Add Category
Never before have Australian workers toiled alongside colleagues so many decades apart in age — a span of four generations.
In small teams and across huge workforces, their workmates are dealing with first pregnancies and menopause, the trials of small children and the deaths of parents, moving out and downsizing.
Gaby Koronis is 69. She's a Baby Boomer with three children in their 40s.
Jess Klose is 23. Born in the year 2000, a Gen Z, she is about to take over Gaby's job.
Gaby prefers in-person contact and phone calls, while Jess — who successfully begged her mum for a mobile phone when she was 16, seven years ago — largely uses digital tools.
"Her communication style is a little bit more different to how I say my generation would communicate. And she loves her paper," Jess says.
"She is a paper fanatic, she prints everything off, writes everything down!
"I am 'Full Tech', I will bring my laptop and I'll write notes.
"I've tried to sort of teach her the ways of technology and go 'Gaby, I can make your life a little bit easier' and she's like, 'No, I'm fine, paper is working for me'."
In meetings, Gaby is often the only person who attends with a notepad and pen.
"Yes, I will put my hand up for that one," she says.
"Old school: pen and paper. When you have IT issues, you don't have them with pen and paper."
Like millions of workers across the nation they've had to embrace change to deal with colleagues and bosses where the age disparity is measured in decades.
"It probably didn't sit well with me," says Gaby, reflecting on how her team over time took to tapping meeting notes on their phone.
"But you need to open your mind and take on board how the world is progressing."
Together work
This Adelaide office, of private health insurer Medibank, is emblematic of work sites across the nation.
On the day the ABC visits, Hayden Harris is working from home.
The 47-year-old, who manages employees in South Australia, has four daughters aged between 20 and two — and one of them is sick.
Hayden worked for his parents' business and at 17 got a job in a sports store earning $5.42 an hour, cash that came in an envelope.
"It was very much in that era that whatever the boss said, went," he remembers. There was little questioning or challenging.
"Now, I think it's a hugely different dynamic."
Hayden has seen huge shifts in how decisions and directions are communicated, with the aim of getting the best out of people.
"The style of leadership and management that I do now versus say if I went back to when I first started managing almost 25 years ago, is hugely different," he says.
"I was probably more that Old School — 'I made the decisions, this is the way it goes'.
"Whereas over the years, it's become a much more collaborative approach: you take on board advice. And if you're not listening to your team, you're going to lose them quite quickly."
"Now I need to actually consider that feedback. And on reflection, probably a combination of the two is a much better way of moving forward and doing things."
This gels with the finding of social researcher Claire Madden.
"It can be quite confronting for the older generation, seeing the shifts that have been demanded by the younger generations in the workplace when it comes to leadership," she says.
The previous "hierarchical model" doesn't work for many workers in Generation Y and Z.
"Younger generations are responding to collaborative models where they have a voice even from Day One in the workplace."
Age bracket
The definitions of different generations are contested, but tend to fall into broad categories based on birth years that span around 15-20 years.
The categories are ropey, and change depending on the expert or report you're reading.
Swipe to see the general definition for each generation:
Baby Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964.
Generation X were born between 1965 and 1980.
Generation Y, also known as Millennials, were born between 1981 and 1995.
Generation Z, also known as Zoomers, were born between 1996 and 2012.
But while generations have shared experiences and some life stages — like parenting young children or bouts of poor health — age isn't everything.
"I think a lot of the views and perspective, both personally and from a work perspective, comes more down to the individual rather than the age," Hayden says.
He notes that many of his colleagues defy the categories society sometimes tried to put them on.
"I've worked with people that are 'young old people' and 'old young people'," he says.
"What it says on their driver's license might not necessarily match the actions and what they can do at work."
Stereo… types
When people were born doesn't determine the kind of personality or work ethic they have, or the choices they've made in their lives.
But people of similar ages do have shared experiences that have helped shape their lives, such as booms and recessions, technological development and changes in societal forces like the decline of religious belief and evolving attitudes about marriage and sexuality.
"There's so much that shapes an individual," Claire Madden surmises.
"There's cultural backgrounds, there's family values and the like. What generational categories do is they just look at what are some of the broad social and technological trends that we grew up with.
"There's more that unifies us as generations than divides us."
On the flip side, we also frequently act the same no matter our age: we travel more than in decades past, our use of the internet and devices keeps increasing and during the early part of the COVID pandemic everyone was 'doomscrolling'.
Y?
Technical business analyst Deeksha Kharub says she gets "emotionally connected" to her work and employer.
Aged 29 and in Generation Y, Deeksha isn't jumping from job to job.
"But then listening to Gen Z and their values and their mindset, it becomes really interesting," she says.
"They do encourage you to switch jobs, [saying] 'You've got more potential and more opportunities out there, you get more money outside with the same work you're doing'."
At the other end of the age scale, Gaby is older than Deeksha's mother.
And universally, she says, people don't tend to listen to their actual parents.
"But you learn from their experience — the confidence they have in the work they're doing — because they've been doing it for so long," Deeksha says.
Generational mix
That mix of perspectives and experience is what Christian Miran is trying to build.
A senior leader in human resources at the insurer, which has more than 3,600 employees, he says the majority of Medibank's workforce is in Generation X and Y, with about 10 per cent Baby Boomers and a small percentage of Gen Z's "coming through".
"We don't really try and look at people are in their age category," he says.
