i go through the the listen backs there are times where i'm like oh no this thing's really terrible or this person's totally wrong and often you're you're trying to take the middle ground you're like oh maybe there's a reason to it oh if you think about it then they've got a perspective on it so i'm wondering if this is our dynamic like i'm the cantankerous one and you're the peacemaker maybe this is yes i think i do i know that you say i do do that i always try to see why someone would do it or i you know why it is i think i do it probably more in podcasting than in other things because i don't know who's listening so if you say all the people who think they're terrible then that might be a listener so i'm always like yeah oh good point good point maybe i should pay more attention to it yeah it could be someone around the table that's true that's true i've always been good at alienating people so that's a special skill i doubt it very much listeners seeing as we're thinking of you straight away let's welcome you it's the first time i think we've done this where we welcome listeners even before we're getting into the topic itself so welcome welcome to the management cafe if it's the first time you are listening to the show well we're going to be here for about 20 25 sometimes 30 minutes talking about a topic that we have stuff to say about that we have some experience of that we've been thinking of for a while so you're very welcome to join us and when i say we my name is pilar or t and tim mergers his co-host here with me ready to lay into something yeah we're going to try and keep it to one coffee yeah let's keep it to one coffee no top ups for today yeah well we might as well do a little bit something strange that we've never done just we might as well introduce the topic before we start talking about it yeah so it's an interesting one today we're going to talk about managing generational differences in the workplace and i must admit i'm not a huge fan of classifying people by generation just just to start yes how about you do you believe that the generations really are different i'm going to agree with you and say that i always have problems with anything that says this huge group of people operates in this way and this huge group of people operates in that way however from what i hear from other people whose minds i respect sometimes there is a difference especially with generations if you blank it and i think as always everything we talk about when we're looking at this there's always the exception there's always a few exceptions and if we talk about generational differences as well yeah it's a bit like when you do a research study and you say oh this was due to generational differences are you sure what did different people grow up you're doing what is the context who else have they been surrounded by during their life i mean when you get to someone and you say someone at 60 behaves in a certain way it's not really just their age it's their life experience so so life experience is so important oh absolutely and i think that's a crucial difference is where this is meant to describe to people's mindset or motivation i think it's dangerous but if it's describing to their shared experience and the experiences that have forged them or have collectively forged a large group of people by and large to where they are you know that's different you know it makes sense if you grew up in the era before television that your experiences would have been perhaps more auditory because you were listening to radio or whatever but uh and the generation after it you know it's gonna be different like pre-internet post-internet sure but when it's taken to things like uh you know generation zed is lazy like you know or they're not motivated you know they don't want to do hard work like that's for me where it starts to get uh just like wrong i do also think that there's a sort of a stage of life aspect to it which is you know early career mid-career late career you know there's a stage around when you're generally like young and single or you know you live a different life than you do if you're in your like 30s if you're in your 40s if you're in your 60s and so on so there are those aspects of it but you know i remember like at times people would say things like oh come on you're gen z how does this computer thing work like how does this particular software and you're just like why why just because they're born in gen z should they automatically know something i agree i completely agree i think we i think it might be more about hearing you think saying this i'm wondering whether it's about what we think is acceptable or not as well like some things were acceptable a few generations ago and today they're not acceptable so if you've grown up with that i think depending on where you've grown i think also it's really interesting and i think it'd be interesting to go through the list of the generations how to classify at the moment because to be honest after millennials i'm confused about what the different generations are or even what they're called i asked gpt to tell me about the names of all the generations of the decades and i was like i didn't even know there was a generation alpha so i mean that's that's very stereotypical of generation x actually so that just proves the point but i think what's really interesting about the last the last 20th to 21st century is how technology has evolved and how that has defined how we think about life and work i think i think there is a difference in how you view the world apart from your individual differences if you were born like like us generation x where we grew up with landlines we saw the mobile coming we saw the internet coming we saw social media i mean we've seen everything so we've got two