Connecting Baby Boomers and Millenials for productivity
In five years the Millenials in your offices will be your Managers, or even the new Owner.
In our furiously changing world (much of it invisible), digital natives have a huge advantage but they behave and speak in a whole new social language. That means clash with Baby Boomers and even GenXY! The result is that Millenials often leave abruptly or go quietly non-productive. Both are very expensive disruptions.
Since life will never go back to how it was, ignoring these issues won’t make the problem go away.
This highlights two major Issues:
- GenY are here to stay. They are a vital part of your business but Baby Boomers can find them like foreigners. Close on their heels is GenZ, as yet an unknown quantity but thought to be ‘like GenY on steroids’.
- Baby Boomer business owners are 5-10 years from moving out, retiring. The next owner will be 32 or 24. Wise Baby Boomers are voicing, “How do we interact so we can get the right people on board and can walk away?”
This gap must be bridged. The conversation must be started.
Structured inter-generational workshops
The aim: to bring GenY thinking into GenY management.
The start: using structured workshops, we invite your GenYs to come in and say how they would run the company they work for. In expertly facilitated workshops, GenY can constructively voice all the structural issues and problems they see, and have free rein on how they would redesign their company. They dismantle structures that don’t work, that are costing the company and change what makes sense, so it becomes three times more profitable.
The end: GenY participants discuss and validate their ideas, go back and pitch their findings to Senior Managers: “If this was my company this is what I’d do…”
How it works:
- We facilitate two GenY-exclusive workshops, in a GenY-friendly style. GenY voice their issues and problems, have open discussion about the things they would do if it was their business. This constructively starts a new conversation with GenYs switched on like never before.
- Simultaneously, we facilitate two parallel workshops for Baby Boomer managers/owners. In a facilitated constructive environment, they can bring out their frustrations, questions and identify the core issues with GenY employees. Content includes a background discussion on the Generational characteristics, how they think, why the traditional management approach perpetuates the gap, and dispel some mis-beliefs that will surprise Baby Boomers. We begin a new journey of mutual respect and productivity.
- In the final workshop, GenY pitch their ideas to their manager or a group of Managers/Partners, which we facilitate as the objective mediator of the process.
Business outcomes:
This program could be the most constructive, inspiring exercise every cross-generational business can do. It opens the door to real communication and develops mutual respect, greater productivity and true team spirit. Old structures that no longer make sense and are costing the company can be changed with cooperation and collaboration, so it becomes far more profitable.
Contact Liz nowto discuss getting across your Millenial-Baby Boomer challenge.