‘If you are a Hotmail user, we will not hire you’, said an advertisement and ‘These baby boomers are now leaders in various organisations and don’t understand what the millennials want’; I am sure you all have heard this for a decade now. Personally, I believe that these gaps in generation exist, but they have more benefits if the diversity of the teams are leveraged properly.
Generational gaps exist because each generation is born into a different context and into a world that is quite different from the earlier generations. For my grandfather, having a fan in his house was a luxury. For my daughter, this sounds absurd, as she was born in a house with fans and air conditioners. When I was born, there were no computers in India. Today, children are born into a world filled with gadgets that network the whole world.
Given the different environments and contexts that generations are born into, the thought processes differ. How they view a particular situation and collaborate at work differ. However, the innate fact that we are all human beings does not change. The same emotions run within all of us – whether a grandfather who was born in the 1930s or a millennial.
From an organisation perspective, it is essential to note a few key things about all its employees:
Everyone wants to be treated with respect and as a human being.
Everyone wants to be seen as part of the team and contributing to the organisation.
Everyone would like to know how their work contributes to the end objectives of the organisation.
Everyone wants to be rewarded, recognised and compensated fairly for their contribution.
This is true for all employees, whether they belong to the baby boomer or millennial generation. Other aspects, such as leveraging technology at work, change based on the context in which we are born.
Keeping the workplace as the context, baby boomers say that a job is for a lifetime. You get into a job and a company, and that is it. They talk of career being a rat race but still say, in the same breath, that collaboration is a must. It seemed to be a rat race because the generation saw their jobs as a means for building personal financial capital. It helped them own a new and larger house and pay for better schooling and expenses. So, the more money there is, the better the living standards will be. Therefore, the job was critical, and promotions were even more essential. Hence, being a part of the rat race was inevitable in their career. Their grandchildren are now living in large houses and have very good standards of living. Their objective in life is no more capital accumulation or asset building but one of experience. It is more about getting excited at work every day. It is about working with others and doing things differently. The paradigm has, therefore, shifted.
As a leader, I have found it useful to remember the four points mentioned above and lead a diverse team. I noticed that attention was needed in the way we approached work from a technology perspective and from the perspective of what could motivate a particular age group. Though individual motivation was driven by the circumstances in which that particular individual was, we could come up with some general conclusions for each geography.
Another derivation would be that when we combine generations into projects, we get the best of the different worlds. We not only looked at the baby boomers mentoring the millennials but also receiving reverse mentoring. It worked wonders in driving an organisation to move from an output-driven one to an outcome-driven one.
The writer is an educationist, social enterprise leader and founder of Alive Consulting