In today's episode, we talk about generational gaps in the workplace.
I’m here to help you navigate the tricky terrain of generational differences, age-related biases, and the jarring shift young people encounter when transferring from education to the world of work.
Drawing on my decade-long experience in human resources and organizational development, I challenge the common misconceptions about different age groups in the workforce. Together, we debunk the myths and explore the realities of our rapidly changing workforce.
Our conversation further unravels the complexities of our diverse workforce, spotlighting the rise of racial and ethnic minorities, and the increasing number of foreign-born workers in non-standard work arrangements. We discuss their unique challenges – from the instability of their employment to impacts on safety, health, and well-being.
Moreover, we address the growing presence of adults identifying as LGBTQ+ in the workforce, the hurdles working mothers face, and the issues younger workers confront.
We emphasize acknowledging and addressing institutional biases to create an inclusive and supportive work environment for all. Now is the time to make meaningful changes.
I hope you enjoy our conversation.
If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart, and you’d like to connect with me, here are a few ways you can do that.
One is my newsletter, it’s where I put most of my time and energy when I’m not working with clients or on this podcast. Sorry social media! It’s a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and of course updates on what’s happening with the podcast. Whenever something is going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first.
Another resource that I have for you is my Guide to Doing Work Differently. The guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place to start.
Last, if you’ve got a burning question, a comment, or a situation you’d like my eyes on, you can email me at candice@fortressandflourish.com.
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out, and if you’re feeling generous, leave a review. Reviews help other like-minded folks find their way to this resource.
Learn more about Candice and her work here.
In today's episode, we talk about generational gaps in the workplace.
I’m here to help you navigate the tricky terrain of generational differences, age-related biases, and the jarring shift young people encounter when transferring from education to the world of work.
Drawing on my decade-long experience in human resources and organizational development, I challenge the common misconceptions about different age groups in the workforce. Together, we debunk the myths and explore the realities of our rapidly changing workforce.
Our conversation further unravels the complexities of our diverse workforce, spotlighting the rise of racial and ethnic minorities, and the increasing number of foreign-born workers in non-standard work arrangements. We discuss their unique challenges – from the instability of their employment to impacts on safety, health, and well-being.
Moreover, we address the growing presence of adults identifying as LGBTQ+ in the workforce, the hurdles working mothers face, and the issues younger workers confront.
We emphasize acknowledging and addressing institutional biases to create an inclusive and supportive work environment for all. Now is the time to make meaningful changes.
I hope you enjoy our conversation.
If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart, and you’d like to connect with me, here are a few ways you can do that.
One is my newsletter, it’s where I put most of my time and energy when I’m not working with clients or on this podcast. Sorry social media! It’s a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and of course updates on what’s happening with the podcast. Whenever something is going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first.
Another resource that I have for you is my Guide to Doing Work Differently. The guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place to start.
Last, if you’ve got a burning question, a comment, or a situation you’d like my eyes on, you can email me at candice@fortressandflourish.com.
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out, and if you’re feeling generous, leave a review. Reviews help other like-minded folks find their way to this resource.
Learn more about Candice and her work here.
The hearth is for you if you're a business leader with a team. Here we have conversations about how to keep growing. When you feel you've reached your capacity, when what you're doing is working but you're starting to see the cracks, when there's a gap between where you're at now and where you want to be, here we find ways to transition through the struggle of survival toward creating a thriving business that supports you and your team as whole humans. Your host is me, candice Elliott. I'm a business strategist and mentor who specializes in working with business owners who are going through periods of growth. Especially when you're adding more people to your team, the practices and systems that worked when your team was smaller just don't seem to fit anymore. And when you're caught in stress and reaction, it's tough to reimagine the way that you created your world of work, both your own personal one and the one that you created for others. I help people align their values and business practices to build practical, sustainable, thriving work ecosystems and no, this isn't just some work utopia talk. To do this, I bring forward my decade-long professional background in human resources and organizational development, working with growing businesses across many sectors, and my decades-long search for meaning and wholeness, which includes researching the history of work and how it came to be what it is today, practicing a trauma-informed approach to business and integrating work, life and spirituality into a meaningful whole. Let's take this journey together. Hello, hello, brave ones, welcome back to the hearth, and this week I'm going to be talking about the changing dynamics of the workforce, which is all the people who work, and the increasing diversity that we're seeing in workers, working people in the United States.
