Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer. My guest today is Amy Leschke-Kahle, vice president of performance acceleration at the Marcus Buckingham Company, a unit of ADP. People talk a lot about the expectations of younger workers today. But how different are say, Gen Z’s demands from the generations that came before them? We’ll explore that along with the changes in today’s workplace and the challenges of getting workers what they want on this edition of PeopleTech. Amy, welcome. It’s great to see you. Now, we hear a lot about the influence of younger workers, particularly Gen Z on the workplace today in the workforce. Can you talk about that dynamic and why it’s happening?
Amy:
Well, I’m not exactly sure why it’s happening, but I think one of the interesting and things, Mark, is I’ve been thinking and reading and interacting with folks who are from a generation much different than ours that we would generally characterize as Gen Z, those folks who are just coming into the workforce. And what I find is fascinating, when you look at the surveys and you read the headlines and you’re looking at some of the research and you’re talking to folks, the experience that they are having and the wants that they have and the preferences that they have are actually less about generation and more about being a new entrant to the workforce.
Amy:
So I think one of the challenges… and we’ve just gotten in the habit of thinking about people in these chunks of when they were born. And I wonder, I don’t know for sure, but I wonder if it’s more about where the life experiences that they’ve had. And I wonder if it’s more about the newness to a situation more so than even their age group. So for example, let’s just take something that happened during the pandemic with a lot of folks. I’ll give you a real life example outside of work. Let’s just say during the pandemic, you decided to get a dog, which a lot of people did. Some sort of a pet, let’s just say it’s a dog. And you’re going through this experience and you’re thinking about getting one and you’re getting all excited and you’re going to have this nice fluffy thing and this pet and you get it. And now you have this, I’m going to say almost a little bit of anxiety, and what do I do and how do I do it and all these kinds of things.
Amy:
It’s not exactly what we expected. There’s more to it. There’s more challenges to it. And when we think about Gen Z or when we think about anybody new to the workforce or any major new experience we’re having in the context of work, maybe even new to an organization, new to a leadership role perhaps, new to a different function in the organization, a lot of what we’re seeing with some of the Gen Z things and unknowing and particularly around wanting to be in office, there’s a lot of headlines, there’s a lot of surveys and people are talking about one small part of their experience, which is I want to be back in office. I want to work in office. A lot of Gen Zers haven’t even had the experience of working in office because they came into the workforce when a lot of people were working from home.
Amy:
So that’s a new experience. I wonder, and I think we have an opportunity to get super curious around, is it in fact new to office or is it more new to work, new situation, and maybe a lot of us experience some of the same things or have the same thoughts they do when we’ve had those new experiences. If I’m new to an organization, it would be really nice to spend some time with employees face to face getting to know that culture. And over time, does that wan a little bit? I get more comfortable, I know more people and maybe hybrid or even fully offsite might be something more I’m amenable to.
Mark:
Well, can you expand on part of that a bit? I hear a lot of people talk about how we’re focused on Gen Z and their impact but this happens pretty much with every generation, that I’m a Boomer, people are all a gog about the Boomers years ago. Is that true or is there really something dynamic, something special about Gen Z?
Amy:
I’m going to give you my personal opinion here. My personal opinion is no. They have obviously grown up in a digital age. Let’s just talk about some of the headlines we read. It’s the digital generation. They’ve never known not having the digital, having automation, things that you and I didn’t have certainly when we were younger, but that doesn’t mean that Boomers and Xers are not also fully embedded in a digital generation and particularly in the context of work. So I think we all need to be a bit careful around making some assumptions as always with any of the things that we’re talking about, making assumptions that the generalized headline is specific to our organization, to the people in our lives that are around us, to a generation, whatever that might be. We tend to get a little bit… We read the headline and we chase it around and it may not be the same inside of our organizations. So while they’ve grown up a bit differently, of course, as every generation does, I think there’s a lot more the same than there is a lot than different.
Mark:
You’ve been spending a lot of time studying this. And I’m wondering what you’ve learned about the different generations of workers. I mean, there’s new graduates, there’s younger employees, there’s experienced employees. First of all, what distinguishes them from one another, but also how do they all mix together?