"It's all about helping people to do their best work. And that means they can bring themselves to work and their whole selves and their experiences."
Instead of a challenge, the company sees the breadth of its workers as a strength.
"It gives you power of ideas and power of experience. If you're trying to innovate, trying to do things differently you need a look at within your organisation. Your people will have ideas."
One of the key assumptions around generational differences is often that older people bring experience and skill and that junior people learn from him. That does happen, Christian notes.
"But on the flip side, what we've seen internally is that people also learn the other way," he says.
Living longer
There's a good reason we're seeing a greater span of years in the same workforce: people are living longer and the nature of our work is changing too.
"It's very challenging if you're brick-layer or a carpenter to physically keep going at 65," says Terry Rawnsley, an economist for consulting firm KPMG.
"Whereas if you're a white-collar office worker, pulling out the laptop into your 60s? No problem."
As service industries grow to dominate our economy, and the bridges of "knowledge workers" expand, so too is the spread of ages working together.
"We've got young people straight out of university or high school — late teens, early 20s — up to people in their late 60s working away," he says. "They can learn from each other."
The flexible work and "work from home" (WFH) revolution spawned by the COVID pandemic have also added to people's ability to step down from work more gradually.
"It kind of gave confidence to everyone, both workers and employers, that this can work," Terry says.
"The COVID period said, 'Look, you can work from anywhere'. You're a phone call away or you can jump on the laptop and be there as required. [It] provided confidence that you can have people kind of chiming in and out of organisations."
Digital divide
Tech company boss Simon Haighton-Williams has more than 1,000 staff, and recently funded research into how companies packed with "knowledge workers" are dealing with generational divides.
"I think the challenges come down to people's expectations and about trying to align them," the chief executive of Adaptivist says.
"Good people want to overcome these things, they want to work together and want to produce good outcomes."
More than half of the businesses surveyed, across the UK, US, Canada, Germany and Australia, employed three or more generations.
The highest levels of conflict uncovered were around the use of digital tools, and how people from different generations had preferred methods of communication.
'Bossy … lazy … forgetful'
The difficulties of dealing with people at vastly different stages of life are clear, according to the research.
People want to be seen as individuals, not generational stereotypes, but businesses face a challenge as they try to build a work culture where people feel valued, work together and have their differences respected.
The research looked at broad stereotypes — how people classify and describe the generations they're not a member of. It is not positive:
- Baby Boomers: "Bossy, disciplined, slow, and forgetful technophobes"
- Generation X: "Bossy but efficient, organised with a strong work ethic, and sociable"
- Generation Y (Millennials): "Easily distracted but organised, sociable, and efficient"
- Generation Z (Zoomers): "Easily distracted, poor attention to detail, and lazy—but sociable and highly tech-savvy"
What is working is that good managers are realising the opportunity that comes from getting things right.
"The key thing is to face those frustrations head-on and build a culture where people are not afraid to talk to each other, not afraid to ask questions and uncover and learn from each other," Mr Haighton-Williams says.
"The biggest message that we took from the survey is that people don't like to be identified by generation. Your generation just becomes another aspect of who you are.
"You can be black, you can be white, you can be old, you can be young, it's just another aspect of that. Who you are and the skills and energy you bring to work are far, far more important."
17 to 70
In his own company, Adaptivist's boss says the breadth of ages in modern workplaces is a strength.
"There's certainly things I learn from the 17 year olds every day … and that is to be celebrated," Simon Haighton-Williams notes.
"We try and actively encourage them to work together. There might be a natural tendency to take a set of people with super common experiences and similar ages and just make them work together as a team."
The company actively avoids that.
"It's just another form of diversity: that helps diverse thinking and helps you be more creative. Ultimately, it's all about people," he says.
Within teams, he says that skill sharing becomes practical when younger staff share knowledge of newer digital tools.
Additionally, older staff who have been taught "the comfort and capability of talking on the phone" — something the research suggests many younger people are "kind of jealous of" — can model how to use direct communication.
Greater gap
Social researcher Claire Madden says the radically different times each generation grew up in means that the "gap" feels even greater than perhaps what it has been in previous decades.
"You can see some some tensions in how we approach how we go about work," she says.
"The generational gap research showed that 46 per cent of Gen Z kids actually envy the 'phone confidence' of their older colleagues," she adds, describing the ability to cold-call numbers or confidently seek information from strangers using only a phone.
"We're finding with Gen Z that whilst they're really confident behind a screen, as soon as you remove that screen, there can be a bit of a confidence gap for them."
That doesn't mean every Gen Z is allergic to calling. But it's part of broader shifts in how people get things done.
"There are differences that we do bring to how we work," Claire Madden says.
"How we live, how we connect."
Ageing in
The Adelaide Medibank office is just one example of the spread of generations in our workplaces.
Across the nation, work sites and tea rooms are full of people like Jess, Deeksha, Hayden and Gaby.
There are two generations we haven't discussed, because they are not in the workforce in large numbers.
The youngest of the Silent Generation, born between 1928 and 1945, is nearing 80 years old.
The oldest representatives of Gen Alpha, born since 2013, are just starting high school.
The Silent Generation deserve their rest.
But in just a few years, Gen Alpha will join the youngest of the Baby Boomers in the Australian workforce.
Meaning five generations in the office, on the worksite and in the tea room — hitting deadlines, complaining about rosters, celebrating birthdays and bemoaning Mondays — will be making it work.