Aligning Your Multigenerational Workforce To Collaborate And Communicate Effectively

HR leaders should look at the workplace analytics to help with the evaluation process

Globally, the range of generations in the workforce has been steadily increasing as older generations work for longer, millennials move into leadership positions, and Gen Z enters the workforce. New organizational trends of reduced hierarchies and flexible work arrangements mean that companies can’t rely as strongly on formal processes and co-presence to ensure effective collaboration. People with different roles and ages use different tools to communicate as well, further complicating collaboration.

For HR leaders in particular, the challenge is to find a balance between a supportive and efficient environment for an increasingly age-diverse workforce, while keeping pace with the digital communication tools necessary to support collaboration. To truly understand how different generations are communicating and collaborating with each other, HR leaders should look at the workplace analytics to help with the evaluation process. Analytics can reveal tangible ways for improving intergenerational cohesion while helping to choose which digital communication tools work best for everyone. 

A large technology company makes for a compelling example. This organization had trouble ensuring tight collaboration across generational boundaries, and its leaders wanted to understand precisely which groups were affected and how these barriers could be overcome. Anonymized data from email, calendars, chat programs, calls, and in person meetings were all analyzed from existing corporate data, where no personal information was identified and no content was analyzed.

In general, the data showed that people in their 20s were the most isolated demographic group for this organization. Relative to their proportion of the employee population, people in their 30’s spend 9% less time with their colleagues in their 20’s than you would expect, while people in their 40’s spend 14.7% less time with them. Similarly, people older than 50 spend 8.8% less time communicating with people in their 20’s. Other age groups were less isolated from each other, although people in their 30’s and people older than 50 communicate 4.1% less than would be expected.

Part of this seems to come down to communication tool usage. People in their 20’s spend more time in chat (5%) than any other age group, and significantly less time in meetings (40% versus 66% for people 50 or older). Taken together, these results show that companies not only need to do a better job aligning different generations through training and processes, but also through aligning the different modalities people use to work. If people don’t even use the same tools, no amount of cajoling will yield a substantive change in collaboration.

The disparity in meeting time points to further issues around work patterns. If older employees tend to view work as tightly compartmentalized from other parts of the day, it will be harder to schedule meetings with younger employees who have different expectations. Depending on the organizational context, one may be more effective than the other, so it’s the responsibility of leadership to set expectations and model the behavior they expect. If more flexibility is desirable across the board, then that extends to older employees who may need additional training to adapt. Conversely, a more focused workday demands the attention of younger employees. Constant examination of a company’s work patterns to ensure alignment across these generations is necessary to ensure effective collaboration. Similar to communication tools, without alignment of workday practices any efforts to improve communication is likely to fall flat.

Moving forward, organizations can measure the impact of their initiatives and assess whether or not they positively impact these disparities. It’s likely that these trends will change over time as even younger people enter the workforce and older employees retire. Even if an organization gets communication right today, in a few months that will likely no longer be the case. Just as the world has moved to a mode of constant experimentation and adjustment, so must organizations when it comes to how different generations collaborate together.