If your organization is leading change with human-centric goals in mind, it becomes important to address one of the biggest elephant in the room: generational differences. In an age where individuality is encouraged and generational gaps are often compared and discussed, it has become extremely important for corporations to consider the differences between individuals and the need for personalization and segmentations in their change activation strategies.
This executive brief will help you recognize some of the most common generational patterns within the workforce, factors affecting these behaviors, and how you can devise successful tactics to address them, along with real-life examples from experts across industries.
This roundtable was held on September 24th, 2024.
Resistance to Change: Is It Generational?
Generational gaps among the workforce and their behavior towards change undoubtedly play a role in the success of organizational shifts and change initiatives. To ensure a successful change, you need to identify if the generational attitude towards change within the organization only correlates with the employees' age groups or if there are any other factors that may divide them into different workforce subgroups.
Factor 1: Age Groups & Gaps
Commonly discussed and considered in change initiatives. Generations born in different eras are often equipped with a slightly contrasting set of values, thinking, and behaviors such as preferred methods of communications and how they consume information effectively. Consider these in your strategies and cater to differences, but always remember not to turn them into a generational stereotype.
Factor 2: Length of Tenure
Less popular take and fairly often missed but one that makes the biggest generational impact on the success of your change initiatives. While generational differences exist, resistance to change is more about the difference in reactions between those who are tenured versus those who are new to the company.
Factor 3: Shift in Workplace Expectations
Global crises and disruptions could also cause stronger resistance within certain groups of employees as fear and uncertainties highly influence people’s expectations, making them more vocal towards agendas that would impact them on a personal level. Shifts in mindsets and workplace expectations may also cause different generations to react differently and become more resistant to a specific change.
Navigating Generational Perspectives in Values and Motivations Without Pre-Existing Bias or Assumptions
While it is important to consider generational differences in your change strategies, it is equally crucial to avoid having pre-existing biases or stereotypes that might cause you to subconsciously place employees in pre-conditioned groups, purely based on their existing collective traits instead of focusing on their unique individualities. Make it a point to only use these preconceived notions to help you enhance your strategies and make them more inclusive for the workforce, not as the sole factor for consideration.
1. Design Inclusive Communications
Communication Channels & Formats
Channels are key and they are highly based on specific company culture. You can adopt a multi-channel strategy to diversify communication channels and increase reach but avoid a one-size-fits-all approach.
However, keep in mind that having to cater to different audiences through various channels instead of being unified at one source may consume a lot of your time and resources over time.
Communication Strategies
Tailor communication strategies to address values, motivations, and concerns specific to particular employee groups. Get aligned with key stakeholders to get everyone on the same page of the change you are driving before strategizing further.
2. Foster Dialogues & Participations
Engage Through Diverse Representations
Create engagement with employees while considering factors like cultural differences instead of solely relying on generational targeting. Emphasize the importance of representation by recruiting both tenured and newer employees to be your change champions. It is incredibly important to choose people who will be able to articulate the vision accurately, whether by email, verbally, or through channels like Slack or Teams.
Provide Platforms for Exchanges
Provide a platform for employees to voice any concerns. Create chat channels for impacted change groups so that there is a resource for support and information readily available and directly connected to them. Opt to break up your audiences into smaller groups to allow them to direct specific concerns in real time. This way, you will be able to observe any overlapping question patterns between different groups and bring them to attention in a larger forum within the project team.
3. Monitor & Evolve Your Strategies
Leverage Data & Insights
Track engagement, attendance, and feedback loops to help refine your communication strategies, constantly improving them to increase success rate. Generationally, people gravitate towards different messaging methods, for example, via informal chat channels over email and vice versa. Analyzing your data like hit rates and traffic will help prove or debunk these theories which directly improve your channel selections and maximize message delivery over time.
Overcoming Generational Challenges: Successful Examples & Approaches
Turn Experience Into Influence
Begin by bringing in tenured and entrenched employees as key stakeholders early on and try to convert them into change champions. More senior employees often have better influence within their respective teams. Bringing them in as stakeholders effectively leverages their existing influence to help the initiative gain credibility quickly and help reduce resistance.
Once you manage to secure buy-in from them, recruit newer employees next and let them learn directly from the seniors to encourage cooperation and alignment.
Address Concerns & Resentments
Neglected concerns lead to grievances and displeasure, further fuelling resistance towards change. Different groups of employees may have distinct expectations and silencing their voices or blindly ignoring ongoing tensions will deepen the generational gaps within your organization.