Amy:
Well again, when you look at the surveys and read the books and do all the things, people separate… It feels as if or you would make the assumption perhaps, that there’s a very clear delineation between generations. And there’s not. Those are almost artificial delineations by some year. If you were in 2012, you’re a Gen Z and if you’re 2011, you are a millennial. That doesn’t quite exactly reflect the real world. It is helpful though. I mean, the nice thing about the headlines by the way, is that they give us an opportunity and help direct this to pay attention to some things we may not have noticed before. That’s really helpful.
Amy:
When it comes to looking at the entire spectrum of the workforce, it’s always best, and we know this from the data, we know this from our own expertise and experience, to look at each individual for their own unique best regardless of generation. Quite frankly, regardless of all of the buckets that we might tend to put people into. Each human brain has their own unique talents, has their own unique gifts that they bring to the world of work, and we first and foremost need to see them for that. So I see you for all of you, but first and foremost, I see you for the best of you. And that’s how we create differentiating workplaces. So generational differences are interesting. They help us be curious and help guide us where we might need to be curious that we weren’t aware of before. And more importantly than that, we need to see each of our individual employee for their own unique best.
Mark:
Now, how does technology play into all of this? I mean, technology’s a tool, what lets people get their job done and stay in touch, but different generations seem to have different reactions to it. And I’m wondering how you see all of that fitting together or with the dynamics you were just talking about.
Amy:
So I think outside of work, there’s probably some differences between… You look at even social media, the generational differences between people now who are using, for example, Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, definitely different age groups have different preferences and it’s shifted and morphed over time. Inside of work however, we’re all using the same technologies regardless of generation. So I think translating what happens outside of work to inside of work might not be an accurate representation. Inside of work today in the workplace, you need to be technically proficient. It’s a requirement of most of us doing work in the world today, doesn’t matter what generation you are.
Amy:
And if you’re not able to do that, well, that’s a key job responsibility or key part of our work, just like if you were a mechanical engineer and couldn’t do finite element analysis. It’s part of your job. You need to be able to do that. That’s what we pay you for. And particularly in the hybrid world, that many of us, not all of us, but a lot of us are working in today, that technology enables us to collaborate, to communicate, to be part of the team, to reach out to others. So it’s just part of what we do. So again, I don’t like to put that generational differentiator and make that assumption that just because you’re a Boomer, you can’t use technology. My parents are incredibly adept on their iPhone and they’re in their 80s. So there’s this stereotype that we put on that and it makes it harder for each of us to lean into each other as unique people.
Mark:
It seems to me there’s a lot of people out there telling employers about how to coach their employees to play better with technology. If you’re an older worker, you have to adjust to the fact that younger workers are so adept at it and all of that, what do you think of those sorts of messages?
Amy:
I think it reinforces the stereotypes that are out there. Again, my guess would be is that you’re pretty darn technically proficient as am I. I mean, I use technology deeply every single day as part of my organization, as part of my day to day work. So I think that notion again, of different people having different abilities, if you will. I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. I think it’s interesting, and again, it’s a point of curiosity. But to assume that a certain person, because they’re in a certain generation doesn’t have technical affinity or doesn’t have technical skills or doesn’t want to acquire them or doesn’t want to use technology, I think that’s a disservice to the workplace in addition to the individual employees. So it’s interesting and we should make sure that all of our employees are technically proficient. We should make sure that all of our employees have the ability and the right tools they need in order to do their jobs.
Mark:
Now, I want to shift gears a little bit. There’s a fundamental change going on in the workplace right now. Rise of the hybrid workplace, I think, is really becoming the big one. So how is that impacting employee expectations about all of this?
