With up to five generations working side-by-side, your workplace is more diverse than ever. This offers many opportunities for collaboration and innovation, but it also presents challenges, like differing attitudes toward hybrid work, financial pressures, and conflicting priorities. If you're a leader who can embrace these differences and foster a culture of mutual respect, you will be better equipped to manage conflicts, retain talent, and build thriving, future-ready teams.

https://swiy.co/go-bridging-the-gap

How many generations are working in your organisation? It might be up to five – and in rare cases, there could even be six generations working together.

From the oldest to the youngest:

1. Baby Boomers, who are usually the most senior people in the organisation
2. Generation X (my generation), in their fifties and sixties, often in senior roles and some close to retirement
3. Generation Y, or the Millennials, many now in management positions
4. Generation Z, roughly up to the age of 25, who are new to the workforce
5. Generation Alpha are even younger workers, often apprentices or in their first "real job"

With so many generations working together, you have people with different worldviews, different attitudes to work, and very different experience and expertise. This creates some interesting dynamics.

On the positive side, if you have the kind of culture that values and embraces diversity, it gives you great opportunities for collaboration, innovation, and different perspectives.

But sometimes, it doesn’t work so well. Often, you get these generations butting heads against each other.

For example, the pandemic forced organisations to provide working from home for their office workers, and now many – especially older managers – are trying to drag their people back full-time into the office. But younger workers want to hold on to that flexibility. In fact, they have always wanted it, even before the pandemic. They don’t necessarily want to work from home all the time, but they also don’t want the drudgery of the Monday to Friday nine-to-five commute their parents endured.

Other things like rising costs of living and rising inflation create pressure at both ends of the generational scale.

For younger workers, facing high costs of living and high inflation, it’s more difficult to save for investments – for example, in the property market that created financial security for their bosses.

At the other end, many older workers who were planning to retire are being forced to delay their retirement because rising living costs. So, they stay at work for longer. That’s good for the organisation because it retains their wisdom and expertise. But it’s also bad for the organisation because it creates a bottleneck at the top, which hurts the career path for younger employees.

Younger people also care more about an organisation’s values, purpose, and ESG commitments. They holding their managers and organisation responsible for things like climate change, sustainability, diversity, and equity. If you don’t provide that, they will often choose to move.

I’m running an online prsentation soon about these challenges and other leadership issues for 2025. It’s free, public, and open to all. So register now, and invite other leaders in your team and network as well.

Register for the virtual masterclass:

https://swiy.co/go-bridging-the-gap

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