Every Friday, we make it our business to find an especially interesting compensation/reward oriented blog post from the past week from somewhere outside the Cafe, and highlight it here. This week we direct you to a post on dealing with a multigenerational workforce by Chris Ferdinandi, author of Renegade HR.
In recent years, as Chris points out, there’s been an explosion of information about how to manage a multigenerational workforce. Recent research even raises the question of whether our reward programs themselves should be tailored to generational differences.
A waste of time ... and even a divisive practice, says Chris. From his point of view:
The real goal of the multigenerational workforce movement is to help everyone in your organization work together effectively. Focusing on generations is divisive. It requires you to lump people into categories and teaches managers to treat everyone within that category the same. Doesn’t it make more sense to teach managers how to deal with individual work preferences?
I think organizations could manage a diverse workforce much more effectively if they took all of the “stuff” that gets taught during multigenerational seminars and ripped away the generational labels.
Teach managers why some people prefer to text or email instead of call. Teach them to have discussions with their employees about how they prefer to work, and to get out of the way and let their people do amazing things.
Good advice to all of us in the business of designing reward (or any HR) programs: Be careful about getting caught in the trap of categorizing people and making assumptions based on generational labels.
If you aren't already reading Chris's blog, be sure to click through and check it out for some renegade reading!
Have a great weekend!
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