Speaker 1:You know, when I talk with employers about changing dynamics in the workforce, there are a few different things that come up. The main one that people talk about is generations, like generational differences between people, and there's a lot of good information out there to listen to, to read about what makes each generation sort of distinct and unique in the workforce and what is helpful for different generations. I do think that some of that research and information it conflates age of a person with the generation that they come from. I think that some of the things that are attributed to, for example, millennials, some of the things that are attributed to millennials, are things that are now being attributed to the generation coming after millennials. So it's like, whatever generation is entering the workforce, it gets this category of things, and it's because they're entering the workforce. They're figuring out how to go from being a student to being a worker.
Speaker 1:Basically, educational system does not set people up for work, right? So there's a huge shift that happens in whatever group is transitioning into the workforce, and I think that we inaccurately assign those characteristics to that group and carry it with them longer than it actually deserves to be carried with them. And then I think also that we don't recognize changes that happen with people as they go through different life events as they become older, right, so we may attribute certain things to, like baby boomers, for example, but as baby boomers are transitioning into being elders in the workforce, we need to recognize that that group of people are going to be experiencing certain things like slower cognitive speed and less physical ability and things like that. On that end, we also don't want to conflate that thing, right, we don't want to miss that. Really important changes are happening to this generation of people that happen to all generations of people. And so there's this life cycle of an employee throughout their all of their working years which, like I, started working when I was 15, and then probably won't stop working until I'm in my 80s. Right. That's a lot of life, of where work is going to be happening, and there are a lot of different life transitions that will happen along the way. You know, from you know figuring out the school to work transition to you know supporting yourself as a single person to supporting and having a family if that's the choice that you decide to make to caring for elders as they are becoming older, to them becoming an elder yourself.
Speaker 1:I wanted to start off with a conversation about generations and how we think of them in that way, because I think that is something that we need to shift our understanding around. Like I think that we put a lot of. There's a lot of frustration that is especially directed towards younger generations for not understanding quote unquote like what work is like right, but we had to be taught what work was like as well. And then there are certain things that are ingrained in how we have decided to create work that might not actually be so good for everyone that we now have the opportunity to change. So I encourage you, if you're feeling a friction between the way you're doing something and then the way that someone else is experiencing it in your workplace, that you dive into that and you inquire into it and you figure out if it's something that you're doing by default or because you think it has to be done that way, or if it is really being done in order to get you to a certain end goal that you have decided that you, that your organization, is shooting for.
Speaker 1:Some other dynamics that are happening within the changing workforce are the increase of racial and ethnic minority workers or global majority workers, and then people who are foreign born and who are working here in the United States, and often these people are concentrated into non-standard work arrangements, including day laborers, seasonal workers, independent contractors and leased workers. So if you're in any of these kinds of employment arrangements like where you hire someone for a day, or you hire people for a season, or you lease workers or you have independent contractors, just be aware that these types of arrangements are more standard for racial and ethnic minorities and that because of that, they experience more unstable and unpredictable work practices, so that generally negatively affects people's safety, health, well-being and that of the families. Another trend that's happening in the workforce is the percentage of adults who are openly identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer, and this is especially prevalent among the younger folks who are entering into the workforce and so ensuring that you have a workplace that is supportive, inclusive and safe for all of these folks. And then another trend that I kind of touched on a little bit, but is that we have a multi-generational workforce right now, and the proportion of older workers has risen and is continuing to rise, and it's going to keep growing through 2050 is what the research is showing. So, just considering the needs of people as they are, as they are getting older and as they are continuing to work and to need to work, some of the research that has gone on has shown that folks who are LGBTQ and women experience more exclusion, discrimination and violence in the workplace than other groups, and that especially women of color and immigrant women face other kinds of forms of harassment and discrimination. Another piece of this is that working mothers are often not provided with the support and resources that they need in order to balance work demands and reproductive plans and caregiving, so like birth and taking care of an infant and then caregiving as children get older, and so they tend to fall into a lower socioeconomic status bracket. And if you're a woman and a person of color at the same time, then you have this, things exponentially get worse.
