Multigenerational diversity provides a landscape for varied backgrounds, experiences, and values, which, if creatively embraced, will lead to rich discussions and multifaceted approaches for accomplishing goals. Managing a varied workforce also presents people-based challenges, including accommodating preferences for work approaches, communication styles, and interpersonal clashes. Additionally, ethical considerations exist around overcoming biases and stereotypical attitudes toward different age groups in the workforce that need to be addressed and overcome with internal controls, education, and empathy. In this piece, we will explore the considerations of working with multi-generational teams.

Elizabeth Kittner

I have had the privilege of working with people decades older than me in most of my organizational roles and some volunteer ones, too. I have also shouldered the responsibility of serving in people operations where I have advocated for the importance of keeping older generations in the employee pool. Several of my past colleagues have been close to retirement while also expressing they feel the most disposable based on their age or pay. It is important to work with people regarding their retirement goals and help bridge a transition plan for them. Working with people to reach their goals helps them feel valued and creates a positive working environment.

I also have advocated for younger generations to have a seat at the table to solicit their input, observe how meetings are run, and analyze how decisions are made. Involving younger team members early will help them feel valued and better prepared for higher responsibility within the organization.

Let’s also think about the challenges some of our mid-career workers encounter, such as time needed for childcare and elder care. Many people, especially women, leave the workforce in their 40s and 50s when faced with some of the flexibility needed in their schedules. As an employer, you can talk to each person to understand their needs and determine a plan that will work to help retain them.

One of the most significant benefits I have experienced in multigenerational workforces is the skills diversity it brings. There is an opportunity for older generations and younger generations to share their knowledge with each other. We can learn from each person in our workforce, and creating the opportunities to listen and learn are valuable for the organization. Likewise, a multigenerational workforce is poised to better support and connect with a multigenerational customer base. The organization will be more relatable to more people and be able to communicate better and with more depth of understanding.

Regardless of where someone is in their career and lifetime, they will have goals and requests for their careers and schedules. Practicing empathy and supporting people uniquely for where they are will lead to more engaged individuals, teams, and customers.

Gill Reindl

In my varied career, I have worked with many aspirational young graduates looking to take their first step on the career ladder, as well as with middle and more senior leaders seeking to enhance their professional skills. I have also traveled through these life stages myself, allowing me to draw on these experiences and head towards the “traditional” retirement end of the ladder. As such, I feel ever more passionate about this topic.

Business is fast-paced, and change is continuous. Organizations increasingly need to innovate, to become more agile to embrace opportunity and bring on board creative, adaptable, and resilient individuals to help them in this endeavor. Innovation comes in many forms, and in this instance, we are looking towards innovative hiring strategies. How to shape the organization differently, mixing contractors with employees, creating part roles, working with multigenerational teams, and bravely looking outside traditional structures and boxes. Portfolio careers are becoming a new norm, and fractional, multigenerational talent pools can benefit both organizations and individuals, bringing diversity in the form of new ideas and experiences.

Gen-Z are broadly known to be values-led and seek meaningful roles where they can contribute to a bigger picture, beyond feeling like an anonymous cog in a big wheel. They often bring passion, energy, and new ideas, and I concur with Elizabeth’s sentiment that building a culture that includes and supports younger team members in organizational decision making will engage them, retain them, and better prepare them for their future.

Contractors are generally juggling several independent projects and work streams. Therefore, hiring and working with them is more akin to a B2B relationship than that of a traditional employee. Taking account of this different form of relationship and adopting a flatter matrix-like project reporting structure can challenge commonly adopted hierarchical leadership and management styles and offers opportunity for a more modern shared and leadership approach. There is a role for leadership development that embraces and evolves new styles and possibilities.

People are living longer and can and often wish to engage productively for longer and healthy economies will need them to do so. Organizations surprisingly still struggle to engage and work effectively with this mature talent pool who still have a passion for work, yet often seek greater flexibility and control of their own destiny; flat out and wrung out in the desire to climb the greasy pole, generally holds less appeal during this life stage. This does not mean hard won skills and wisdom cannot add value to organizations and to those on the upwards trajectory, just that organizations must consider how to shape opportunities to take advantage of the skills on offer. There are now many initiatives evolving that aim to re-engage the mature workforce, some great part time roles, project work and job share schemes amongst others, yet employers often underutilize the contractor route as a more flexible option to deliver projects and mentor developing talent.

At GigaOm, several of our experienced practitioner analysts are more mature and as a result they have built years of technical expertise, often deployed in senior leadership roles within the sector. This rounded knowledge and wisdom is invaluable to our business and our clients.

It is an exciting time to start thinking seriously and innovatively about the opportunities and possibilities multigenerational talent can offer and how to gain best value from such a team.

How to Get Involved with GigaOm

We’re always looking for more people to join our great team, so if you’d like to work for GigaOm, take a look at the current job listings on our careers page.

About the Authors

Gill Reindl
An organizational development consultant with 35 years’ experience gained across a variety of commercial sectors including senior leadership roles in UK higher education. An experienced researcher and project manager in areas of organizational culture, leadership development, the future of education and work. Gill has worked on several projects with GigaOm.

