CPA firms now have partners and staff ranging in age from the retirement years to the newest "generation," Gen Y. How can all of these generations get along? PR has assembled some current wisdom about understanding the motivators and characteristics of the various generations, so that you can more easily deal with the different generations that are now contributing to your firm.
Who are the generations? Before you can work at making sure everyone gets along better and more productively, you need to know the players. The accompanying sidebar, "Generations Comparison Chart," provides a summary of the four groups now in the workforce:
• Traditionalists, (about 13% of the workforce), were born between 1900 and 1944. They may be known by other names, including Matures, Seniors, and Builders. "They love job security, even when they may financially not need it," explains Dennis Schrag, president of The Longview Group (Iowa City, Iowa), a management consulting firm. "They are very employer-loyal. They are excellent mentors. Motivate them with recognition that is private and personal."
• Baby Boomers, or Boomers (about 48% of today’s workforce), are the largest group. Born between 1945 and 1964, this group includes many partners and managers at CPA firms. Boomers are dedicated to the task and hardworking, and like titles and public recognition.
• Generation X (about 33% of the workforce), born between 1965 and 1980, are the most family-oriented generation. They want to limit work hours and save time for fitness, family, and friends. They work hard as team members on projects that challenge them, but loyalty to the employer is lower on their scale of values.
• Millenials, or Generation Y (about 6% of the workforce), were born between approximately 1981 and 2004. These technology-oriented staff like work challenges that they can solve with technology, and value hard work.
For more on these different generations, see the sidebars, "Key Differences Among the Generations" and "Attitudes and Expectations of Three Key Generations."
Current trends in generation management. IOMA’s recent "Managing the Intergenerational Workforce" audio conference provided many insights into the ways to bring these seemingly disparate groups together.
W. Stanton Smith, national director in the human resources practice of Deloitte (www.deloitte.com), shared findings from the Generation and Gender at Work study, part of national research sponsored by the Families and Work Institute and the American Business Collaboration. Smith’s observations are a great starting place for understanding what staff and other partners want:
• Employees evolve into "consumers of the work experience." In other words, they tend to develop desires or needs for more customized work arrangements, including full-time, part-time, onsite, offsite, contingent, or consulting.
• Employees of both genders and all generations have acknowledged family as a top priority since Sept. 11.
• Twenty-five percent of U.S. households include a family caregiver involved in elder care, according to AARP (www.aarp. org).
• Fewer college-educated employees of both genders and three of the generations (Boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y) want jobs with more responsibility.
Deloitte conducted focus groups into some of the issues raised by the study. Selected findings include:
• Younger workers consider jobs with greater responsibility to be less desirable because they’ve observed their parents and grandparents working up the career ladder for a lifetime, only to be outsourced or downsized. They aren’t eager to repeat the experience.
• Younger employees are also quite aware of the amount of conflict and stress at upper levels of management, which makes reaching those echelons less desirable.
• They don’t like what they see of those in higher management. Smith provided an anecdote from a law firm client: In a discussion among partners and associates about making an extra effort to serve clients, some associates responded, "We don’t want to be like you. You seem pressed and stressed, and we don’t see the payoff for taking on more responsibility."
• Youth are ambitious, energetic, and hungry for stimuli. They seem to have a strong desire to stay in one company for as long as possible. This is in striking contrast to late 1990s, Smith noted, when young people moved from company to company in search of new skills, contacts, and experiences.
Despite this, a majority of young people expect to hold more jobs in more companies over the course of their careers than they would consider ideal. They are happy to give their loyalty to employers who are loyal to them, but they don’t believe business is set up that way.
• There’s a noticeable gap between the skills students believe they will need and those employers think are necessary to succeed at work. The skills that students believe are the least necessary include mathematics, speaking a foreign language, public speaking, selling items or ideas, writing, and editing—and all of these skills are increasingly important in a global business world. Instead, students believe such habits as working patiently, diligently, and independently; multi-tasking; and developing personal connections are important for job mobility.
How generational differences can affect your firm’s business. Making business relevance the guiding principle for all intergenerational conflict removes personal judgment, noted another speaker in the audio conference, Indra Lahiri, Ph.D., an organizational psychologist, industrial anthropologist, and founder of Workforce Development Group (www.workforcedevelopmentgroup.com).
"A person who values family may perceive that those who want to get ahead value family less. This isn’t necessarily true." Both points of view can be accommodated to achieve business results. "The focus should be us—the team—against business issues."
She believes that generational differences are a diversity issue, and can be managed in most organizations. "When conflict arises, make sure you’re not stereotyping participants. Use solid, diversity-related approaches to problem-solving."
The different generations tend to have different sets of norms and values, Lahiri said. These differences include beliefs about work and how they get the job done, communication, and building relationships—or even the belief that relationships are important. She offered five tips for multi-generational inclusion:
1. Add a combination of individual and team project-based work to function-based work.
2. Offer multiple compensation options. While some younger employees don’t want to wait a long time for rewards, others want the safety of a regular salary—which is why you need multiple options.
3. Leverage technology and provide training to use it. You may assume that Gen X and Gen Y staff are completely knowledgeable about technology—but that may not really be the case, Lahiri noted. You must be inclusive in asking all staff to use technology and to know how to use it. This means training for everyone.
4. Personalize career-development opportunities with flexible ways to learn that go beyond classroom training and traditional mentoring. For example: One company designed a fast-track training program to put graduates with MBA degrees into executive-level positions in three years. Concerned about skill levels and resistance from experienced employees who lacked the same opportunity, the company opened the program to internal employees and offered them a chance to take an MBA program as well. Result: The company ended up with multiple generations. Tip: Look for colleges that have multigenerational students.
5. Demand that leadership be more employee-centered and incorporate finding opportunities, providing technologies, supporting learning, and ensuring communication and quality.
For more information: To order a CD or tape of the IOMA audio conference, "How to Manage the Intergenerational Workforce," contact IOMA at 212-244-0360, subserve@ioma.com, or order online at www.ioma.com/audioconferences/340.html. Cost: $275.