Talkin' 'Bout My Generation: Demographics and Employee Engagement

http://blogs.law.widener.edu/

Talkin' 'Bout My Generation: Demographics and Employee Engagement

How to Think about Building Engagement Models for Diverse Populations

Last month, you were promoted to a new executive-level role overseeing two teams: one is a young, enthusiastic group of experience designers; the other is an older, more experienced group of software developers. Your HR manager says that you need to engage your employee and recommends a social media-based approach. What do you do?

If the arguments I'm making about employee engagement being an individual's attitude towards their work in their organization comprising feelings of vigor, dedication and absorption; perceptions of empowerment and motivation to act both within and extra-role to benefit the firm, then it can be inferred that employee engagement is very personal. As such, it can manifest differently in different people. If it manifests differently, in different people, then the things that drive it in differing individuals might vary by degree as well. 

When I interviewed practitioners for my dissertation research, many spontaneously talked about how important it is to adapt engagement programs for differing employee populations. In the words of one, "There is an engagement model for every population." The most-frequently mentioned population of note was "Millennials," the group just coming into the workforce, born from the early 1980s-2000. 

Although many of us are familiar with the concept of "generations," in case you're not sure exactly what that means or how it differs from someone's age, let me clarify. A generational cohort is defined by birth year and comprises a group of people who have undergone a common set of experiences (in this case cultural) over the same period of time. These experiences are adapted into a sort of common identity. Think of "Baby Boomers" or the "Facebook Generation." The sorts of events that generations share can be diverse, but common historical events (wars, moon landings, etc.) and technological innovations (think internet for Gen X and social media for Millenials) are two significant ones. There's a scientific argument behind generational theory: the common stuff that happens to a cohort early in life effects brain development, specifically with respect to social identity.

Which is all to say that the people I interviewed are right: Millenials are substantially different from their colleagues in other generations. In the example above, having had access to social media during formative years makes it likely that a social-media based engagement program would be a natural fit for them. The same may not be true for their Baby-Boomer colleagues in the software development team. In fact, some might read a social media based program as explicitly excluding them if they've never used it before.

Does this mean you literally need to target engagement programs to each individual? Of course not. Because fundamentally, as human beings, we are substantially similar to one another too. The ideas I've laid out in prior posts about trust and communication driving engagement, for example, apply across generations and most cultural differences.

What it means is that as a leader, you should be discerning when someone comes to you with a "one-size-fits-all" approach to engagement. Ask questions like: 

1. Is this solution as appealing to me as it would be to a recent college graduate? If you aren't sure, go ask a couple recent college graduates.
2. Does this solution have a technology learning curve? If so, have a generationally-diverse set of team members preview it.

Although many practitioners recognized the value of population-specific engagement programs, few firms seem to be actually implementing such plans for differing generations. I'd love to hear from readers if they are aware of good work going on in this area!