Creating a diverse workforce that contains a variety of generations offers several benefits to your organization. By including Baby Boomers, Traditionalists, Generation X, and Generation Y members on your staff, you will benefit from their varied experience and their different approaches. A diverse work force can also support itself with each generation filling in information that the others may lack.
Diversity creates strength for any company, but it does create managerial challenges. If you want to get a diverse work force to work together, then you need to understand how to manage workers from a variety of generations. It is not always easy to manage several generations at once, but it offers significant business benefits.
Have A Policy In Place From The Beginning
The National Integration Working Group for Workplaces offers a comprehensive study on managing different generations and one of the key concepts the group mentions is having a plan in place to help make managing diverse work forces easier. A company must not only desire to have a diverse work force, but it must have goals for that work force and have a defined path for success for the entire group.
Why is your company creating a diverse workforce? Is it to focus on customer needs, or to create an environment that offers a wealth of solutions to company issues? A policy on how to utilize a diverse work force makes it easier to manage that work force because everyone involved understands the goals and what is expected of the group.
Know The Issues To Avoid Stereotypes
Did you know that generation Y is not nearly as reliant on technology as most people think? According to the Newspaper Association of America, 68 percent of Millennials react to print advertising in newspapers along with utilizing online resources. When you know this kind of information, it can prevent you from making the mistake of assuming that your youngest workers are the tech experts.
Rice University suggests that the best way to manage across generational lines is to understand each generation thoroughly and avoid using stereotypes. When you open up to what each generation can really do, you will maximize your work force and avoid alienating anyone over generational issues.
Know How To Reach Each Generation
A big part of managing a diverse work force is understanding how each generation prefers to get its new information. The Wall Street Journal says that Baby Boomers prefer training material they can read, while Millennials react better to interactive training materials such as videos. If you want to be able to train your diverse work force, then you need to understand the manners in which they each take in information and how they process new ideas.
Your company could benefit significantly from having a diverse work force made up of people from a variety of generations, but you can only benefit if you know how to manage diversity. It takes time to understand the management techniques that make diversity profitable, but the results will make your company much more competitive in your marketplace.