huge different worlds to compare whereas if you are born now well i'm sure you're gonna have lots of stuff that's new to compare but you don't have that huge that very recent history and i wonder whether that well i know that must affect how different generations then going back to how they manage how they manage hmm i do think that that's actually just part of life though you know like if you think about the technology change that we experience you know i'm gen x i'm gen x but like my mother's generation experienced the same thing in their way and my grandparents generation you know my grandparents when they when they were my age or actually when they were younger than me you know didn't have electricity uh lived out in the bush you know uh and so like for them they had this massive leap forward by getting electricity you know lights and stuff and then cars and like the fact that people could have them so actually no they had cars they didn't have electricity in the bush but um i think that there's always this aspect of there's generations that haven't had access to things all that for them it was really incredible and then there's generations who grew up where it was just standardized because that's how quickly the world changes and has been changing for you know 100 years 200 years more you're actually right about the technology though it moves super quickly one thing i do think is constant is i don't think people's fundamental desires have changed that much i think the opportunities have changed a lot and so that's something like uh if we think about flexibility at work one of the common knocks around generations is that like two generations ago they're very loyal and you work for one company and now people job hop well two generations ago uh there weren't companies who did mass layoffs every 18 months to preserve their stock price now there are so one like i absolutely know that my grandfather would have liked to change jobs at times he didn't have the opportunity to do so so he had to stick it out so you can say that that's loyalty but it wasn't loyalty driven by his desire to stay at one place forever it was by the fact that he didn't feel he could shift and if he had taken him at that age and transplanted him 50 years later once he got the hang of using the phone and the computer he would have changed jobs very quickly i have never heard that point of view and i think it's really really key that we don't realize how much it is about the opportunities being there that drive people to express the desire and to chase after that desire it's not just suddenly like you say it's not i think you're so right so people probably going into them i don't know even looking for work now there is such thing as being able to do some kind of knowledge work remotely which is now an opportunity 50 years ago it wasn't there maybe you wanted to do it but you couldn't so but now you can and therefore because you see you can you ask for it before you didn't ask for it because no one else was doing it and it just wasn't physically possible and so i think that's a really really key point that's yes and it really i think it stops us from pigeonholing a lot as in what people want or don't want because some of this generational stuff comes across as sour grapes you know it comes across as older generations saying oh these young ones have it so easy and oh they don't have and part of that i think is because because they're like well i couldn't just become a social influencer and live in bali and make money through an app on the phone you know i had to go into a factory for my first 10 years and do a apprenticeship under a terrible boss and so there's a bit of bitterness there you know jealousy that people get perhaps easier now you know what you were saying earlier so i'll give you the other side i mean some people will be jealous yes um because they might have had those thoughts i couldn't do anything about it but some people actually cannot understand that also because you've never seen it you've never heard it you've never felt it so it's like why would you want to be in bali so i suppose there is this when we're looking at working with people who are who we think are different and probably are as you're saying as cohorts seeing some aspects of work differently then i suppose that empathy of understanding what life experience has been like in order for people to be behaving in that way um we can be quite rich uh when we're because it stops you yeah you're absolutely right and to an extent we do internalize it so you know if you're in a situation where you can't change jobs you might psychologically start to value loyalty because it helps it helps you get through uh and not necessarily in a bad way but i must admit i as a manager you know if we try and bring it into the management cafe context i have tried to think of it more as people and their characteristics as opposed to a generational even though you know sometimes you will get someone who might be perceived to be stereotypical of a particular generation i don't think it's that helpful to to review it through that in the like view through that lens as a manager well i think it's helpful though and i think i'm going to go through the list just in case anyone else was as lost as i was when we started talking about this i think it is helpful when we look at separating and for example saying this generation does this generation does that it raises our awareness of how people are different in general that's what i like when i'm looking at also things like cultural differences and stuff so i'll just uh i'll just go through a chat gpt summary that's okay and also just that we all remember and i know what some of these generations refer to so the silent generation you hadn't heard of this born 