Working in Harmony: Nurturing a Multi-Generational Workforce

"Nurturing" and "harmony" are not exactly terms that you'd expect to pop up in the standard corporate lexicon. However, as the workforce steadily becomes more diverse and more multigenerational, these types of ideas are starting to become more and more relevant.

Corporate leaders are increasingly tasked with keeping a diverse group of people with different viewpoints happy. The one size fits all approach just doesn't seem to work anymore. 

Does that sound familiar? If so, it's probably time for something different.

Nurturing: A Concept To Help You Prepare for the Future of Your Organization

As humans, we tend to nurture things because of our basic nature. Most of us like to see things grow and become successful, and that is definitely true of leaders' attitudes towards their organizations.

Attempting to nurture a workforce requires a different frame of mind from a leader. However, it can still be an approach that advances your organization towards the overall vision you have of success.

Nurturing a team means empowering them to do the right thing. It means building up the strength of each member — and of each generation — so they can handle what's ahead. 

Doing this for everyone is going to take a massive team effort. As they say, it takes a village to raise a child. In fact, that requirement for mass involvement in personal development is one of the things that should increase harmony in your organization.

Getting Together To Build Each Other Up

All too often, generational differences in the workplace can lead to internal friction and negative stereotypes when left alone. You see this a lot when technology is involved. People tend to form ranks generationally around whether or not they want to adopt new technologies and methods.

How do you persuade a group of people who are predisposed to individualized, internet-based learning when you want them to engage in an in-person training session? How do you get pen-and-paper types to learn tech skills using touch tablets?

One way around these challenges is to focus on the people as much as you're focusing on the tasks. After all, you're not just trying to transmit skills, you're also developing people.

Mentor-Mentee Relationships Can Help Cross Boundaries

Even if you adopt the mindset of focusing on people, you might still have some challenges in terms of resources. After all, not every organization can (or would even want to) roll out a multi-format, companywide development program. This is where your multigenerational team can really shine.

We already talked about how hard it's becoming to try to please everyone with a single approach. However, the mentor-mentee relationship is one possible exception.

Mentoring is a single approach that's versatile enough to handle basically any type of challenge you face when attempting to nurture your workforce. These one-on-one or small-group sessions come together and break apart as necessary with very little need for direct intervention from management or leadership.

You'll find some trade-offs when comparing mentorship to traditional training, and you'll probably end up using multiple tools to tackle each challenge you face. Are you ready to start making the decisions that will build a harmonious future for your multigenerational team?