The article, Four Generations in the Workplace: Do You Get Their Differences? (Copyright, DiversityInc) by Barbara Frankel (Date posted: May 2007), has been reprinted with permission from DiversityInc magazine. No further reprinting of this article is authorized, unless prior permission is obtained from the publisher.

Age diversity—the concept that the four generations now co-existing in the workplace are in serious need of cultural competence to work successfully with each other—has been getting increased attention from our readers. In focus groups over the last few months, this topic persistently has come up as an increasing diversity challenge. As more boomers near retirement, will there be a brain drain? Are they communicating with and mentoring those in Generations X and Y? Do members of the different generations understand each other, especially in terms of what individuals need at work to thrive? And are we in danger of stereotyping people based on their age?

To address the burgeoning questions surrounding generational communications, we invited four companies on The 2006 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity®—The Coca-Cola Co., No. 3; Marriott International, No. 22; Allstate, No. 23; and Ernst & Young, No. 24—to participate in a roundtable in our Newark, N.J., offices on March 1. We asked them to send employees of different generations and experiences. The 12 people they delivered were among the most open, intelligent and enthralling participants we’ve ever had.

Should corporate America categorize people by generation?

Murphy: The generational impact is probably one of the most critical aspects of diversity. It has a lot of impact on the relationship between a first-line manager and the employee. It impacts employee benefits, the discussion around career development, work/life benefits,
flexibility, work style, the purpose of work, what motivates a person to go to work.

Martinez: Why is it such a big deal, now more so than it has been in the past? When you look at the generational size, the volume of employees who will be leaving the work force, who is coming to replace them?

Frankel: Are we in danger of overly stereotyping people? Are we in danger of saying that people in their 20s can’t interact because they are so hung up on technology? Or that people in their 50s can’t get the technology?

Boston: Technology becomes the equalizer. I use technology and I’m not too sure that a 20-year-old uses technology more than I do (maybe more socially). The key thing at the end of the day is that we start looking at the similarities around cultures, similarities around everything. The similarities start to pull us together.

Hollman: My concern is that although Gen Y is so adept at technology, they may not be as adept at interacting with people, and for us, that is critical. Forget about the hotel business, which is what I know, but if you go to Target, if you go to any store and you try to do a transaction, there needs to be more training for that generation in interacting with people.

Murphy: We need to understand essential tendencies of a generation. Just like in the conversation about culture we acknowledge that there are cultural tendencies, similarly there are generational tendencies. Where we need to be careful with stereotyping is, of course, not to apply that to every individual and recognize within every generation that there is difference and that there are some people who are right on the border who kind of possess traits of both generations. Don’t assume that because a person is Generation Y they are technically savvy or that someone who is mature is not technically savvy, but certainly use your knowledge of generations in general as a cue to help in the relationship or the conversation.

Mark: Generation is another dimension of diversity, and one aspect that we all are going to start looking at is really stage of life, stage of career. If you get married and have children, your priorities do change, and they do again, going through stages of life. As you move into more senior roles, you start adapting to the people who are more senior to you, so we’re seeing Gen X become partners in the firm and you see a meld of Gen X tendencies and baby boomer tendencies.

Martinez: Generations influence each other. I’m a Y and I do value my work very much and I value my personal life very much, and we tend to think about baby boomers as not really having a life. Baby boomers are learning from Gen Y that you can have it all—that you can have both and reach a happy medium. When we talk about technology, how Gen Y and Gen X are more technologically savvy, I realize that I’m influencing my parents. They have a computer, they have a video camera, we are video conferencing every week, so clearly there are a lot of merging and blurring of the generations because we are learning from each other.

What are Gen X and Gen Y learning from the work/life anguish of the boomers?

Boston: I think about work/life balance and that we baby boomers probably kept it to ourselves. In that generation, all you did was work, work, work. Many times, we had very fruitful lives with our children and great family life, but we kept it to ourselves. You think I’m going back to the office but I’m going home to coach my son’s basketball team.

Frankel: There is a gender issue, though. As a woman baby boomer who worked my entire life, it was different. I never talked about my kids at work, it was like they didn’t exist. You just sucked all that up.

Visconti: I wonder how much of the change in attitude is due to the fact that for the baby-boomer generation, it was mostly men in the workplace. Women weren’t permitted in a meaningful role in corporate America until really very recently. Look at the talent pool and women are more than 50 percent of the college graduates—in some MBA programs they are more than 50 percent—so you’re hiring women and then all of the sudden, the organization has to change to the work force that exists.

