The time travel of workplace cooperation: How to foster cross-generational collaboration at work

Picture this. A family is shifting houses. Everyone in the family, from the great-grandfather to his great-granddaughter (what a healthy and lucky family!) are working together to pack, move and unpack. It is an image of cooperation, love and harmony. Extend the same cross-generational collaboration to the workplace and we have a disastrous recipe. Of mistrust, grudges and even malice.

Corporates today are families whose members range from Boomers to Gen Z. Whether this is healthy and lucky for the organisation is a debated topic. The reason, experienced (or burnt?) people feel, is the incompatibility of the different generations. Surveys, discussions, polls and many more exercises are planned and conducted to analyse this incompatibility and to come up with a gluey solution that would bind them all together.

Interestingly, I have seen cases of some Boomers being young in the mind while some Zoomers acting conservative. (So here goes another topic to debate on: Do you categorise someone based on their physical age or mental age? Where does the emotional level of a person figure in this?)

Cross-generational collaboration is essentially a time travel. Ideas, opinions and work must travel from one generation to its past or future.

As a fairly new startup founder, I have not had the opportunity of working with a multi-generational team. Almost all my team members are Gen Z and younger than me. Whereas Tellable’s clients and partners are mostly Gen Y. I myself fall at the boundary of Gen Y and Z, and therefore my work ethics and preferences lie in the narrow intersection of these two circles. Some people think of me as a mixed race with an undecided mind and fluctuating ideas. I think of myself as gifted since I can understand both the generations (and their politics) well. But understanding is not enough. Action is necessary. How do I fare in that metric?

Right in the day-to-day conduct of business there are multiple challenges that I face with my Gen Z team members. Communication, learnability, alignment of interests, growth, everything is different and new in their way of thinking. Though I do understand where they come from, I am paralysed in action. On top of all this are my own biases and stereotypes about people, formed from minute facts like their use of language, sense of clothing, perspective of work, etc. (Biases and stereotypes are not inherently bad; they are our mental models to understand and work with people. They however become grossly bad when we stick to them steadfastly and stop receiving the counter signals.)

Everyday I ask myself how I must act in a scenario? Do I rebuild my organisation in favour of people’s needs, or persuade them to fall in line with my goals?

What I have learnt in this tumult and four and a half years of running a startup is that, cross-generational collaboration is essentially a time travel. Ideas, opinions and work must travel from one generation to its past or future and land without any change to its form or intention. And like any time travel, this too is complicated and uncertain. When I discuss a project plan to a newly recruited visual designer, I don’t know if it would give them the same meaning. To make this time travel efficient, the two points of time should follow the same absolute standard, and in business, that standard is the organisation’s vision. Importantly, it should not be my vision, but a vision put together in consultation with people across generations.

After that, any idea or opinion could be assessed by the weight of its own merit. 'How does this contribute to our overall vision?'

If a Gen Z’s idea aligns with the overall vision but not with a Gen X’s opinion, the Gen X should be ready to kill their (ego and) opinion. The sum here is more important than its parts.

An essential tool - the perfect time travel vehicle, if you will - to make the above model efficient is a culture of curiosity and empathy. At Tellable, we ask questions, listen and try to understand others keeping aside our biases, which we change as and when required. Once this culture of mutual respect and open communication is built, then cross-generational collaboration at work can be harmonious.