward learning, and ways of working.
Well, focusing on the opportunity to overcome bias leads us to reflect on how in reality, beyond generational diversity, we are much more similar than we imagine.
Not only that. Coexistence between generations-as well as that between different genders, cultures or sexual orientations-if valued, can increase the value expressed by people and positively affect the overall performance of the company.
The challenge today is to foster collaboration and mutual understanding, using differences as a strategic lever for the well-being of people and business.
Promoting Interaging produces benefits for workers, as well as for organizations
Within Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices, the branch of age management, which encompasses structured and mutually consistent corporate interventions aimed at enhancing the strengths of workers, including in consideration of their age.
For individual workers, the benefits are many:
- improved motivation and sense of belonging
- Increased job satisfaction and sense of recognition
- better work-life balance
- Maintenance of work ability and employability throughout the career.
But more generally, promoting age-heterogeneous teams in the organizational setting can help:
- ensure the skills and know-how
- Improve performance in all age groups
- Improve the implementation of strengths and talents within different age groups by, for example, taking advantage of each other’s network of knowledge, skills and experience
- Reducing recruitment costs and facilitating job rotation
- To positively manage succession in the stages of retirement.
What can HR functions do to foster intergenerational inclusion and collaboration?
Among the possible actions:
- Create projects or project teams that involve all generations, making explicit the added value that each person, with his or her knowledge, skills and peculiarities, can bring
- Have a clear scenario of internal communication styles and tools, and then define and promote a language that can be understood and shared by all organizational stakeholders
- Include specific references in competency models to the ability to recognize and manage bias
- Stimulate knowledge and curiosity, ask questions and stimulate the same in people in the company.
However, for organizational actions to be successful and generate virtuous shared behaviors, it is important for individuals to understand the meaning and act good practices in everyday life, for example:
- Manifest curiosity by practicing the skillful art of asking exploratory questions
- Carefully observe the other generation, looking not only for what distinguishes, but also for what unites
- suspend judgment and ask: What phenomena are promoting that generation’s own worldview?
So Bases, not Bias
Companies need to lay a solid foundation of mutual respect for intergenerational collaboration; implement positive synergies to integrate different ages and skills as well as different professionalism.
With the sudden changes in the world of work and the rapid evolution of technology, everyone must work together within the organization to foster a positive exchange between generations, and thus have two visions: an experiential one, of the older worker, and a future-oriented one, typical of younger minds.