Bauman: A lot of people let their workplace manage this balance for them. As a young person, I was a single father for a year, with a 4-year-old girl, and I was in the Army and I had to shift my thinking around work. I had to turn down a job with the chief of staff of the Army because they expected me to be there at 5:30 in the morning and go to 9:30 at night, and I had childcare things to consider. Then I married and things smoothed out and I worked and put in those 10, 12, whatever hours I needed to put in, but I became an older parent. Things that may not have been important when I was younger became more important the older I got ... I coach a lot of the younger women at headquarters in terms of how they are accomplishing that balance, and I’ll tell them, “What are you doing? What’s the plan that you are going to put together that you can manage this better?”

Hollman: I don’t think we would have had that conversation with a mentor 15 years ago. We work at the same organization and I got married for the first time at 43. I was on that corporate track and it was fun. I worked, I worked—I had a great time, it was wonderful. But when I got married, my priorities shifted and I was willing to walk away from my job, because my balance was more important to me, more important for me to have that family. But Marriott was gracious enough to work out a deal for me to work from home—that would not have happened 15 years ago.

Murphy: I’m a true Generation X but it’s really the women who were baby boomers who said to me early in my career, “Well, you know, we did it, we never did talk about our families,” but they encouraged me not to do that. They empowered me to be really bold about taking time off for myself, and personal life and striking that balance. And one mentor told me, “Even if you have to, write down ‘therapy appointment,’ nobody ever asks you about that.” I really got a lot of that coaching from the baby boomers and I do feel very empowered for work/life balance and to work out things.

Visconti: This subject has encouraged people to be better people. That they can now express themselves instead of saying, “Oh, suck it up, don’t worry about it. Soccer game? What’s the matter with you?” Now it’s exactly the opposite; it is encouraged, and it’s created a better place to be. But I keep in mind that all of us around the table have a very enlightened viewpoint compared with the rest of the work force.

”Paying Your Dues”—What priorities does your generation put on work and loyalty to the employer?

Valentin-Ruiz: When I started working, the coaching and mentoring I received was “You’ve got to work really hard, you’ve got to work whatever hours it takes to get your job done to show your employer that you have the ability to get ahead, that you are worthy of promotion.” I’ve seen that change drastically.

Theodore: Accounting has its seasons and its times where you’re working like crazy, and investment banking, where you can make a lot more money instantly—that’s not an option for me. I want a life; I want to be able to, at certain points in the year, go home at 5:30, be able to have appointments, be able to see my friends, able to enjoy whatever success I have in life. That is a priority for me, regardless of what career I’m in. I need “me time” and time with family and friends. A lot of my friends feel the same way, but then again there are those who are more impressed by money and are willing to work 100 hours a week, every week.

Murphy: As a Gen Xer, most of my managers have been baby boomers, and the idea that we need to “pay our dues” just causes me to melt down. Where this generational impact intersects is really understanding what motivates the different generations. My mom even talks about paying your dues and I melt down because what I hear is, “You have to do things the way I did it and just because I did it.” It doesn’t speak to the value of it; it doesn’t speak to progress—that is what you did 20 years ago, why am I doing that now?

Frankel: But emotionally, when you’re a boomer, you think (I’m generalizing), “I had to go through all of this crap, I had to do all of this scut work when I was young and not get any recognition and I had to do all of that for five years, 10 years before anyone took notice of me, so why do you get it in six months?” So people feel like it is not fair, and you’re right and it shouldn’t be that way.

Johnson: For boomers, is it that my generation is not recognizing that you paid your dues? Is that what it is? So is it like we need to actually say to you, “I recognize that you paved the way for me and I appreciate it,” would that help? I would need to know that because that would help me to communicate.

Murphy: As I mentor some Generation Y’s and those younger than me, the mindset that I bring is this: “This is what it took for me to get here; I had to go through all of this. Let me help you navigate that, so if it took me five years, success in my eyes is you accomplishing this in two and a half.”

Hollman: When you talk about “paying your dues,” I can see where that could get under your skin because I see many in Gen Y having far more maturity than I had at that same age, and it’s because of greater exposure. So I may have needed more time to get to that certain point where really, in some instances, you don’t.

Allen: I’m 24 and I’m an HR manager. I got to that position in a year; I started as a coordinator with the Ritz-Carlton. But my director did not ignore my experience prior to coming into the company, because I’ve been working full time in human resource since I was 16. I told her that I really thought I was ready to be a manager.

