Michaela Jeffery-Morrison, CEO and cofounder of Ascend Global Media, the company behind Women in Tech World Series.
At the time of writing this, there are four generations primarily comprising today’s workforce: Baby Boomers (born between 1955 and 1964), Gen-X (born between 1965 and 1980), Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996), and Gen-Z (born between 1997 and 2012).
But these categories are largely arbitrary. What matters is that the workforce is more diverse in terms of age than ever before. In some businesses, young people fresh out of school or university rub shoulders with people with grandchildren. That has significant implications for wider diversity in every industry—including tech. In fact, growing age diversity is important in technology.
The future of work—and tech—might just be multigenerational. Here’s why.
Audience Appeal
If a product is intended for a multigenerational audience, then it’s logical that a multigenerational team should be involved in creating it. If computers, smartphones, applications and other types of tech were once the preserve of the younger generation, that’s not true anymore.
Tech is ubiquitous in modern life. It isn’t unusual for grandparents and grandchildren to communicate using the same social networks or devices. You’re just as likely to see communication software like Slack used in an older, more traditional company as you are in a move-fast-break-things startup.
That means that tech companies should have representatives from those demographics. Tastes in design and needs relating to user experience can be wildly different from one age group to the next. Without representatives from both, tech companies risk creating products and services that exclude one or the other.
Knowledge Transfer
Because each generation has distinct knowledge and expertise, a multigenerational workforce holds enormous possibilities for knowledge transfer.
Older employees often have considerable institutional knowledge accumulated over the course of a career. Whether that experience is in one sector (or one company) or across multiple sectors and companies, it’s invaluable to younger generations starting out. They can share those lessons that can only be learned through experience and help them to plot a career trajectory.
Younger employees can also share skills that they have been able to develop since childhood, such as the kind of technical digital skills that younger Millennials and Gen-Zers have been developing all their lives. Though it’s a generalization that anyone over the age of 50 is baffled by technology, younger employees have often been able to benefit from the kind of deep learning that we experience during childhood.
One way to encourage and facilitate knowledge transfer is through mentoring. It’s a really powerful way of structuring the flow of information, experience and skills from one generation to the next. It can be especially valuable to people from underrepresented groups in tech, such as women, who face different challenges in their careers than their male counterparts.
Talent Acquisition
Just as products created by multigenerational teams will be suited to a multigenerational audience, multigenerational businesses will appeal to multigenerational talent. A business without members of a certain generation can naturally seem less welcoming and accepting of people from that generation, and what that means is that the business loses out.
What’s more, those kinds of businesses potentially come across as less appealing even to talent from different generations. Young people today want their work to be meaningful, and mentoring is one of the factors that helps to provide that.
All Diversity Is Beneficial
A multigenerational workforce is diverse by definition—and diversity is always a good thing. It means bringing together people with different backgrounds, perspectives and experiences, which fosters innovation and creativity through various ideas, approaches and solutions.
Diverse teams bring fresh insights, challenge stale thinking and come up with more innovative and effective solutions. Individuals are forced to challenge their own biases and assumptions and so learn and grow in knowledge and in empathy.
Age diversity might be less discussed than other kinds of diversity—diversity of race, ethnicity, culture, religion, sexuality or background, for example. But it’s no different. It, too, brings and can continue to bring benefits in productivity and overall profitability. Research from McKinsey has shown diverse companies typically outperform their less diverse peers.
It’s up to companies to embrace this and confront any threats to it head-on. We’ve all heard about the accusations of selfishness directed toward Millennials and grumbling about such phenomena as “quiet quitting” (and “loud quitting”) and “lazy girl jobs.” We’ve also heard of the “OK, Boomer” trend, and stereotypes around the “value” of older people and the “entitlement” of younger generations persist.
But we can and should confront these generalizations head-on and build cultures of inclusivity, equity, openness and communication. If we create environments where everyone is seen and heard—and everyone’s needs are respected—we can begin to unlock the potential of multigenerational teams.
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