By now we’ve all heard about how Millennials are the fastest growing generation in the workforce. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, in 2016 Millennials became the largest generation in the U.S. labor force, surpassing the 53 million Gen X’ers with a staggering 56 million people working or looking for work by 2017. That’s just over one third of the workforce population. In response, companies are making major real estate and policy decisions based on what they think Millennials want, with the sole purpose of recruiting and retaining the best possible talent.
What does this all mean for the workplace of the future? For one thing, it means we’re looking at four to five different generations in the workforce and current, trending mainstream office design is disregarding 65 percent of them. What about those 53 million Gen X’ers who at present hold 51 percent of leadership roles in companies across the globe? And who’s designing for the 25 million Baby Boomers, also holding much of the decision-making power, who are still going strong well into their 60s and 70s? And then there are the 5 million-and-growing new-to-market Generation Z’ers (whom it seems we’re now calling iGeneration?) coming out of schools today fully-equipped with technical know-how? Many workplace articles—and, more generally, business op-eds—written today push design catering to those of us born between 1981 and 1996 with a seeming disregard for the other, larger two thirds of the population. But, we need to design for people of all ages, not just the slight majority.
One of the most frequently named generational dividers is technology. So much so that it’s now a common trope that Millennials can intuitively find a fix to any techy issue while Gen X has little hope of catching up. However, in some cases Gen Xers are far more adept at fully integrating apps and other digital tools into their professional lives than Millennials and one reason for this may be because Gen Xers had to make an active effort to stay on top of relevant technology that help them in their jobs, for fear of getting left behind. By contrast, many millennials grew up with apps and social media that may provide them native digital fluency socially, but may not spur them to seek out the skills needed professionally. This is just one example of how generalizations about generational differences can lead to limited, if not outright inaccurate, views into what professionals need and want out of their workplace to perform at their best.
Workplaces should never cater to one particular age group, gender, race, or any other label society decides to create. Instead, to create a successful workplace, design must move beyond generalizations to support what it takes for employees to get a job done and a job done well. Good workplace design must support both current and, more importantly, desired behaviors—like collaboration, interaction, invention, or production—today and into the future. After all, a truly successful and diverse workplace is, categorically, age-agnostic.
Designing for Tasks & Behaviors
When you take age out of the equation of how to do your job successfully, you’re left with tasks and behaviors. What tasks do I need to complete, and how do I want to go about completing them? What and how. These are the questions we ask to help inform designing a productive workplace. (We also ask Who, but that answer is company-specific.) When we ask about tasks, we want to know what things you do on a daily or weekly basis. Do you have routine assignments or do they vary frequently? Is your work predictable or is it sporadic, constantly changing and evolving? Or it is, more often than not, both? This leads us to understand how you, as individuals and, more broadly, as an organization, behave at work. Moreover, this line of inquiry allows us to venture beyond how you are behaving today in order to understand and seek out how you want to behave in the future. Are you a heads down, extremely focused company, or are you constantly buzzing with collaboration? Those options are, of course, the extremes of a circular spectrum in which many companies fall somewhere in the middle—and which are not mutually exclusive—but they give us a sense of what kind of organization you are and how you need to be operating to stay successful.