Bauman: Sometimes it’s situational; it’s the capacity of the individual for learning, demonstrated performance. It’s a natural sort of psychological response sometimes where you’ve seen others that took maybe five years to make director or senior director and you have someone who has high capacity, learning agility and all these things that people talk about. They have great emotional intelligence and all those buzz words and so they get promoted early. There is bound to be someone that’s going to say, unfortunately, that the individual didn’t pay their dues or how come they got promoted early, they will not look at the balance. And I’ve seen it across age groups.

Theodore: It’s not so much about the length of time of the experience as it is the quality of the experience that you are given. I don’t want to be in a job that lets me work for a few years but I don’t get to do anything, and I feel like that’s where more people in my age group are coming from. We say, “Give us quality work. We’ll work hard and if you see that we’re capable, then give us more responsibility, keep laying it on me because I don’t want anything easy either” ... I hear older people say all the time that we’re lazy and we don’t work and we’re always on the IM thing. They are not recognizing that a lot of these people would do the work if you just gave it to them. But if you give them something that is not productive, then you’re going to see that I don’t feel like doing this—what’s the point? And then you see the attitude and then you see what people call laziness, but they don’t want to do scut work.

Bednarski: The ones who are successful are the ones who say, “Whatever needs to be done, I will do it because it doesn’t matter. We are all working as a team. And if it is copying, if I’m a manager and I’m reporting to a senior, maybe copy for the senior because they’re too busy, then I’ll do it, if it is what needs to be done.” These are the people who are successful and I don’t think it matters whether you’re in your 20s, 30s or 40s—it’s just a personal trait.

Miller: With the younger generation ... you really have to sell that. It’s a buy-in. You have to say, “This is the mission, this is where we are heading,” and you really have to bring that value to them. They are not automatically going to sign up: “OK, we’re on the team.” A baby boomer would step up and say, “You tell me how to march and I’m going to march and if it means marching in this direction for two years and then I take a shift to the right and a couple steps ahead—I would do it.”

Boston: Things have changed relative to leadership. If you start looking, years ago, leadership was “You do what I tell you to do.” And now leadership is about engaging individuals, it’s about being on the team. I heard something that Dick Parsons said: “Don’t lead where you won’t go.” And when I start talking about whether I can get my entire team engaged, it’s really incumbent upon me to do an excellent job, with respect to everything. I get the coffee as much as anyone else. Because it doesn’t really matter, we are a team.

Mark: I do think Gen Yers are more vocal about asking for feedback. “Give me feedback now, give me feedback every week, not at the end of the year.”

Allen: I want to know that I’m doing a good job as I’m doing it, but if something is wrong I want you to address it as well because I can take constructive criticism. I don’t want to do anything wrong, so tell me so I can fix it right away. I’m generalizing, for Gen Y’s, we are loyal to whoever is going to help us get us where we want to go. That’s about career goals—that’s not necessarily about being loyal to a specific corporation. You’re loyal to whoever is going to help you and mentor you to get you where you want to go in your career. So if you’re helping me get there, then I’m going to work with you more, we’re going to be a team.

Murphy: I really value my time, and I think of time as a form of currency. So I had a situation at a former employer where my manager for a merit increase gave me a 1.5 percent increase, and when she gave it to me, I said, “FYI, in the future, if it’s less than 3 percent I would prefer just an additional week of vacation, you know, that would be more of a reward for me.” And she just thought I was a spoiled brat; she was highly offended because she could only give a merit increase to two people on her team and she thought really hard and chose me as one of them. And it wasn’t until we both ended up hearing a speaker on generational things that she came back and said, “Aha, now I understand that your personal time is more valuable to you maybe because of your generation,” so we ended up being OK.

Mark: There is no doubt in today’s environment in corporate America that people expect to change jobs more and there is less security today, but in my mind there is no doubt that there are different expectations between generations about how many times I’ll move. And to your point, Aubrey, you said you would be loyal to the person giving you challenging work and taking an interest in you but less loyal to the company itself.

Allen: A perfect example: I was in finance prior to going to Ritz-Carlton and I had to leave. I stayed seven months because I felt that I was just a warm body in a position there. I was just there to do the job; I had to do a lot of work, but that was just my job, they [couldn’t] care less about me growing and what position I should be going to next. I go to Ritz-Carlton and Marriott and it’s all about “We value you here, we want you to work with us to give a great product of service to everybody,” and I don’t want to leave.