For instance, if the majority of older employees occupy roles that must be done in-person while a majority of younger employees could work from home, then COVID-19 measures managed to exacerbate tensions between generations of workers. Resentment over workplace inequalities and health concerns can cause important divisions in a workforce, which must be addressed.
Foster Connections Amongst Employees
Situations like COVID-19 did have a lot of impact on how people work and interact with each other. Tenured people want to feel heard and seen, while remote teams want to feel more engaged, especially if they are at the early stage of their careers.
Leverage Employee Resource Groups (ERG)
Employee Resource Groups (ERG) can be a great source for feedback and diverse communications across generations. Prioritize and utilize it as more than just another platform to increase message visibility. Instead, use it to move change forward, drive participation, and recruit change champions.
Do make sure to develop the correct strategy while leveraging ERGs as they do have the potential to be either your number one advocate or main detractors if they feel unheard. Oftentimes, ERGs are filled with passionate and vibrant people so they can act as a useful sounding board to help you create a better message around change. It would be also smart to employ the groups or people in it as a real resource and engage them to be more involved in the workplace. However, make sure to stay aware of the potential downsides of employing ERGs when driving change.
Meet Them On The Ground
Create internal roadshows around change initiatives and meet employees on the ground to avoid surprising people and causing circumstances where employees are forced into a fight or flight mode, which eventually causes them to become resistant to change.
Tools & Tactics to Optimize Multigenerational Communication Strategies
1. Ensure Visibility & Build Rapport
Join different team meetings occasionally to help them get used to you. If possible, go to the office a few times a week to encourage informal conversations and interactions via watercooler chat moments to help build positive rapport.
Focus on consistent and transparent communications to build long-term trust with employees. Once people feel more familiar with you, they will be more comfortable reaching out for help or advice.
2. Audience & Message Segmentations
Targeted Meetings & Office Hours
Office hours and manager meetings help to provide direct access to change updates and encourage two-way communications. Office hours are also valuable for topics that don’t require a town hall but aren’t simple enough for an FAQ. Look for the topics that are top of mind and make it so that your audiences get the most out of the session.
If you are holding regular ‘office hours’ sessions that attract low attendance, try hosting them separately for different groups of people and go through specific examples that are more relatable to the impacted team instead.
For example, you can arrange targeted meetings with engineers to directly explain how the regulatory changes impact them, along with providing a relatable real-case scenario to make change easier to understand. This method will allow you to bring more people to the table and effectively help solve issues specific to each different groups.
On the other side, weekly manager meetings should be led by a member of the executive team or the SVP of the area that is changing. This way managers can get direct updates on change, be reminded of the available resources, and have a forum to ask questions directly from the source.
Provide Context Prior to Discussions
People often don’t show up to office hours because they don’t know what to ask. Therefore, it’s good to give some sort of overview before the session to give them a space to ask follow-up questions or contribute their ideas or feedback afterward.
Encourage Questions & Feedbacks
Emphasize the importance of employees’ contributions to encourage conversations and the exchange of ideas. This practice will help in getting people highly invested in the change and end up basically championing it themselves.
Adopt Phased-Sharing Approach
Avoid ‘info dumping’ employees in one go. It is better to set up office hours in chunks over a period of time where each session focuses on a minimal number of topics related to the change to allow employees to process them better. For example, set up one office hour weekly for the course of six weeks. Each week, share three pieces of news related to change and focus on hearing questions or feedback about them.
By breaking up information and tackling different topics in every session, you will be able to concentrate and dig deep into each of them. This often results in encouraging attendance for the following weeks as people don’t want to miss out on the next piece of news related to the change.
Conclusion
Leading change across generations requires thoughtful strategies that acknowledge and bridge differences in values, motivations, and communication preferences. While it may seem challenging to unify diverse groups, success lies in fostering inclusivity, addressing concerns proactively, and positively leveraging the strengths of each generation within your organization. The insights from this brief further emphasize the importance of clear and repetitive communications, collaborative engagement, and a targeted plan of action to create a workplace where all generations feel heard, valued, and motivated to embrace change, leading to a successful transformation.
The Executive Council for Leading Change
The Executive Council for Leading Change (ECLC) is a global organization that brings executives together to redefine the landscape of organizational change and transformation. Our council aims to advance strategic leadership expertise in the realm of corporate change by connecting visionary leaders. It's a place where leaders responsible for significant change initiatives can collaborate, plan, and create practical solutions for intricate challenges in leading large organizations through major shifts.
In a world where change is constant, we recognize its crucial role in driving business success. ECLC’s mission is to create a community where leaders can excel in guiding their organizations through these dynamic times.
Interested in joining ECLC? Learn the membership criteria and sign-up below.