Elizabeth Kittner
A finance and accounting guru with a technology focus who has a passion for elevating individuals and building healthy cultures in the organizations she serves. Elizabeth is a member of GigaOm’s executive team and oversees finance and people operations. She is also an author and speaker in the areas of ethics, communication, and leadership.

The post Multigenerational Diversity appeared first on Gigaom.

Gill Reindl

Why Is Culture So Important?

A great company culture is something everyone in an organization will recognize, yet it’s hard to describe in a nutshell. So much of company culture is hidden beneath the surface and isn’t tangible—it’s behaviors you encounter and values you feel, like trust and belonging.

Positive, cohesive cultures help glue an organization together and provide a springboard for its people and their talents to thrive; they foster creativity and productivity and keep talented individuals fired up with a sense of pride in the organization and their contribution to it.

On the other hand, some cultures can be toxic, demoralizing places, sapping the lifeblood from their people and hemorrhaging their best talent—not a great plan when business is tight and competition for talent is narrow. Some consider the current landscape as a war for talent.

Getting Started

I started working with GigaOm as a contractor just over two years ago. The company is a fully remote tech analyst firm, operating with a global mix of highly skilled employees and contractor practitioners. Growing fast and establishing a strong reputation in its sector, it had great products and was ready to adopt a little more organizational formality.

But first, GigaOm needed to build the cultural foundations on which to support its ambitions plans. Our team set out on a course to define the underpinning values that everyone in the organization could stand behind and then create an ongoing program to embed and maintain them. Importantly, GigaOm leadership wanted to ensure that its values were not merely named and then placed on a metaphorical shelf; instead, its values would be the beacons guiding the growing business in all aspects of its work.

It’s been a rare privilege to work with the GigaOm team as it builds its company culture from the ground up. In the past, my work in this area has involved working with companies to course-correct and adapt already-embedded cultures—how exciting it’s been to encounter a fresh canvas, the energy of a startup, the cross-organizational enthusiasm, and a fully invested leadership team! A promising set of ingredients.

GigaOm’s Values

Our team chose to use the Culture Design Canvas framework to support our work (covered in more detail below under “How We Settled on Our Culture”). Out of those efforts came GigaOm’s six values shown in the wheel below (Figure 1).

Figure 1. GigaOm’s Values Wheel

Each value includes qualifying “I” and “we” statements, helping to give meaning and personal accountability. We’ve also created policies, work processes, and communication channels to align with these values, and we feature the “value of the month” within our weekly huddle program.

Additionally, as we’re a remote workforce, we’ve leveraged tools like Slack and our evolving intranet called Gigahub to develop social, fun aspects of the culture. Some of our favorite culture-building channels are Gigafoodies, Crazy Ideas, Fantasy Football, and GigaPets.

I don’t believe it’s true that great culture cannot be built in remote or hybrid workplaces, although I would agree it needs determined, thoughtful, and intentional effort. Sure, meetups in person always add value; however, strong and close remote culture is not impossible, it’s just different.

Creating values and establishing cultural norms is just the start—maintaining values and ensuring the company is living up to them is where the real effort comes in.

To that end, our team has just completed a second round of focus groups, gathering feedback on our progress thus far and planning next-step initiatives to strengthen areas that need work. From those convos, we know an area we want to tackle next is how to embrace and unify the contractor/employee mixed workforce.

We are immensely proud of the progress made, which, without a doubt, is fueled by the belief that the leadership team and whole organization are invested in a positive culture as a major ingredient for future success.

Nicole Saunders

When I was first considering working with GigaOm, an analyst described the company to me as an “innovative startup with a great product.” Of course, I was intrigued. A startup has many things going for it; it’s fast-paced and there are many opportunities for growth. It’s built around a small core group of dedicated individuals who are willing to wear many hats to produce something meaningful for its customers. But the startup is ideally a transient state. To maintain success, startups need to respond to growth, develop and streamline processes, and find the right balance of the right people in the right roles.

Once I came on board, it was clear that GigaOm was graduating from its startup phase into something bigger and more refined. Happily, we found that the process of “growing up” beyond startup status didn’t mean discarding the passion and enthusiasm that comes with starting something new.

Growing Pains

The growth and success of GigaOm’s products and services meant that we needed to focus on organizational transformation to bolster this success with thoughtful internal change. Several areas stood out to leadership as being places we could improve, such as defining the core values of our organization, diversifying the individuals holding leadership positions, strengthening our project management office (PMO), and solidifying our people processes.

How We Settled on Our Culture

Defining organizational culture must be purposeful. While discussing where to begin with the important task of developing our values, we agreed that these values must come from across the organization. The people who would enact the culture needed to be included in the process of defining our values. With that in mind, we scheduled a series of collaborative brainstorming sessions with volunteers across the organization to hear where we were doing well, where we could improve, and what our colleagues valued in each other.