Bednarski: How the company you work for views you is so important. When I graduated from college, I went to a private enterprise and I worked there for eight years. Five years ago, I decided to join Ernst & Young, and at the time, the reputation of accounting firms was “They’ll work you to death and there is so much to do, but it’s a great experience and you’ll learn so much.” And my thought was “I’ll suck it up for two years.” And when I joined the firm, it wasn’t just nose to the grindstone every day. I’m on the steering committee for the professional women’s network, and the importance of organizations like that [Asian, African-American, other employee-network groups] has made me feel so much more important to the company.

Do people of color have the same generational conflicts?

Boston: I just don’t see any difference. I enjoy being around young people, I enjoy being around many different people, and for me it’s just how do we find the balance to communicate, find the balance to set the parameters.

Hollman: The one generational conflict that I can think of with my father was when I was contemplating what my first job should be out of college. Because of his experience with discrimination, he said, “You need to get yourself a good government job.” His generation felt that working in the government, you had protection, your job had some protection, and here I decided right out of college I [would] work at Marriott. I don’t think my father truly understood how to take that until I started to get promoted and he started getting to stay at the hotels for free. And then when he had a chance to meet Mr. Marriott and come to the JW Marriott awards as my date one year, I couldn’t have picked a better date—he couldn’t have enjoyed it more.

Mark: There are potentially three aspects: One is for many in the Asian, African-American, Hispanic culture. Relative to the majority culture, it’s very family oriented. That heavy family orientation, to your children, to your elders, to elders in the family, is bound to have an impact in terms of generational perspectives. Another aspect, your economic background. The stereotype of a baby boomer is having that sense of entitlement, and not everyone had that sense of entitlement growing up. A third aspect is around immigration. In the U.S. today, a lot of these new immigrants are people of color. For a lot of immigrants it’s the land of opportunity.

Visconti: This shows up tangibly in homeownership rates, household-income rates and education rates. Indigenous people, whatever culture or race you’re talking about, people who are born here don’t do as well as people who are immigrants. You look at those things and even though people who are immigrants may make less household income, individual income, they will still own homes, far in excess of their income.

Theodore: I’m a first-generation born here, my mom came here when she was in her 30s, and it’s just a very different mentality. Not doing well wasn’t an option. It was: “You’re going to do well and I don’t need to watch over you or hover over you because you know that there will be hell to pay if you get home and you don’t do well.” She thought, “How could it be any other way other than the fact that I’m working all these jobs to help support you so you can be in school and get into a good school and get a good job?” And you can’t really let them down in that, so it’s a completely different mentality.

Murphy: When I think about my own personal experiences, I think, too, of the history of African Americans in this culture and this country. I think about my own parents. I don’t think they understand my need to be fulfilled in my job and to be challenged. It’s like, “You should be happy you have a job.” When I talk about being innovative and I want to propose this or I want to push that, [they think], “Don’t rock the boat too much.” So I get that type of pushback even in terms of changing careers and changing jobs—that makes them very nervous as well. “Stay in one place, you got in, just stay there.”

Theodore: I’m actually part of two communities; I’m part of the LGBT community and the African-American community, and we’re actually having a discussion in our EY Beyond Group about this generational diversity. The older generation feels that these young kids just expect things to be handed to them and they don’t want to be a part of the activism and to fight for rights and to fight for equality and things like that, they just expect it. And the older generation [of LGBT people] says that if you really want these rights to succeed in life, you have to put in a little bit of effort, you need to join the HRC [Human Rights Campaign] or other groups and be more socially active, while they just want to be social, and there is a lot of disagreement between the generations as to handle it yourself in that sort of community.

Visconti: From an LGBT standpoint, do you see resentment from older people in your community that you have the ability to be a little bit more open? I’m not saying that there still isn’t a huge amount of road to go, but still it’s a little bit easier.

Theodore: There definitely is, and it obviously depends on the person, but I definitely see that viewpoint. They think, “How dare you think that it is easy? How dare you take it for granted to be able to be part of a community or that a group at work exists?”

What is the greatest generational challenge facing the nation over the next 10 years?

Valentin-Ruiz: Creatively looking at how work can get done differently. Because when you think about the amount of work, the amount of different businesses, the pull of talent, you know we are going to have gaps—so that’s part of it, how do we do more with less, but also with talent that puts a lot more value on their personal life, their flexibility and the ability to do other things, even if they don’t have a family.

Helbing: We have to make sure that we are available 24/7 and that also puts a stress on companies. They have to find out where we are going to change to make sure we’re able to supply that.

