According to Glassdoor reports, Gen Z is expected to overtake Baby Boomers in the workforce by next year. And they are not thriving.
A recent workforce survey by CNBC and SurveyMonkey found that 47% of Gen Z-ers indicated they’re coasting by at work. They also say they find their responsibilities uninspiring and proclaim to have the least meaningful work and the least autonomy compared to other generations. All older generations in the same survey reported just the opposite, with a higher proportion saying they’re thriving in their roles.
This scene plays out over and over at workplaces across the U.S., showing just how much a multigenerational workforce requires a custom approach to employee management. The collision of five distinct generations in the workforce — each with its own preferences and definitions for work/life balance, career growth and work environment — proves that maintaining satisfaction levels and retaining employees has never been more challenging.
The most recent U.S. Census Data shows that the current U.S. workforce comprises Traditionalists (born 1922-1945), Baby Boomers (born 1946-1965), Generation X (born 1966-1980), Millennials (born 1981-1996) and Generation Z (born 1997-2010). Generations are often shaped and characterized by the state of the cultural environment of their time, and while caution should be served to not generalize or stereotype, an understanding of each group’s values and beliefs can minimize conflict in the workplace and increase employee engagement, directly impacting your bottom line.
As a modern marketing company, we help clients find ways to understand their audience and deliver personalized messaging to each unique stakeholder group at the right place and time. Here are five ways to design the same systems and structures within your workplace to accommodate each generation’s unique communications needs so you can reap the bottom-line rewards.
1. Dive deep into the data
In marketing and in business, we don’t do anything without first understanding the environment in which we’re operating. Who is the audience? What are their needs? Where do they consume information? How do they consume information? What are their beliefs? Gathering qualitative and quantitative data provides the information to base your plans on.
Ask your talent and culture team to establish or access your own workforce census data. This will give you an understanding of your team’s generational makeup. While our people management system does this for us, DS+CO also annually participates in the Great Place to Work Institute’s Trust Index Study. In addition to gathering sentiment surrounding key areas of the business, the study collects and includes demographic data in its reports.
It is like Christmas morning every year when that data lands in our leadership team’s inboxes. It not only helps us gauge how well we’re serving our employees but gives us a deep understanding of where our assumptions meet our reality.
2. Develop your strategy
Data not only takes out the guesswork, it also provides assurances that your plan will have impact. Insights will emerge, and you’ll start to discover nuances among workstyle preferences from one generation to the next.
When we were combing through our most recent pulse survey and Great Place to Work Trust Index results, we recognized some gaping disparities among the facetime preferences across generations. Nearly 100% of our team members prefer at least some in-person time at work. Our data revealed that the younger generations prefer to be in the office, but only if others are there with them. They crave mentorship and community.
Most surprising, however, was their expectation that management orchestrates these conditions. To that point, we had been leaving it up to our team members to self-govern their in-person time, not realizing the expectation was that we would provide the guidance.
This generational insight, again derived from the data, allowed us to craft a strategy for how to gather our teams in person and set the direction for our current work-from-anywhere policy, with Tuesdays and Thursdays in office for those who are interested.
3. Identify the right channels and the right messages
It’s no secret that where and how generations consume their information is vastly different from one group to the next. If your talent and culture team is your best friend in this endeavor, your communications team is a close second. These folks are trained to deeply understand an audience’s communication preferences and craft precise messaging that resonates.
They also can help you build the plan to execute your multigenerational workforce communications and engagement strategy. Creating varying versions of readable, listenable and viewable content ensures you connect with each generation and engage them, rather than irritate or ostracize them. Make no mistake, involving your communications team to support your efforts to navigate the multigenerational workplace will pay dividends.
4. Measure, analyze and apply
Measuring and tracking progress matches the importance of using data to inform your plan. Without a measurement plan to understand which success factors are most important to you, you’ll miss the opportunity to evaluate progress. Analyzing your plan and the expected goals for each of its components provides a framework you can measure success against.
You might set a goal to increase engagement at weekly all-staff meetings among the mid-career professionals in your organization. Because you have the census data on your team, you understand that a vast majority of those folks tend to be classified as Millennials.
Additionally, your work to build out engagement and communication plans according to preference data gleaned from your research means you know that this group engages most when a clear purpose is present. In fact, the most recent Deloitte 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey states that 89% of millennials say having a sense of purpose is important to their overall job satisfaction and wellbeing.
Your strategic plan therefore calls for infusing your organization’s purpose into your all-staff meetings for a set time period. And your measurement plan would include a metric to track Millennial engagement at the onset and again after the plan is launched to determine its effectiveness. As you watch that trend, you can use the progress against that metric to determine if tweaks must be made.
5. Deliver
No matter the generation, human beings crave information and follow-through. Asking them for their preferences and building programs aimed at satisfying those preferences builds trust and engagement. On the other hand, gathering the data, writing the plan and putting it on a shelf breeds discontent and resentment. You have to follow through.
At DS+CO, our leadership team tracks accountability through quarterly updates that share progress on our strategic plan and agency financials. In those meetings, we often report on pulse survey and Great Place to Work results. Where we glean areas for improvement, we address the ways and systems that will be used to address them. Once a program is launched, we report on its progress at weekly agency meetings as warranted.
In today’s diverse workforce, understanding and addressing the unique needs of each generation isn’t just a nicety but a necessity. By diving deep into data, developing strategic plans, identifying the right communication channels, measuring progress and delivering on promises, organizations can create a more engaged and productive workforce. As we’ve seen at DS+CO, these efforts not only enhance employee satisfaction but also drive business success. Embracing a tailored approach to employee engagement and communication will enable organizations to thrive in an increasingly multigenerational landscape.
Lauren Dixon is board chair of Dixon Schwabl + Co., a marketing communications firm, which has been honored as a Best Place to Work.
