Page 50 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

Crosswind Factors C37

For example, according to our study:

If an employer has a slightly age-diverse workforce (more
than 1.5 on our scale), it is three times more likely to have a
lower overall engagement score.

If the employer has a moderately age-diverse workforce
(more than 2.0), it is five times more likely to have a lower
overall engagement score. 8

If an employer has a highly age-diverse workforce (more
than 3.0), it is six times more likely to have a low overall en-
gagement score.

Even the best of Best-Places-to-Work employers find generational
diversity challenging. The CEO of one winning company, who has
primarily hired younger employers at his technology-based services
company, has admitted to failures in assimilating older employers into
the culture. He states: “Older employees often have perceptions of work
which aren’t necessarily wrong, but are very different than our culture.
We’ve had a few who didn’t make it because they were rejected by younger
employees before they even had a chance to succeed.”
The correlation between greater age diversity and lower engage-
ment applies to employers regardless of average workforce age—in
other words, regardless of which generation is predominant in the
organization. Thus a relatively homogenous company of mostly
Boomers or mostly Generation Xers is more likely to have a higher
level of employee engagement than an employer with more genera-
tional diversity.
In summary, a company’s GDI is a revealing demographic, po-
tentially indicating a significant challenge to its efforts to develop a
highly engaged workforce. Most employers aren’t going to resist the
demographic trend and economic necessity of generational diversity
just because it makes employee engagement more challenging. The
tide cannot be turned. We all will need to accept this phenomenon