Bednarski: One of the biggest challenges over the next 10, 15 years is all of the knowledge that will be potentially lost with the people who are retiring. I think at EY we have a great apprenticeship model where that knowledge is transferred from the partners, senior managers, managers and down to the staff on a regular basis. But there are a lot of companies out there where someone has been doing the same job and has been excellent at it for the past 20 years and they could be retiring. If they don’t have everything documented, then that knowledge could very well be lost.

Murphy: Engaging people of different generations. Companies are going to need to face doing more with less and so that we’re going to have to really get the most out of all our resources, all of our human resources and engaging them in such a way that each person will be bringing their full self to the workplace. That may look differently to different generations.

Bauman: The issue for me then is how we change the paradigm in the workplace to help prevent this knowledge drain. We have to change the paradigm around retirement. How are you going to better utilize people, encourage them to stay longer? The data is really shocking in terms of only the last six years … a young girl being born today is expected to live to 100 years. My uncle asked me, “Steve, how come you haven’t retired yet?” Because he retired at 55 and he’s now 80-something. I said, “Because I really love working and it gives me pleasure and I think I’m doing a great job.” There could be a perception that you could have these older folks in the workplace and they are the blockers ... You have to figure out how to keep them motivated by developing opportunities, keep the dialogue going.

Miller: How do you keep the work force fluid? ... We have a lot of real senior experienced people that need to be where they are today, but the younger generation sees it as “Where is my opportunity?”

Theodore: The generation that’s about 10 to 15 years younger than I am—those who are in middle school—will be joining our work force in about 10 years ... They are a whole different ballgame. They are advanced at a whole different level; they have their own language, like on text messaging and things like that where I sometimes wonder if they actually can form a real sentence.

Visconti: The biggest challenge is globalization. We do not even begin to understand what is going to happen in the next five years. There are a couple of statistics that I just read about. Eighty-eight percent of all mutual funds flowing into this country last year went into international funds. So that’s 8 percent of the money that investors in this country invested that went oversees. And if you look at the leading, all initial private offerings used to be all in this country; now the majority of them are outside of the U.S. If you look at the GDP growth of China and India, it far outstrips anything we’ve ever even experienced in anybody’s lifetime in this country today. Combine that with the fact that there are 461 million Chinese people with cell phones and there as many people with access to the Internet as we have citizens, and it’s cheaper to call from India to here than it is to call India. The world is going to change.

Helbing: How do you bridge across the generations and teach everyone this new protocol. It’s so dynamic you can’t keep pace.

Visconti: What skill sets are going to be necessary? I’m a trustee of a small black women’s college and we were talking about the concept of educating people to be team members. That was of more importance than learning biology, because by the time you graduate, what you learned as a freshman is obsolete anyway. So what really is more important is group decision making and group participation and problem solving. And the group can be anywhere on the planet.

Mark: We are increasingly, month by month, recognizing that we need to change our culture, to a culture of much more mobility, getting international experience.

Valentin-Ruiz: Companies have to be very creative in developing programs and different opportunities at each level for that person. The younger generation, I can tell you when I interview them for hiring purposes, one of the first things they will ask me is: “Well, how long does it take me to get promoted?” That’s not a question I would have asked when interviewing. Inside I was asking that, [but] I would not have verbalized it.

Hollman: We’ve been saying, “Mentor them, teach them, coach them, give them.” The challenge is going to be for each individual to take responsibility for developing themselves, for achieving their own goals. You can’t achieve a goal unless you identify it and that may mean that if corporate America cannot help you achieve your goal then you get your butt out and build a business.

Johnson: When I worked at a company before here, the people who could have helped me understand that personal development was important were untouchable. And so you start to say, “I know I’m a young person and I know I have a long way to go, but if I can’t see what it is I’m supposed to aspire to, then how helpful is that?” And so organizations need leaders that say, “OK, I’m going to get my hands dirty and I’m going to see if by talking to this young person, I can touch them,” and then they become someone who is reachable.

Allen: We need to learn how to create a work environment for these younger people where they can see what their contribution is and they feel valued and they feel they are going to be developed. But at the same time, they still know that what they are doing, they need to take a proactive step in aligning themselves with the business goals.

Boston: I just look at the opportunities that we have, opportunities that center around each generation, and put out three words: value is clearly one, respect is one, and karma is another one. You have to value the contribution each individual brings to the table regardless of their generation; respect the way that they bring it to the table.

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