MANAGING A MULTI GENERATIONAL WORK FORCE

The lord our God in Ephesians 2; 14 encourages us to live in peace no matter our differences! One would reflect upon the viability of this message, especially with today’s work places having an average of four generations according to Forbes. Difference in communication styles and mindsets being the major sources of inter-generational conflict today, managers continue to battle with minimizing and mitigating these conflicts.

With the baby boomers preferring the rigid face to face communication, technological advancement has come in as a major aggravator of the conflict since it allows the millennials practice their online communication. Similarly, the boomers’ competitive and hardworking mindset in contrast to the millennials’ cooperative and smart working does not narrow the conflict any thinner.

On that note, managers need to negate the blanket stereo types concerning the different generations and handle them in respect to their personal needs. Darren Kyeyune, a millennial sports journalist believes the first step to reducing these conflicts is appreciating the existent cross-generational differences. The managers should therefore be flexible enough in their expectations from the different generations. It would be a fable for a manager to believe that a baby boomer can learn to work with the windows XI operating system with as much ease as a millennial therefore implying a need to appreciate their differences and manage them accordingly.

Cross generational transfer of knowledge is very crucial and this justifies why many managers today need to adopt workplace mentorship programs where the millennials and the X-ers can be mentored by the boomers. Furthermore, there is need to adopt a number of work patterns such as flexi time and telecommuting that would enable generations like the Millennials who strongly subscribe to the new psychological contract ably perform work tasks from anywhere. Such patterns are even more helpful to the x-ers who in this age dominate parenthood.

“The glory of the youth is in their strength” Proverbs 20; 29. This is why managers need to actively engage the Millennials at work since it is their God given right as youth to keep engaged. Research proves that Millennials will enjoy their jobs more especially if they are greatly subjected to contextual work performance where they perform tasks outside their job description. Millennial engagement at work can further be spiced by involving them in teamwork since they are highly intrigued by team involvement.

Just as conjugal rights wouldn’t be enjoyed in the same recurrent style, Millennials have a natural tendency to easily get bored and lose interest in case of monotony. This implies the need for managers to apply different approaches of job design such as job rotation to keep their flames burning vigorously within.

With a new generation “Z” cropping up, it is paramount for managers to re position their approach towards handling multi-cultural conflicts in order to save organizations  lots of labor turnover, low productivity and poor staff rapport in the future.