Managing People Bridging the Generation

Managing People Bridging the Generation Gap

Managing people in a cross-generational fashion:

Bridging the generation gap at Randstad USA: A case study

Managing people in a cross-generational fashion:

Bridging the generation gap at Randstad USA: A case study

According to the 2007 BusinessWeek article "Bridging the generation gap," instead of deploying the typical job search model of fitting one person into one job, the Randstad USA Employment agency's use of partnership teams takes a more holistic view of organizational needs. Randstad was dissatisfied by the insufficient communication between older and younger employees, and wanted to create a more tight-knit organizational ethos. Randstad USA also wanted to more effectively use the skills of Generation Yers, as well as the personal resources of employees in their 50s and 60s. Today, Randstad deploys the increasingly popular use of team-based leadership in a unique fashion to accomplish its goals: it pairs younger and older workers together. Instead of a conventional mentorship program, the two individuals are meant to learn from one another, rather than for the older individual to teacher the younger employee.

Randstad's program reflects the fact that today's ever-changing environment, individuals from the different generations can bring a variety of skills to their enterprises. Generation Yers may be more technologically fluent in digital and social media. They may know how to use Facebook and Twitter to promote the company name, design an effective corporate blog tag that will turn up in a search engine, and be able to use the Intranet with ease. However, older individuals with longstanding experience in the workforce bring a wealth of experience and knowledge that cannot be accessed by Googling. Randstad's selection of employees reflects the fact that many Generation Yers may need to be molded into 'management' material to be useful to the company, but also suggests that it is willing to change its company culture to suit Gen Y style, again in defiance of the usual job search model, where the company searched for the individual that would suit its immediate needs.

Simply pairing old and young employees together is not enough to create cooperation and mutual exchanges of learning. "Of course, Randstad doesn't simply put people together and hope it all works out. First it figures out who will play well with other people. To assess that, the human resources department conducts extensive interviews and requires candidates to shadow a sales agent for half a day" (Bridging the generation gap, 2007, BusinessWeek). It might be easy to assume that this multigenerational strategy is due to the fact that the employment agency Randstad wants older employees to become more 'with it' in terms of the social media and search engines that define modern job hunts. But that is not the case: in fact, many employers have expressed great frustration with working with Generation Y "Boomers are concerned that their successors do not possess the work ethic, social skills, and dedication their jobs require. For Boomers still looking at managing Millennials for years to come, they resent the suggestion that they need to begin 'being nice' or 'hand-holding' and coaching rather than commanding" (Hart 2008). Rather than replacing Boomers with Generation Xers, however, Randstad is trying to adopt their skills to training even younger potential managers. Again, this is in defiance of looking for the 'right candidate' who can immediately fill a needed position: Randstad is also trying to shape its current employment force to suit the demands of the future.

It has often been observed that Generation Y has been slower to break away from their parents than other generations, has been more in need of support during their college years, and tends to be less financially and socially independent than previous generations of workers. Partnering with an individual from a more self-sufficient generation can be one way to gently nudge Generation Y into taking a more proactive stance at work. The emphasis on partnership ensures that Generation Y is likely to be more responsive to this technique, given that it is, in some ways, an extension of the hand-holding and high degrees of parental and teacher involvement that characterized their childhoods. Randstad's approach, however, may also reflect the fact that the focused and independent style of Boomers is in short supply in today's job pool. It may be necessary and even easier to nurture such skills, than to seek them.

The reason for this degree of solicitude to the up-and-coming generation of managers is also because companies such as Randstad want and needs to tap into Generation Y's knowledge-based resources, especially if they are the company's target customer demographic. Technology is changing, and getting tech-savvy employees means more than simply getting someone familiar with current operating systems: Randstad is seeking out employees who are people smart and tech smart, and know how to learn. And companies like Randstad need to orient their workers to the mature responsibilities of the workforce in a way the Gen Yers will respond to: pairing the individual with older workers enables the young to act as technological teachers and the old to act as task-maskers of maturity. "Knowing that these Gen Yers need lots of attention in the workplace, Randstad executives figured that if they shared a job with someone whose own success depended on theirs, they were certain to get all the nurturing they required" (Bridging the generation gap, 2007, BusinessWeek). Also, "Gen Y was raised during a time where everyone got a prize for participation. Individual accomplishments were subordinated to the common good…while Gen Y members are excellent team players, they can quickly become lost when assigned individual duties. In addition, they may become uncomfortable with the glare that individual accountability creates" (Hart 2008).

The type of attention this generation has received has caused friction many Greatest Generation and Boomer mentors in their 50s and 60s. Admitted one Randstad employee: "It's natural to think: Why should I do all these kinds of things for them? No one did that for me. You have to get over that. You have to think beyond your own feelings of fairness." Some of the older individuals in the partnership stated that Generation Yers tended to breathlessly report problems to suppliers without looking for solutions, and would multitask rather than approach a problem sequentially. They were inclined to skip lunch -- yet not necessarily accomplish more than their colleagues. "Even the best ones require a lot of maintenance," said one mentor, although some of the Randstad pairings have formed extremely close bonds, to the point of finishing one another's sentences and sharing emails with one another (Bridging the generation gap, 2007, BusinessWeek).

The hope is that creating these partnership teams will guard against some of the potentially negative aspects of the generation known as the Millennials, the Faceboook generation, as well as Generation Y but enhance their positive attributes. The teams clearly designed to help the Generation Y team grow and flourish, even though the sharing of ideas is supposed to be mutual and the relationship is specifically not labeled a mentorship or apprenticeship. In fact, the notion of a mutually beneficial sharing of ideas between generations itself seems quite commensurate with the principles of the Internet. After all, on the Web, every idea has the chance to gain a following, depending on the creativity and eloquence of an author of a blog or the poster on a message board. Age and even a formal degree are less important than what the individual has to say. Online tasks are chosen, not assigned -- and so are leaders. Position, title, and past experience -- none of the usual status differentiators (and methods of choosing an employee) carry much weight online. Online, information is shared, because sharing information translates into social collateral and power. Intrinsic rewards -- people blog for free, after all -- matter more than external rewards (Hamel 2009). This is also in defiance of the usual job search and reward method -- instead of salary-driven, Millennials are fulfillment-driven.