A conversation with Giselle Kovary from n-gen performance
Listen on this blog, Apple Podcast, Spotify, SoundCloud, Anchor and other platforms.
Topics covered:
How the rapid, forced virtualization of work is received by the different
generations at work
Generations and the use of technology at work
The leadership behaviours that are needed to effectively lead a virtual team
The virtual team’s challenges that can impact engagement and how to overcome them
What “followers” should do to better support and enable their leaders
What HR can do to help leaders and business units
Insights:
On Gen Z: "This is a generation that is bringing back some very traditional values. They want stability and security andthey want to stay with an employer for a long time". "This is a generation where 71% of them have been used to using YouTube every single day (...) they're leveraging social medias heavily and they're also using it as a place to go and learn. In that way they're really well-suited to be able to live in a digital world"
On Millenials: "this is a cohort that's been challenging organizations for a long time to be able to have a much more fluid work style. They have an expectation that they can work from home where they can work virtually and they canwork from wherever they want, and they're demanding that organizations allow them to have the technology to use their own devices to be able to blend their personal and professional lives"
These 2 generations will now be expecting more work from home: "the millennials and the gen Zed are going to be demanding it from their employers. There's no way that they can say now it's not possible"
On Gen X "We were well trained for quarantine. We were latchkey kids as children. We were used to being bored. We had to entertain ourselves. We didn't have a lot of technology when we were growing up. We were the early adopters of technology. We used to go and wait in line for things. We're highly independent as a generation." See this article: "Coronavirus quarantine? Gen X was made for this. Boomers and Gen Z, not so much."
On Baby Boomers: "this is a cohort that's probably struggling the most with this immediate move to virtual work because baby boomers have been well-known for their strength around building relationships. And most of those are relationships have been built face to face. It's been a culture of meetings. It's been a culture where we entertain clients, let's say, by going out to to golf or to go to events. I'm not implying that because you're of a particular age you are not leveraging technology, but most organizations that have a strong baby boomers culture or mindset, regardless of the age of the people working there, they've tended to be very siloed as organizations. They have competed with each other often across the organizations for senior leadership acknowledgement or dollars or resource"
It's less about which technology each generation wants and more about whether or not they're going to find the right way to leverage it.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash