GENERATIONAL DIVERSITY IN THE WORKPLACE

More and more companies in contemporary business environment include the development of diversity strategies into their long-term action plan. Differences and similarities among the employees in terms of culture, age, physical abilities, religion, sex, race, and sexual orientation is known as workforce diversity (Workforce Diversity, 2014). The paper discusses the topic of generation diversity at the workplace based on the studies by Diane M. Holtzman, Evonne J. Kruger and Charles D. Srock. The case of a certain imaginary employee named Julia is discussed.
Julia has recently occupied a position of the entry-level manager of the Everything's Here Inc., Electronic department. The company’s management has set a challenging target that is to increase sales and consumer satisfaction rate. Thereafter, she has three direct subordinates, with whom Julia faces generational issues. Ethel is 70 years old, and is a representative of a "great generation" most commonly referred to as Veterans. Larry, age 20, is from Millennials, and Rick, age 51 who fits under the profile of Gen Xers, are two another subordinates of Julia. Thus, the entry-level manager is facing generational issues, as the three employees represent different generations with certain traits and behaviors that are inherent for each of them. Ethel’s cultural values include discipline, hard work, and dedication, which make her a good employee. However, she cannot cope with changes, learn something new and provide all needed support for the customers even if she is always at her workplace. Larry is opposite to Ethel, as he is an electronic smarty, who prefers to spend time at work testing video games instead of speaking to clients (Holtzman, Kruger, & Srock, 2011). Rick is a dedicated employee with quite high level of techno literacy, but he is impatient as most of Gen Xers (Dittmann, 2005). He is unwilling to sacrifice his personal time for the clients, as he believes that other knowledgeable colleagues can address issues. The culture is very different for Ethel and Larry, and the social understanding of the world is dissimilar for the three employees and Julia, who is from the Cuspers generation. The differences between them might cause the generational issues. These issues affect the Julia’s management of the department, as it is hard for her to create an effective team. Therefore, Larry would find it difficult to communicate with Ethel, but easier to cooperate with Rick. Julia would face problems while sharing information will all team members as Ethel does not use the Internet, does not receive information through emails, and even does not pick up phone at home, which might result in lack of communication. Larry prefers texting, which might be tricky, as Julia would need to double check whether he received and understood the message. Mover, Julia needs the team to be fully aligned, and Larry finds it hard to concentrate, while Rick does not want to get deep into details. Moreover, Rick is happy to sell only the TVs. In order to improve the customer’s service, Julia would need to set certain targets and divide tasks between the team members. This strategy would be different from what they do now, and together they can achieve good results. Larry should be more available and less distracted by the phone, Ethen must target senior clients, and Rick has to try to learn more about other electronics aside from TVs.
Upper management made certain generalizations about the employees. For example, Ethel was moved from one department to another during last two years as she is “to work until she gets cover for other insurance” and probably would not be missed much upon retirement. I think this opinion is wrong as she is a hard worker, and if someone mentored her, she could bring more value to the company. Larry was initially put into the proper place, but he needs more control, which upper-level management understands, and probably expects Julia to implement mentoring as a strategy. The generalization about Rick is both correct and incorrect, as he is considered to be a ‘super-user of technologies’, but still has not upgraded over the TV sets (Holtzman et al., 2011).
I have not worked in an environment that has certain generalization issues. However, I can say that such situation is quite typical in clothing outlets, where Veterans and Gen Xers do not have the same views as youngsters, and find it hard to help customers to pick the proper clothing. The situation might result in some issues from the team members and management side.
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