The Missing Middle: How Workplace Intergenerational Initiatives Can Evolve for All Generations

Many of the most successful intergenerational activities are celebrated for their ability to bring younger and older people together. This is exemplified by IE’s Network’s own award-winning Intergenerational Music Making which uses music to bridge the age gap between younger and older generations. Many of us now see our loved ones participating in enriching programmes where school or nursery age children visit residential care homes for activities with older residents. Given the success of these programmes in the community, it makes sense that focus of intergenerational initiatives in the workplace to date has often been aimed at connecting the youngest and oldest within our organisations.  

Indeed, intergenerational or ‘reverse’ mentoring between graduates and older mentors has become a popular way for organisations to connect their youngest and oldest employees. And there is some evidence that these mentoring programmes can help to reduce conflict between younger and older generations at work. These connections can be especially beneficial for younger workers, reducing their anxieties about ageing, helping them to ‘let go’ of ageist stereotypes, and increasing their interest in working with older generations. Yet it is less clear if these intergenerational pairings deliver more concrete organisational objectives, such as boosting productivity or engaging and retaining employees.  

At work, there are two key limitations that intergenerational mentoring initiatives face in delivering productivity benefits. First, they are extracurricular in nature, happening ‘outside’ the core working deliverables; and second, they often overlook the needs or participation of ‘middle generations’. Employees aged between 28 and 59, or the ‘middle generations’, make up more than 70% of the workforce, and often occupy the most senior roles. Yet these employees face key obstacles that prevent them from participating in mentoring-based intergenerational initiatives at work. This is a period where people are most likely to be time poor, often balancing work with children and family commitments. It is also a life stage when employees are less vulnerable to the negative stereotypes or challenges associated with being a particular age at work. Equally, ‘middle generations’ often do not fit neatly into ‘younger’ or ‘older’ categories associated with intergenerational mentoring, having already established their careers but not yet reaching the later career stages where motivation begins to reorientate towards social relationships with colleagues.  

Achieving the business benefits of intergenerational diversity requires connections across all generations, not just an exchange between the youngest and oldest. This is because intergenerational diversity across all generations means more diversity of experiences, perspectives, and networks available to deliver meaningful innovation and performance. This workplace diversity is most important in situations where creativity, collaboration, and strategic decision making is required. Intergenerational diversity is linked to more productive meetings, but too often this is not capitalised upon. More than half of important meetings do not have representation from either the youngest or oldest generations. For this reason, intergenerational initiatives must move beyond pairings of ‘younger’ and ‘older’ employees over coffee, and towards engaging people from all generations across key design and decision meetings. 

Rather than bringing the ‘middle generations’ to ‘intergenerational programmes’, workplace intergenerational initiatives should focus on better integration of younger and older generations into their organisation’s project and decision-making structures. Successful intergenerational relationships require frequent contact between people of all generations, in which they are focused on the work. Initiatives aimed at getting people of all generations in the room together to address real operational problems and make strategic decisions are those most likely to deliver both the personal and organisational benefits of intergenerational exchange.