Speaker 1:Some other dynamics that are happening for younger folks is that they are more likely to visit an emergency room for a work-related injury. So those are folks between the ages of 15 and 24. So thinking about, you know, education around safety in the workplace is important. When I was I think it was like 19 or 20, I had to go to the emergency room because I burned my hand as I was working as a barista and the milk and the thing boiled over onto my hand and you know it wasn't like I was not paying attention to what I was doing or anything like that, but it, you know it, just that happened at that time in my life. So just like a real life example for you there. And then you know, if we kind of understand I'm listing all of these different things because there are so many different kinds of dynamics that are happening, right From, you know, younger folks to older folks, to gender identity, to, you know, immigrant populations and people of color and all of these changing dynamics there is something that we can talk about organizationally, like as a business that you can do to address, kind of all these different kinds of things that are coming up, and that is to look at your institutionalized bias, and institutional bias is defined as laws, customs and practices that systematically reflect and produce group based inequities in any society.
Speaker 1:So it's the ways that we have been working on, so it's the ways that we have created systems that make it so that things are unequal, and so, as we move into this future where there is more diversity within the workforce, it's important to identify what these biases are and to remove things like structural exclusions so that they're not repeated as we move forward. This can look at, you know, imbalanced power relationships that occur based on race or ethnicity, nativity, gender, sexual orientation, age class, disability or neurodiversity as well. It can look at the unequal exposure and susceptibility to workplace hazards. It can look at the inequitable distribution of injury or illness or inequitable distribution of finances, and then it's also really important to understand that workers who fall into multiple categories of socially marginalized groups experience overlapping structural inequities. So you know for I talked about women and women of color previously women have a certain set of inequities that are a part of the systems that we currently have in place. People of color have another set of inequities that are a part of the systems that we have in place and women of color are at the mercy of those overlapping structural inequities. So that's how you know. When you look at compensation for, you know, mothers in general, I think it's 75% of or it, you know, varies a little bit, but in the 70% zone related to all other workers. But when you look at women of color, their pay is 50% of other workers. So that's how multiple overlapping structural inequities can show up in something like compensation, for example.
Speaker 1:So what are some steps that you can take? We're going to get to that. I guess I have. Well, I've explained a bit of the problem that we're experiencing. They're not problem challenge for sure.
Speaker 1:So one is to, like I was talking about, is looking at your institutional bias, like how have you designed your company? How have you designed your jobs? How are your work agreements created? What are the technologies that you're using? What are you know if people are commuting, what are the inherent disparities in that? Just looking at where there is bias. And when you do this work, you might not want to see it. So it's a good idea to ask your staff, your people, what is difficult and what is showing up, you know, institutionally and structurally, in a difficult way for them and each workplace is different. So it's you know there's not like a standard set of questions that I can give you. That's like here, give this survey to your staff to find out how you have institutionalized bias into your company.
Speaker 1:But we can. We can, if this is something that you want to work on, talk about your specific organization, what's going on there, your employee groups, and uncover some of the biases that are happening. So, looking at your policies and practices just to see if there are inequities that you are creating or perpetuating through those Improving the way that you're collecting data so that you can understand what kind of disparities might be happening. And then looking into inclusive technology, technology that will support all these various different kinds of workers you know, from your folks who are elders in the workforce to young folks, to your you know non primary English speaking folks to you know, all the different types of people. And fostering workplace inclusivity and and empowering people. And if you want to dive more into that inclusivity conversation, I would recommend you listen to my episode. It was a couple ones ago, episode 33, on building an inclusive and respectful workplace. Well, I feel like this one was a little bit of an octopus, because there's so many different places that you can go and talking about diversity and in diversity in all of these different groups. If you have any questions or you wanted to clarify something that I said, or if you'd like to talk about embracing diversity in your workforce, feel free to reach out. I would love to talk with you and I'll be linking some of the research that I included in this talk in the show notes. I'll see you next week. Bye-bye Hit, subscribe to know when the next episodes come out and, if you're feeling generous, please leave a review.
Speaker 1:Reviews help other like-minded folks find their way to this resource. If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart and you'd like to connect with me, there are a few ways to do that. One is my newsletter, where I put most of my time and energy when I'm not working with clients or with my family or working on this podcast Sorry, social media. The newsletter is a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and, of course, updates on what's happening with the podcast. Whenever something's going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first. Another resource that I have for you is my guide to doing work differently. This guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place if you're looking for somewhere to get started. Last, if you've got a burning question, a comment or a situation you'd like my eyes on, you can email me. All those links are in the show notes. Take care, brave soul, catch you next time.