I work as a cash office clerk and a front end manager at a fair sized grocery store. We tend to have adults working during the day and then teens at night after school with the weekends being mixed. As a front end manager I have to listen to the complaints of the cashiers which I do with tremendous patience (I think). The one that bothers me though is how the over forty employees cannot stand the teens and go to great lengths to insult and complain about them. Now I am only 6 yrs older than the teens and thus maybe able to better relate to them but even beyond that I genuinely think these are good kids and am frustrated by it all.
They do tend to chatter but so do the older women.
They complain about balancing homework with their jobs but the older women complain about back pain and their sore feet.
They ALL try to get out of work by pretending to be busy to the customer goes to the next till.
The kids have piercings and dyed hair but they show up neat and presentable.
Honestly, the kids tend to be more polite since most customers are older than them.
The kids know exactly which women dislike them but are always professional which is amusing when contrasted with the supposed adult’s behaviour. This isn’t a pitting as I’m actually finished at this job in a few weeks just me wishing they’d get along. Anyone else have generation gaps like this at their jobs? How did you handle it?
I never experienced it when I worked at Wal-Mart for about two years as a teenager but maybe I was just oblivious. Everyone there of all age groups, from sixteen to sixty, got along with no real apathy or hostility that I noticed. Sure, there were cliques of teenagers and groups of gossipy old hens but there was plenty of interaction between everyone with groups composed of people from every generation being fairly common.
For a while in college I waited tables/tended bar during the summer. We had the generation gap thing. A large part of it was just the generation gap that’s always there. We dress differently, discuss different things. etc. However, a large part of it seemed to be resentment because those of us working over the summer were mostly doing so for extra spending money in college whereas the older folks needed the money to support themselves and their families. Also, we college kids were planning to go onto bigger and better things. The older folks were pretty much where they were going to be in life.
How did management deal with it? They mostly ignored it. As long as it was just general carping that goes on everywhere, it didn’t affect the customers or the business.
Since I work in HR, when this issue cropped up in my office once we got all touchy-feely and did an in-depth project on it. Not to make too much fun of my profession, since sometimes HR is called on to advise management on the best strategy to deal with this issue.
Probably the most fun we had was a multi-generational potluck. Everyone brought food that represented their generation to them. It was kind of a variation on a multicultural potluck.
There is a classic book on this topic, Generations at Work. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in this topic. In addition to profiles of 4 different generational groups, it also points out that this is a new situation, to have 4 generations in the workplace at the same time. I have also read Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail about Generation X and Millenials Rising, about the generation after Generation X.
Did we have any breakthroughs? I think we had a few. I was one of the younger people in the office and I learned to give the older folks (who tended to be in leadership roles) a chance to play around, ask questions, and kick the tires on any new software we’d be using in a small group before introducing it to the whole team. This seemed to help the change go more smoothly. Older workers seemed to be a little more understanding of younger workers’ different style of dress and interest in working from home.
I’m not sure this is a generation gap (i.e. resentment of younger ages).It may be a “Seniority gap”-- i.e. resentment of short-term employees. Maddystrut mentioned it above: the teens are soon to move on to new and more exciting things. But the 40 yr old women are stuck in their dead-end jobs, and they know it.
I’m one of the old folks at my work. In fact, I recently got my 30-year service pin, and many of my coworkers are early-20s, fresh out of college.
Honestly, the main gap I see is, for want of a better word, lifestyle. When my work day/week is done, I want to go home and putz around the house or garden. The generally want to go places and do things. When we have to go on travel for training or whatever, at the end of the day, they want to sightsee and check out the clubs, and I want to go to my room and enjoy not having to do the dishes.
Of course, I don’t work in retail - I work with a bunch of engineers and scientists, so that skews the results decidedly.
Still, it is weird for me to think that I’m old enough to be the mother of so many people in the organization…