This week, I had the chance to deliver a presentation to 150 finance leaders around the multi-generational workforce, and the implications for attracting and retaining talent. The keynote was followed by a panel discussion where we had a multi-generational set of panelists talking about their own experiences in work and career.
It was truly a great learning experience to hear the stories and perspectives of people across multiple generations as they think about their workplace and their career. There’s a lot of noise in the generation dialogue and discourse so one of the reasons why I love the panel format is you get to hear people speak from their own experience.
My main takeaway is while there are differences, we all have more in common than we do that’s different. But what is helpful to know and understand, and what came out in the panel, is the context, culture and personal experience for each individual.
For example, one of my favorite questions to ask people is to ask them what their first professional job was, and how similar or different the workplace is today from that experience. With a Boomer or X’er, you can see how that change might be pretty drastic.
One panelist talked about how they had to share 1 computer amongst 4 colleagues and how you couldn’t really “take work home with you” which is far different from the organization they lead today.
Meanwhile, our Gen Z panelist talked about spending the first 2 years of their career without stepping foot into the office, and the effort they put in to learn how to make small talk and connect with colleagues, and while learning how to work remotely was not a huge adjustment since half of college was online, getting reps and exposure of soft skills and gaining social capital was hard.
As the talk and the conversation of the panel evolved and went in a number of different directions, but the key themes and topics all mapped back to one of the following
- What does (insert generation) want out of an employer/career?
- How do we retain/hold onto talent of (insert generation)?
- What does (insert generation) expect/want out of company culture?
Naturally, a lot of this defaulted to conversations about Gen Z, and fortunately, we had an amazing Gen Z panelist who could take and field a lot of those questions.
Invest in moments that matter to make the implicit parts of your culture explicit
One of my biggest takeaways from the panel was around the importance of making implicit norms, values and aspects of a company’s culture that are implicit more explicit.
One of the hardest things to do when you are younger in your career is to know what you need to do. You can sort of figure out some stuff, but a lot is still learned through trial and error, advice from a mentor, or unfortunately, never learned at all.
This goes from anything from managing your career, building social capital, or learning how to do a certain task or project. One of the most valuable things I learned early in my career was that A) It was okay to ask for help and B) the kind of help I could ask for. That way, when I got stuck, I didn’t have to fake it, or spend all this time spinning trying to find the answer. But the only way I learned that was because I had a boss who told me how to do those things.
When you have been working for a long time and working at a company for a long time, there are so many things you know and take for granted because you just do them. When you are new to a company and new to the workforce, there is so much that you just don’t know.
This is not anyone’s fault, but we have to be more thoughtful and intentional about how we teach and help employees learn everything from what’s expected of them, cultural norms of your company, to succeeding and navigating in the role that you are in.
As one of the panelists said, “don’t just show me how you did it, take me through it step by step.” I consider employee onboarding and new manager training as great moments in the “employee lifecycle” to use as a starting point to really make these implicit norms explicit, but there are others as well.
The goal of all of this is just making sure that your people have the knowledge, tools, and language they need in order to work effectively with one another.
Be more expansive about career development and learning
One of my key messages in my part of the talk was encouraging employers to think more expansively about career development and learning inside your organization. With a diverse workforce and with people working later and longer into their lives, the traditional models of learning and career no longer are universal to all employees. Furthermore, it’s shifting the idea of career development to one of a mantra of “we can grow our people so that we can grow our business.”
Enabling your employees to have career growth on their terms allows them to see a path to contribute, but also to make progress toward their own goals. Thinking more expansively about a career means making it more accessible and built into the mindset and daily habits of each employee, but also, acknowledging that even the very idea of a “career” can look different for each employee.
Instead of solely focusing on a new role or title (still important) or advancing on a particular path/track (also still important) it is about empowering them with a way to proactively contribute to the company while also taking ownership of how they want to use work to progress to their own personal ambitions.
This is also important because, if the last 3 years taught us anything, it’s that shocks to the system can happen at any time. if you just wait for every big shock to the system for when you need to tell your employees “it’s time to upskill” you’re going to be in a reactive position,
But when you can empower your employees to take on that career growth, and provide them language, and frameworks for how to do that, you can start to get them to grow and iterate in ways that allow them to upskill, but also allow you to grow your business.
Meeting employees where they are, and being more expensive also makes career growth and learning away from just titles and roles, and making career development more accessible and less episodic.
In both of these, my main conclusion is that we (collective we) need to help employees develop a set of career skills that help them grow and evolve through a changing world of work. Doing this can enable them to take on new responsibilities, develop new skills, find work that matters to them, and build a career that works to their terms.
While this message was aimed at the corporate/employer mindset, in my mind, this is something that we collectively (society) need to do a better job of doing for students and employees. As the panelists showed, much of what we think about work and career is shaped by our upbringing and cultural context.
To the degree that we can start talking, teaching and empowering these career skills not just in the workplace but through the educational and cultural systems that we have in place, the more we can make this a reality.
In some of the work I do inside of organizations, I like to talk about career habits, or a set of principles and practices that you can use to grow your career during a changing world of work. Think of these, as the set of career navigation skills you need to grow in your career. I’d offer up to you this list, as you think about how this might apply to yourself.
- Practicing Self-Awareness – Listening in to understand how you and others see your strengths, interests and values and using those to seek new opportunities
- Demonstrating Professional Advocacy – Sharing your work and expertise with others to create opportunities for yourself and for others
- Exploring Curiosity Through Experimentation – Continuously trying and testing small experiments to learn and grow
- Developing Organizational Acumen – Observing the ways people in your organization follow norms, traditions, behaviors and rules to effectively get things done and work together.
- Intentionally Building Relationships– Intentionally nurturing a set of relationships that advance your goals and make you connected to the organization.
- Iterative career planning – Consistently developing small habits and practices that allow you to evolve and iterate career growth in a continuous way.
Instead of waiting for the performance reviews to talk about your career development plan, or for an organization, bringing up learning and upskilling the next time you have to roll out a new technology, these are habits you can encourage employees to practice each and every day to see possibility and opportunity for growth.
And for employees, it’s a way to make small habits and practices out of managing your career, and finding small opportunities to make progress in what you are doing each in and every day, and to create possibilities for yourself without having to know the answer to the question “where do you want to be in five years?”
Regardless of who we are or what generation we are a part of, we all want to be successful in our work and our career. If we agree that the world of work is changing and will continue to evolve and change, we need organizations with people who can evolve and grow at the speed of the market.
Making sure that employees have the language and tools to be successful in your organization and to evolve themselves in a world of work that is complex and ever changing can ensure you tap into their potential, and grow your business by growing your people.
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