PLAYING the generation game is a tricky business. As the UK workforce ages, the gap between seniors and the new graduate intake is widening, and not just in years. It’s all about outlook. Generation Y-ers don’t want to hang about, working their way up through the ranks like their parents. Here’s how to mind the gap:
1. Ignore the above. “Look at individuals’ abilities and not their age,” says Sam Mercer, the director of the Employers Forum on Age (www.efa.org.uk). “Education is more likely to impact your attitude to work than age. It’s about recognising that you have to treat everyone with respect.”
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2. The problem could be you. Mercer believes that poor management lies at the bottom of the generation gap. “If you can manage people, age doesn’t come into it,” she says.
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3. Know your team. It’s dangerous to generalise: 65-year-olds climb mountains too. Getting to know your team as individuals, and what makes them tick — or ticks them off — is crucial regardless of their age.
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4. Start out right. Graduates need to be given the skills to fit into an organisation, says Jonathan Stevens, the training manager at Impact Development Training Group (www.impact-dtg.com). The answer is an induction process that puts graduates to work in a number of teams with people who have a different take on life, he says.
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5. Work in progress. “It can be a challenge getting people to recognise that even though they have been with an organisation for 40 years they still need to develop professionally — and that they can,” Stevens says.
6. Find a common goal. “Give people the time and space to talk and recognise what they can do collectively,” Stevens says. “Make sure that people are clear about where the organisation is going and what ‘we’ need to do to get there.”
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7. Try mentoring. Pairing senior team members with new recruits can be a good way to create mutual understanding, but there are pitfalls, Stevens says. “Give people the support they need or mentoring can do more harm than good by raising peoples’ expectations that are then not fulfilled,” he says. One danger is that young people feel that they are being assessed.
8. Reverse it. IBM turns mentoring on its head, says Mary Sue Rogers, the global leader of the company’s human capital management practice. It has young people mentor senior colleagues. “Mature colleagues [say] that they appreciate the insight into what people are like in their twenties and thirties . . . they can ask ‘what’s a blog?’ and feel comfortable about it,” Rogers says. “The younger person can give them an insight into how their public persona works with the other generation.”
9. Time to quit? “If managers want to wind things down near the end of their working life [and go part time], then I believe they should be given the opportunity,” says Dietmar Martina, the head of HR at Deutsche Telekom, in The Cane Mutiny: Managing a Graying Workforce (Harvard Business Review, Oct 2005). “Otherwise you run the risk of employees internally resigning, putting in only meagre efforts.”
10. Youth is overrated. Mitre Corp, a public intrest systems engineering company in the US, brings retirees back to work on a “part-time, on-call” basis because younger employees just don’t have the technical expertise.
WHIZ-KIDS & OLD DOGS