Age Should No Longer Be Focus of Talent Initiatives

The traditionalist generational lens used to design and deliver workforce programs has seemingly handicapped companies from understanding the shared values of their workforce across generations, according to a study by Deloitte. Experts agreed, arguing that age should no longer outweigh tangible, relevant experience.

“The longer I study generations in the workplace, the more similarities I find in what people want out of work. Those fundamentals of meaning, purpose, good leaders, professional growth do not change. What changes is how each generation expresses these needs and what expectations we have about our employers’ fulfillment of them,” wrote Author Lindsey Pollak in The Remix: How to Lead and Succeed in the Multigenerational Workplace.

Generational analysis has served as a prevalent and influential anchor to view, design and deliver workforce programs for decades. Its application rests on the assumption that each generational cohort shares an inherent set of values, needs and preferences that play an important relevance in workplace incentives and processes. Yet the prescription has seemingly been rendered obsolete by a workforce that now spans five generations. This development has challenged leaders to consider alternative approaches to workforce strategies.

Karlo Mongragón, CHRO, Grupo Salinas, said that wrongly stereotyping peoples’ needs according to their age can be counterproductive. “People in charge of human capital should gather information about employees, who they are, and their specific characteristics, to create solutions beyond gender and age. There is a need to segment colleagues to be able to take care of them, create personalized solutions and give leaders the flexibility to understand what people want,” he added. These solutions cannot be generic to all company members and should not be top-down, Mondragón continued.

Othe pressures include the increasingly dynamic nature of career progression in an emerging digital economy that has effectively loosened the “historic correlation” between age and career advancement. This is best evidenced by ongoing organizational changes and the accelerated adoption of technologies triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing organizations and their contributors to reinvent themselves repeatedly. This macroeconomic transformation has in turn made it desirable, if not necessary, for organizations to promote younger individuals over senior contributors.

Furthermore, as workers across generational lines became more vocal about their needs, they realized that they have more in common than previously anticipated. Elements like congruent value propositions, flexible work models, job security and expectations for advancement have proven to be important across all generations, according to the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends Survey. “Taken together, the evidence suggests that there has never been a greater opportunity to look beyond generation to reimagine how to segment the workforce for the future,” reads Deloitte’s insight article. “We need to develop specific models to make optimal use of this opportunity,” said Ana Karina López, HR Business Partner, Kyndryl.

“Our responsibility as HR professionals is to pay attention to those similarities and differences to create better strategies,” said Raquel Castañeda, People Director, Incode. Nevertheless, companies are not always willing to invest and meet the needs of each segment. Furthermore, companies need to evaluate how much they are willing to invest in their employees' well-being, commented Sandra Jaime, HR Director, Zurich.

“Generational intelligence is a skill as valuable as emotional intelligence that can help leaders to gain better results and work at a better organization,” added Castañeda.

What is more, the personalization of individual workplace experiences will depend on the collection and analysis of workforce data to discern and understand distinct employee archetypes. This process has been greatly facilitated by the proliferation of new technologies and techniques for measuring key performance indicators, including demographics, firmographics, attitudes toward inclusion and needs from employers. However, companies should be careful to avoid micro-segmentation which, as consumer-product and retail companies discovered, has a limited value without also understanding customer values and preferences.

Yamile Nacif, HR Lead Mexico, Accenture, mentioned that companies who do not accompany their HR processes with technology will become less agile. Nevertheless, the challenge lies in taking the data and bringing it to something relevant to make intelligent strategies and define them. By looking for answers there needs to be results and changes that people can notice, Nacif explained. “The labor market has changed and is demanding different factors, we have to understand that. Until today we have failed to read that information and process it,” said Raquel Castañeda.

“Organizations today have the opportunity to apply consumer marketing insights and data analytics to design workforce management practices based on a deep understanding of individual behaviors, values and attitudes, as well as demographics and career and life stages,” according to Deloitte. Nonetheless, demographics should not be the base to create a program or a strategy. “We must be more precise to find a more personalized solution. Creating closeness and opening communication channels is very important,” said Jaime. In addition, companies need to involve people from different professional backgrounds that can bring diversity to the teams and interpret this data differently, said Nacif.