How to avoid generation wars in your workplace

Imagine a director telling Tom Cruise he’s too old to star in Top Gun. You can’t, right? At 60, Cruise is still one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actors. While he may not have any problem getting work, many older workers aren’t so lucky.

Some 78% of workers aged 40 to 65 say they’ve seen or experienced ageism in the workplace, according to a 2021 AARP survey. Generational labels and societal views, as well as older workers’ ageism fears, can all fuel a negative environment for older workers, experts say. But by making age part of overall diversity efforts, HR can fight ageism and make their workplace more representative of the general population.

Generational nonsense. Generation labels are “no more meaningful than the names they’ve been given,” University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen wrote in a July opinion piece for the Washington Post. “There is no research identifying the appropriate boundaries between generations, and there is no empirical basis for imposing the sweeping character traits that are believed to define them.”

Employers and consulting firms’ seemingly constant focus on Gen Z and millennials is pitting generations against each other at work, Ashton Applewhite, anti-ageism activist and author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, told HR Brew. “Generational labels are never our friend,” she explained. “Differences in the workplace have much less to do with age than we think.”

Applewhite recommended that HR leaders erase generational language from their vocabulary, instead remembering that workers of all ages may have similar wants and needs from their employers. As Noa Gafni, executive director for Rutgers Institute for Corporate Social Innovation wrote for Harvard Business Review in 2021, “solutions [for ageism] start with acknowledging that older and younger students or employees have unique mountains to climb.”

DE&I lens. HR teams should approach ageism just as they approach other diversity efforts, explained AARP’s VP of international affairs, Jean Accius. Some “83% of C-suite executives said that they value a multigenerational workforce,” he told HR Brew, citing recent AARP research. “However, 53% did not include age as part of the DE&I policies.” Accius said this gap may result in older workers getting left behind. “There’s tremendous value from multiple generations of learning from each other, of engaging with each other,” he said, adding that multigenerational workforces tend to have more productive, creative employees and less turnover.

Diversity efforts can start with the hiring process. Accius said that it’s important for HR leaders to review who they’re hiring and who makes up their workforce: “If [it’s] not diverse, by all of the different dimensions, we have to look beneath the surface and look at the policies and the practices to ensure that those policies and practices are not producing these unintended consequences.”

Applewhite recommended using ERGs to create an inclusive workplace for older workers. “Ideally, there would be a way for people of all ages to be part of the ERG, so that ageism is not framed purely as an old person problem,” she explained. Intuit, Google, and AT&T all have ERGs dedicated to older workers, their unique challenges (such as healthcare and mentorship), and their allies.

The bottom line, Applewhite said: HR leaders need to make a conscious effort to be inclusive of workers of all ages. “What every employee wants is to be able to take a personal day if they need it, is to be listened to, is to be respected, is to look around the room and see other people who look like them, whether you are 70 or 27.”—KP

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