Amy:
Yeah, well, there’s a couple things that I have no noticed when working with clients, working with organizations out in the world. And there’s a couple things that I see happening around hybrid and in particularly employee expectations. So one of which, employees want to have, and almost I think are going to begin to demand, the agency, the ability to figure out how they can do their best work, where they can do it, when they can do it, within reason given the work that they’re doing. So we’re grownups. We’re super smart grownups. And I want to, for myself even, I want to be able to have some say in how, where, when I do my work. As long as I’m delivering on expectations and hopefully delivering extraordinary results, not just okay results. And actually those two things go together. So when sometimes when we mandate a certain way of working, it may not be how someone works best.
Amy:
Now, of course, there’s reasonable boundaries within that. It depends on the work that someone is doing, their ability to even do hybrid work. But if we can give our employees a little bit more flexibility, a little bit more agility, and get our work done even better, you’ve probably seen some of the surveys that I have and some organizations have said that their productivity has gone up during the pandemic because employees were able to certainly work in a way that works best for them but also to be able to manage their lives outside of work a little bit easier. That’s not true for all employees and not true for all organizations but it’s something for us to definitely consider as we look at how we go forward into… I don’t know. It’s not a new normal, it’s into the new world of work, this changing, shifting very fast moving world of work.
Mark:
Now it’s up to HR to make all this work and put all this generational stuff, technology knowledge and everything together so that the organization’s effective. Are there specific challenges that you think HR faces as they confront this?
Amy:
Oh so many challenges. One of which is we’ve been working in this world of urgency for the last two years. A lot of the figuring out how work is going to get done has fallen on the shoulders and probably rightly so on HR folks. How do we do hybrid? What are the policies? How do we make sure people are doing their work? What if somebody doesn’t… What if they get sick and how do we handle that? All of these things that before used to be, yeah, kind of, sort of there, but they became urgent in the last two years.
Amy:
So moving from that reactive mindset that we’ve all had to be in as HR practitioners to a more proactive mindset, that’s a big shift to make because we need to start thinking now and probably should have started a while ago, start thinking about how do we design our workplaces that the human related parts of our work in a way that not only will service well right now, but will support and sustain us as work continues to shift. And maybe as even the world continues to shift, we don’t know what’s going to happen. Are we going to have another wave of COVID? Who knows? So we’ve got to be able to respond to that and create a work environment in which we’re ready for whatever might come our way.
Mark:
If you were giving advice to HR people about facing all of this, what’s the most important couple of things that you think they need to bear in mind?
Amy:
I think one of the most important things is to adopt an experimental mindset. We have not experienced this before. So as we start to maybe kind of, sort of, sometimes figure this out, don’t assume that what we read in a headline or that we hear me talk about today, or that we see a colleague in another organization do is going to work for our organization. It might.
Amy:
And one of the ways that we can better help our organization move through these changes and uncertainties is to run some experiments. Number one, it lets us test some things out. And number two, it creates almost a language where we are not setting an expectation for our employees that we know everything but we can say we’re going to try this and see what happens. It might not work. Even hybrid is a good example of that. Should we have mandate folks come into office three days a week or should we say pick your own day? I don’t know. Maybe we can try both of those things and see what works best. So having that experimental mindset and not pretending that we have all the answers is really important.
Amy:
I think the second thing is simplification, particularly from an HR perspective. We’ve done a lot of work to establish processes and policies and some of those things have probably been over-engineered and over complicated. And as HR practitioners, I think it’s absolutely time. Again, don’t we all wish we would’ve done things differently a couple years ago? But I think it’s time for us to really take a hard look at our policies, our processes, and go, how can we simplify these things? And that’s important because we want to create space not only from a time perspective, but also from an emotional perspective for people to do what we need them to do from a work perspective. We need to create space for leaders to lead. We need to create space for employees to do the work that we paid them to do. And we’ve over-engineered a lot of what we’ve done. We’ve made it too complicated, too big. So refocusing on the critical few things that we need to do from a policy process as well as from a measurement perspective is really important right now.
Mark:
Amy, thanks very much for taking the time to talk today.
Amy:
Oh you’re so welcome, Mark. It was my pleasure.
Mark:
My guest today has been Amy Leschke-Kahle, vice president of Performance Acceleration at Marcus Buckingham. And this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of RecruitingDaily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs, visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology Report every day with the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us @www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
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