How often do you see a Baby Boomer employee going out to lunch with a Millennial, or even more to the point, a group socializing in the office with members of multiple generations?
A recent piece on The Conversation by Megan Gerhardt explores the usefulness of inter-generational work relationships to combat feelings of isolation in the office.
The Educational Component
The different generations have different lessons to teach each other. Older employees can serve as “wingpeople” at in-person events showing younger employees how old-school schmoozing is done. Networking online is a much different affair from doing it in-person, with another human being standing in front of you waiting for you to ask a question or respond to a remark—or to fill the awkward silence with a witty comment.
If the employee is just starting out in their career, the older employee also can use in-person events to introduce them to their friends and colleagues. The older employee may not be far from retirement, after all. The younger employee doesn’t have much time to gain entry to the older employee’s huge network of industry friends.
It’s never accurate to always generalize, but overall, it’s safe to say the digital natives of this world (i.e., the very youngest in the workforce) have a leg up on their older counterparts when it comes to all things technological.
Creating newsletters and online material with great search engine optimization and the ability to generate a high level of engagement often is best left to younger employees. Those younger employees can bring older employees along in these tasks, though. It may never be second nature for older people, but they can learn and improve.
Seemingly Insurmountable Challenges Can Be Isolating
There’s nothing like struggling blindly with a Website that has poor readership levels or walking into yet another cocktail party where you stand alone in the corner to make a person feel isolated.
With inter-generational relationships comes a chance to beat the isolation and feel you have a comrade in your most difficult work pursuits. What’s hard to a young person may not be hard for an older person and vice versa. That means you’re no longer going it alone and feeling isolated and lonely in the process.
Gerhardt notes that the generational differences also can mean that the element of competition between individuals has been removed:
“…Relationships with colleagues from different generations tend to have fewer feelings of competition and pressure, as they likely occupy different life and career stages. An older colleague who has navigated office politics or balanced raising young children with career demands can provide valuable advice and support to co-workers facing these challenges for the first time.”
How Do You Bring Different Generations Together?
Since, as Gerhardt points out, people tend to flock together with those close in age, a work group with people of diverse ages requires a well-trained manager to bring the different generations together. The manager can be trained to look for opportunities to pair younger and older employees together for work projects.
Your organization can make a point of teaching new managers about the usefulness of pairing people of different ages on work. The managers also can be given guidance on the best way to help each pair work together. It may take some training to effectively serve as a facilitator of work groups comprising people who may vary in age by 20, or even 30 or 40, years.
Capture Results of Collaboration Between Generations
When an older and younger employee work together, there is an opportunity for each person to keep track of the things they learn from the other person.
In the case of the younger employee, they can record the points about the industry they learn from their more seasoned colleague. Or they could note points taught to them about navigating the company’s bureaucracy effectively.
The older employee could create a cheat sheet for different technologies and tasks such as social media marketing and Website content creation to share with other people who are not savvy about such things.
All of the knowledge can be journaled online someplace the rest of the department, or maybe even the rest of the company, has access to.
Gerhardt points out that we now have more generations than ever in the workplace—five to be precise. You have the opportunity to harness the power of each of these generations. That won’t happen, though, if these different generations don’t interact with each other.
Do you encourage inter-generational collaboration? What is the best way to do this?
