Generational diversity: why companies need to talk about it

Imagine this scene: the company president in his late 70s calls a meeting with his team of 50-year-old directors, his 40-something managers and 20+ and 30+ coordinators and assistants. Everyone together in a room to develop a new project. So many ages and so many generations in this scene described are no longer a utopia. This is the new reality of the corporate market.

For the first time in history, four generations are actively working together. Generations Z (born from the end of the 1990s), Y (born between 1981 and the mid-1990s), same corporate environment. And this “clash” of generations is very positive for companies. And they urgently need to understand this.

The increase in Brazilian life expectancy – currently around 80 years in the case of women, for example – is also driving productivity and postponing the exit of some generations from the job market. That’s why so many ages in the same ‘call’. This plurality and diversity of profiles is very beneficial for companies because it contributes to the environment, as it highlights the climate of a lot of exchange and learning between generations, where the diversity of bodies, ideas, culture and lifestyle can help development of a project, for example, from different perspectives.

Furthermore, when you have an environment with this generational diversity – more than numbers and graphs – you need to look at people. Understand people. Analyze people’s behavior. Learn from your strengths and weaknesses. Dealing with the immediacy of generation Z, for example, or with the search for stability of generation X or a possible difficulty in keeping up with the digital transformation of baby boomers.

We are living in a time of learning and deconstruction in our society, which is obviously reflected in the job market. We live in a moment of inclusion and plurality of bodies, ideas, races, genders, cultures, thoughts, ways of life, different ways of thinking… all together and mixed in this corporate melting pot, which draws our attention to what educator Paulo said so well Freire “you can only learn from differences and not from equalities”.