The moral and commercial imperatives for managing a 5-generation workforce

Navigating the presence of more generations in the workforce – which has never happened before – is undoubtedly a challenging prospect, but it is also a necessary one.

In a recent conversation with HR Leader, Foundations for Tomorrow managing director Taylor Dee Hawkins pointed to research from Deloitte that showed only 6 per cent of leaders have strong capabilities in intergenerational management.

This, she said, is “wild”, given that for the first time, we have five generations in the workforce and seven generations alive.

“It means that there is so much opportunity cost, there is so much risk, and so we’re just missing out on a huge amount of upside,” she said.

The conversation with Hawkins came ahead of her appearance at Bold Ideas in HR, being hosted by Captivate Q, in Sydney on 19 June. To learn more about that event, click here.

The flip side to this above issue, however, is that “if you then flip it, what is the upside? What could we achieve? Number one, intergenerational collaboration is a natural antidote to short term thinking. By the fact that you have interests across the time horizon all present in the same room and you’re able to give each other feedback. It doesn’t mean that you then won’t think short term, because a little bit of that is built into our wonderful human brains, but it is a bit of an antidote to that”, Hawkins said.

“Number two, intergenerational collaboration. And some of the intergenerational inequities that we are increasingly seeing around the world and in Australia, means that intergenerational collaboration is increasingly evidence of a commitment to purpose,” she said.

Leaders across the spectrum, Hawkins said, are aware of the looming challenges in this space and understand that it is becoming increasingly complex to be a good leader.

With management of multiple generations, for example, “there’s nuances to how you need to approach it, but there’s so many similarities in the competencies and strategies that you would use to foster great intergenerational collaboration, to what you would use for cross cultural communication, for what you would use for building better gender diversity in the workplace”.

However, she said, it is something that leaders must urgently grapple with.

“There is a moral imperative to take this approach as a leader. Our world is not in a great state and we know that we’ve heard the word polycrisis thrown around everywhere. We desperately need to solve some of the challenges that we’re facing,” she said.

“The commercial imperative is [also] undeniable. The commercial future of your organisation relies on your ability to anticipate and respond to these longer term challenges. Coming back to that need to overcome short termism and then your ability to gain the loyalty and engagement of your clients and customers and your ability to attract and retain staff. All of that means that this is not a nice to have.

“This is something that, both morally and commercially, strategically, we must do.”

There will be such a high return on investment, Hawkins said, that comes from properly understanding and appreciating the idiosyncratic needs and wants of all five working generations.

“There’s a huge amount of untapped potential in leaning into this intergenerational collaboration. And starting the journey towards doing this better is as easy as how do you frame the beginning of your meetings? Who are you inviting to the meetings and what roles are they holding? What sort of support are you giving people as you onboard them into your organisation or when they reach maybe nearer the end of their career?” she said.

“It’s these really basic things that can slot into existing systems. This is not an overhaul of how you manage your whole HR practise. It’s just a thoughtfulness and consideration and, to be honest, a bit of intrinsic work, a bit of internal work with what are the biases that you’re carrying about different generations.”

To register to attend Bold Ideas in HR, click here.