Leading Five Generations in the Workplace

By Kelly Zibell, AMS, PCAM

Demographic changes are taking place both in the workplace and in community associations. Seventy-five percent of the workforce will consist of millennials by 2025, but more than 97 percent of homeowner leaders are traditionalists, baby boomers, and Generation Xers, according to an analysis from my company. This means that strategies for leading employees and working with residents and homeowner leaders should take generational differences into consideration.

Each generation in the workplace or in a community – from traditionalists to Generation Z – has distinct work or volunteer motivations, aspire to diverse career goals, and require specific types of communication, engagement, and management styles. The table shows a summary of attributes that distinguish each of these five generations.

Management company executives and association boards must learn how to address the changing needs of a multigenerational workforce or membership to ensure they remain competitive and desirable places to work and live in. Here are five key areas to adapt.

Have a purpose. The future of work is about fostering a collaborative environment, leading with authenticity, and creating and sustaining partnerships. This means management companies and community associations need to determine what their purpose is and their strategic vision for getting there.

Create multiple communication channels. Gone are the days of communicating everything in the community or company newsletter. Now there is text messaging, emails, automated voice calls, and app notifications. Important messages must be sent through several channels to ensure they are being received by members of each generation. If you haven’t explored new options to improve communication in the past five years, now is the time to do so.

Focus on empathetic leadership. As workplaces and community associations welcome more millennial and Gen Z employees or residents, empathy will become a critical behavior to adopt. In the best organizations, authority is earned and not assumed, and leaders should inspire by example. In addition, look for opportunities to create team-based work groups and provide opportunities for engagement between leadership and employees or homeowners.

Equalize your hierarchy. For communities, this means empowering volunteers in committees to execute some of the work for the board, which will keep them engaged and grant them the ability to remain nimble in quickly changing circumstances. Within management companies, explore the idea of stretch assignments and shifting from a command-and-control environment to one that is performance based. Allowing your team to have a voice in the decision-making process is empowering and can drastically increase employee retention.

Prioritize work-life balance. A 9-to-5, five-day work schedule is no longer a reality for employees post-pandemic. Consider flexibility in schedules (i.e., compressed workweeks), the number of hours worked (i.e., part-time roles or job shares), or where staff can work from, such as their home office or a satellite office closer to where they live. This can dramatically increase staff retention, especially for working parents, and decrease feelings of burnout.

Management companies and communities that have the right mix of motivational and situational elements to better engage multiple generations will have a competitive advantage within the industry and in their association.

Kelly Zibell is owner of Divergent Consulting Group in Morgan Hill, CA [email protected] Reprinted with permission from the November/December 2021 issue of Community Manager, a bimonthly newsletter published by Community Associations Institute (CAI). www.caionline.org/cm