1928 to 1945 grew up during the great depression and world war ii often value hard work discipline and loyalty and of course this is looking at generations and through a very western lens actually yeah and then we've got baby boomers born 1946 to 64 post-world war ii optimism and growth civil rights movements saw the rise of mass media and the cold war often value job security and personal accomplishment this is super interesting because i'm probably looking at this through the lens of us uk because in spain 1946 to 1964 there was a dictatorship and so really interesting but of course it all spilled it was also i mean i wouldn't say it was a civil right movement but yeah things were happening um yes but so i was saying often value job security and personal accomplishment generation x yeah let's hear it for generation x uh 1965 to 1980 grew up during economic downturns again for me it was the opposite the rise of personal computing technology and increasing divorce rates often described as entrepreneurial and value work-life balance millennials or generation y ah this is why i get confused because i thought they were different generation y and millennials uh born 1981 to 1996 but some sources might extend this to the early 2000s came of age during the internet boom the 2008 economic recession and global terrorism they often value flexibility meaningful work and are tech savvy two more team two more two more generations generation zed or i gen 1997 to 2012 again dates may vary digital natives who have never known a world without the internet or smartphones socially conscious and value individual expression and finally this is the one i didn't know about generation alpha starting from 2013 this generation is still young but they are expected to be the most technologically immersed my god yeah if you were born in 2013 they will likely grow up with advancements like ai machine learning and possibly new forms of social media yeah i can't imagine what it's like to have been born in 2013 my youngest daughter was born in 2013 uh she's a terrific person so you can see it yeah i reckon she could easily uh end up ruling the world if she chose it she's fantastic but uh yeah i i think i mean no question they're going to be technologically uh immersed i do wonder a little bit about this let's just take this last few generations generation x often described as entrepreneurial and valuing work-life balance maybe it's because they're all in their 40s and 50s and 60s now yes and millennials value flexibility meaningful work and maybe it's because they're in their 30s and early 40s and generations there value individual expression because they've just left school or they're you know teenagers in early 20s that's what you do when you're in your teenagers in early 20s because i guarantee i guarantee that if if you had looked at this same generational stuff 20 years ago they would have been saying baby boomers they're all about individual expression and trying to change the world yeah because that's what you do when you're in your 20s so there are generational differences it's just that we can't say okay if you're born like this in this year you're like this and you're always going to be like this so i think we just it goes back to what you were saying the generational differences are there because you are a different stage of your life and then there's individual things like i mean when talking about uh like baby boomers being less savvy with technology or something like that you know some people who quite in their 70s are learning new technologies and are totally driven by learning new technologies whereas there's some younger people who actually all they want to do is be on their phone on the chat all day and are not interested in something though this is just an anecdote that my husband has noticed that a lot of young people so my husband's a bit younger than i but his generation next as well and he teaches people maybe in their 20s something like this they don't use a mouse they don't use a mouse with their computer which is really weird maybe once they get into the workplace they will have to because they do a lot of design stuff and i don't know how you but or maybe not so there are some visible things that really shock you about how people operate yeah i think yeah i think some of that stuff is just people people working out their ways to do things not the mouse not they're not using a mouse well but maybe the mouse like because i don't know if you've ever had this experience of watching uh okay i'm now going to start talking about generations when i said i don't believe that in a bit i remember i'm sitting on the train once on my way home and uh and there was someone sitting in the seat in front of me and they had their phone i could see their phone and they were swiping on this thing like like so fast switching between apps and swiping up and down and changing different and making a phone call and then going back to something else and i was i was dizzy just looking at it and i've had a phone for a long time and i thought i knew my way around the phone but like watching how quickly they were interacting with it i was like yeah it was like learning a language and being a beginner and then trying to talk to someone who's fluent they were just a totally different level of evolution than i was in terms of competency and maybe that's you know maybe that's a generation maybe it's because they didn't come into having a phone with all the baggage that i did of starting off with a with a zx81 or an apple 2 computer you know where they didn't have mouses. When I first started using a computer mouse, I hadn't been invented yet. I know, it took me a while to go on a mouse to use what is this. Those aspects of shared experience are interesting.