What stood out to me the most when we held these sessions was the enthusiasm that each person brought with them. They had great ideas for the culture they wanted to see, and they pointed out subtle areas of previously unspoken understanding. For example, many employees had already developed strong connections within a fully remote work environment, which was no small feat. Individuals were happy and proud to help unearth the ways they connected with their coworkers and upheld an overall sense of pride in their work.

With the input from these sessions, we were able to summarize common themes and settle upon six values that we knew we could represent and embody on a daily basis in everything we do. To keep our values front of mind, we have focused on one value each month so that we can lean into them, contemplate their impact, and find new ways to represent them.

Thoughtful Hiring

Additionally, we knew it was important to be thoughtful in our hiring process and bring on people who could help take GigaOm to the next level. Beyond someone having the necessary experience, we needed individuals who were excited about an evolving role in a growing organization, people who would go beyond the scope of their job description to take on challenges that needed new solutions. Through our interviews, we selected candidates who matched with the values, energy, and direction of GigaOm. We were greatly rewarded! These additions to our teams have fostered spectacular results in efficiency, communication, and enthusiasm.

When I reflect on the differences from when I first started at GigaOm two years ago to what the company looks like now, I see the progress that we’ve made as well as more positive change on the horizon. Truly, change is the only constant. Our improvement is reliant on our flexibility and continued sober self-assessment. We are proud of what we’ve achieved and know that the work is far from over.

Elizabeth Kittner

What would you implement if you were empowered with setting and guiding your organization’s culture, values, and norms? I invite you to think about and determine how you can impact your organization in these ways to help you and your colleagues thrive and evolve in positive ways.

It is my distinct honor to be part of the team at GigaOm that has put structure around these intangibles of culture, value, and norms, and is dedicated to cultivating them and keeping the organization accountable for living up to them. I am proud of the values we created and for putting them into a wheel format to demonstrate how each value is of equal importance.

Seek, Welcome, and Respect Diversity

The value I want to focus on today is “Seek, Welcome, and Respect Diversity.” We highlighted and celebrated this value in June to align with Juneteenth and discussions around diversity in our GigaOm community. We set the stage for a respectful discussion of differences and allowed people to feel comfortable asking questions of other people within the discussion. We celebrated the neurodiversity in our community and the ability to recognize the quieter contributions of our introverts. We asked culture questions about language, traditions, and lifestyles, and we invited external guests to participate in a Diversity in Tech Panel to garner additional perspectives from the tech industry we contribute to.

Part of my role as a culture guardian is to help create these psychologically safe environments for people to feel comfortable asking and sharing. Each time I participate in a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training or discussion, I learn from other people’s backgrounds and experiences. These opportunities highlight the importance of respect for diversity in a professional setting so we can create the best possible work environment and best version of our organization in the communities and markets we serve.

How Each Value Upholds and Strengthens the Others

Each of our values intersects with the others, which is one reason why our values are meaningful to us as individuals and as an organization.

We can take our “Seek, Welcome, and Respect Diversity” value and link it to the other five:

• Embrace Learning and Improvement: When we seek to understand others’ backgrounds and experiences, we are learning about different ways to approach a situation and can improve or refine our own approaches because we will achieve a deeper understanding of the world.
• Act with Integrity: We act with integrity when we welcome and respect diversity because we ensure honesty and fairness include all backgrounds.
• Strive for Clarity and Openness: When we seek to understand where our colleagues are coming from, we will reach more clarity and be more open to different ways of working. Welcoming diversity promotes transparency of people’s opinions and respect for those opinions.
• Pursue Excellence: When we seek diversity in our work, we pursue excellence in the way we work with each other and deliver our offerings. We can challenge the status quo and push each other to be more excellent in our thinking and decision-making.
• Empower People: People will be empowered to share their opinions and speak up when they want to contribute an idea, even if it is counter to the group or to the way a problem has been solved in the past, because they feel psychologically safe and supported.

While I’m excited to celebrate the progress we’ve made in defining our values, encouraging positive norms, and preserving our culture, I’m even more excited to see how we take our learnings from today and apply them to help us achieve a better tomorrow. Preserving and refining culture is an ongoing responsibility, and I am thrilled to be part of an organization and a team committed to this journey.

How to Get Involved with GigaOm

We’re always looking for more people to join our great team, so if you’d like to work for GigaOm, take a look at the current job listings on our careers page.

About the Authors

Gill Reindl
An organizational development consultant with 35 years experience gained across a variety of commercial sectors including senior leadership roles in UK higher education. An experienced researcher and project manager in areas of organizational culture, leadership development, the future of education and work. Gill has worked on several projects with GigaOm.

Nic Saunders
A tech industry enthusiast with a background in operations and working in the startup space, Nic has worked with GigaOm for two years in the areas of people operations and finance.

Elizabeth Kittner
A finance and accounting guru with a technology focus who has a passion for elevating individuals and building healthy cultures in the organizations she serves. Elizabeth is a member of GigaOm’s executive team and oversees finance and people operations. She is also an author and speaker in the areas of ethics, communication, and leadership.

The post Developing a Culture for Growth—Reflections from the Project Team appeared first on Gigaom.