And one, certainly, that I noticed in the workplace is that younger people coming into my workplaces had higher expectations around something. One of them was, like, technology interfaces. Yeah, definitely. For example, like, older people would use a piece of software that looked like garbage and, you know, ugly as in, had far too much information on the screen because they'd been down that road many times before.
As long as they did what they needed to and they knew which buttons to press, they were relatively okay with it. Whereas a younger person or a person who was earlier in their work experience, I should probably say, iPhones, and so they didn't like the baggage of the old ones. Now, that's actually a positive thing because they're pushing us to improve, to make things work better and look better. I suppose it's the expectation as well as offices have evolved, like the workplace, the offices have evolved and people just going into the workplace at a time when offices are brighter and more colorful, et cetera, will have that expectation.
Whereas people who are more used to either cubicles or private offices will have that expectation. So I think that's a really good point as well. And also with technology, because as individuals, we've had access to much better technology now that we didn't use to. Then we expect the organizations to provide that level of quality.
I think that's really something that we were seeing that we started to see not long ago. I do think that there are huge benefits for organizations and for teams and for managers to be dealing with a wide range of people. I think one of the dangers of this is to look at one of these lists and go, oh, well, we're a tech company, so we better only employ people from Generation Alpha. Yeah.
They're not old enough to work yet. But once they work again, we'll only employ them because they're digital natives. But actually, really interesting things can happen when you have someone in their 20s and someone in their late 50s working together if they're both open-minded and collaborative. So just from the manager's point of view, a couple of things I'm thinking of.
One is to recognize that there are differences and recognize that sometimes these differences come from being born at a different time, but also sometimes are individual. And also, again, this is another way of stereotyping. And to just be vigilant that either we're not doing that and are always giving the jazzy projects to certain kind of people and the most thoughtful projects to other kind of people. And also just having a look at that the group is not falling into stereotyping themselves as well.
I'm always falling. Like you say, oh, the young person can do it. Well, actually, there might be an older person who loves technology and is sitting in a corner and would love to do it, but if they raise their hand, they might not look that funny. So I think that's where it becomes interesting.
And the other thing, which goes back to a point you've made, especially earlier when we started having coffee together about this sense of using the workplace as an opportunity to improve society, is that the more that we can get different generations interacting at work, then the easier it might be to have them interacting outside and making for a more cohesive community. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think there are great benefits in different generations.
People of different ages and different phases of life can get great benefits of interacting with. Like if you're in your late 50s, I'm in my early 50s. I don't interact with a lot of mid-20-year-old people in my personal life, unless they're like children of friends of mine or whatever, or like I'm in a shop or whatever, but at work I did. And it was an absolute pleasure.
Absolutely. What a lovely, refreshing, energizing, and inspiring group of people. And I got to interact with them at work, which I really enjoyed. So I think it's not something to shy away from.
I think it's something to embrace. Definitely. I think that's a good point to wrap up. I hope everyone around the table has been either nodding along or shouting at us.
That would be great. Let us know what you did. What do you think about all this? What do you think in general about the whole generational divide, if there is one?
managementcafepodcast at gmail.com. Sorry, that's the email address, but we also have a contact form at managementcafepodcast.com. Any specific questions, Tim, you want to ask our listeners? Just curious if they think that they're indicative of their generation.
I don't think anyone would be 100%. So I'm curious how they think they're emblematic of their generation or how they think that they're different and how they change over time. Excellent. Well, listeners, coffee is over for us.
Now it's over to you. Thank you for joining us at the Management Cafe. Remember, you can subscribe to the show on whatever podcast app you use to make sure you get your weekly dose of reflection. Our website is management.caf and on Twitter we are at Management Cafe.
That's all for this episode from myself, Pilar Orti, and our fellow co-host, Tim Burgess. Thank you for listening.