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Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway, and I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. There are at least four generations now in the workplace, Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Generation Z. Now, Millennials make up more than 1/3 of the US workforce in the US, but the youngest Boomers aren't quite ready for retirement, they're staying at work longer than previous generations.

Meanwhile, the 20-something Gen Zers are on the way, but they are a little bit less likely to be working than previous generations at the same age. Last week, in one of The Takeaway's editorial meetings, a producer brought up a recent New York Times article by Emma Goldberg. It's titled The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them and they got our team talking about generational differences, about the workplace, and just so you know, we have the whole range of ages, Boomer to Z, right here at The Takeaway, so we asked you if you felt the generational divide in your workplace.

John: Hi, this is John from East Hampton. Yes, I believe that various generations in the workplace have somehow been disrupted. I was born in the '60s. I learned my work ethics in the '70s and '80s, and I can't relate to any of these people. They're like they want to play ping pong in the middle of the day and I'm like, "Are you nuts?"

Lacey: This is Lacey from Jeffersonville, Indiana. I am an elder Millennial. I was once chewed out by a Boomer manager for sending an email instead of calling him to ask for clarification on something. He claimed, in an email reply that it takes 20 minutes to write a two-sentence email and it's much quicker to call. In fairness, it probably did take him 20 minutes to draft an email because he was a hunt and peck typer and didn't understand computers at all.

Speaker 1: Did she post you public or pm you?

Speaker 2: I don't know.

Speaker 1: Let's look at her page. www--

Speaker 3: Got it.

Katrina: This is Katrina from Maplewood, New Jersey. I am Generation X, born in 1972. I'm a professor now teaching the 19 to 20-year-olds. I find myself sounding like my parents talking about when I was younger and how things were back in my day, but then I do work in consulting for people who are often older than I am and they think I'm young and fancy, so it's interesting to deal with that on a regular basis. I'm sort of stuck in the middle, but I kind of like it that way.

Speaker 3: I want to be your assistant.

Speaker 2: Really? You hate it here.

Speaker 3: So do you.

Josh: Hi, this is Josh from Edwardsville, Illinois. I'm a Millennial. I'm 37, and I think it's important that Boomers hear that I'm a Millennial, and I'm 37. I'm almost 40.

Speaker 4: I'm 37. I'm not old.

Speaker 5: Boulder, Colorado. I am 56, so I am a Gen Xer by one year. I don't see any generational divide. Yes, I don't feel that at all. I don't know why this is such a big conversation and I work with people much older than me, much younger than me. My boss is 25 years younger than me.

Speaker 6: How do you do, fellow kids?

Speaker 7: What?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Listen, we always love to hear from all of you, so thanks for being in the conversation. Now let's go ahead and dig in and interrogate this idea of generations and whether they're really affecting workplace dynamics. Lindsey Pollak is a career and workplace expert, and author of the book The Remix: How to Lead and Succeed in the Multigenerational Workplace, and like me, Lindsey is a proud Gen Xer. Welcome to the show, Lindsey.

Lindsey Pollak: Thanks for having me, Melissa. Glad to be in conversation with an Xer.

Melissa Harris-Perry: [chuckles] All right, so first, let's talk about this article that got all of us talking. Is there something unique happening with the generational divide, the little like, "Get those Millennials off my lawn," or is this just sort of what happens with aging?

Lindsey Pollak: Oh, when I saw that article, and I think it has caused tremendous conversation, just like in your workplace at The Takeaway, all I could think was, I remember reading this article 10 years ago about the Xers and the Millennials and I remember reading it 20 years ago about the Boomers and the Xers and if I had been alive, I would have read it about the traditionalists and the Boomers.

I think the caller who said, "We find ourselves saying we walked uphill both ways to school in the snow," it is so true and we're going to read it again in 10 years with the Z's saying it about the Alphas, the next generation, so we have been here before and I just wish it would finally stop.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That said, aren't there meaningful differences? Look, our music was better, wasn't it?

Lindsey Pollak: [laughs] Well, that's an arguable, obviously. There, of course, are differences, but the way I like to frame it, if I'm walking into a company that's struggling with generational diversity, is it's not better or worse, it's not good or bad. For instance, the story about emailing or calling on the phone, it's just different.

If you take this as another element of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the fact that somebody has 20 years of experience and somebody else has 20 minutes of experience should not be a judgment. It's simply a difference and it's a difference in the experiences that you've had and it's a difference in your expectation. If I walked into The Takeaway or NPR 20 years ago, I would expect different technology to be sitting on my desk. If I started as an employee today, I might not even expect to have a desk.

That's just the difference in the reality that we are part of. In some ways, I think it's helpful to think of it like cultural differences. We seem to accept that someone who grows up in a different country experiences the world differently and might have different opinions or practices. In some ways, the United States is a different country if you were born in 1960 than if you were born in 1990.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, so it's useful. I want to break this down and walk through this a bit. One possibility is that what we're looking at is simply life cycle effects. That folks, no matter what their birth year, are different in their 20s than in their 50s than in their 70s, but then you've also laid out for us the structural changes, which is everyone, 20, 50 and 70, is dealing with new kinds of technologies at any given point in time and then there's a third possibility that we're actually shaped by those core coming of age moments.

I do think about Gen Xers or at least sort of my portion of the Gen Xers coming out of college and into the workforce, or even out of high school and into the workforce during a booming economy. We could get jobs, not necessarily easily but certainly much more easily than, for example, Millennials. I wonder if that impacts and affects then, forever, how we think about what a job is.

Lindsey Pollak: Absolutely. Even before Xers, Boomers came into an economy where companies offered a lot of benefits, and the majority of traditionals before them had a pension plan. If they stayed with a company, they retired with income for the rest of their lives. Millennials and Gen Z's will never have that. Millennials face student loan debt. The most challenging economic recession, the Great Recession, the pandemic, that's a different economic reality, so what you graduate into from high school or college stays with you. Economists have proven for many, many years afterward and I think it's not just what's in your bank account, it's your mindset about whether the world is going to be a welcoming place, an abundant place, or whether it's going to be really challenging.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to also just walk through some of the stereotypes. Let's listen to what one of our callers had to say.

Caller: I'm a Millennial. The generational divide in the workplace boils down to Gen Xer's very meh, Boomers think they know everything, Millennials are very idealistic, and Gen Z's seems to just be doing it for the LOLZ and I respect it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Doing it for the LOLZ. For the non-Zers listening, that's the LOL, the laugh out loud. I wonder about those stereotypes. Clearly, as you point out, if we were stereotyping a culture, a racial identity, a gender, or a sexuality in these kinds of ways, we would see that as deeply problematic but we do make these kinds of stereotypes about generations.

Lindsey Pollak: I want to echo that. If I came on your show, Melissa, and said, women are so meh, you would kick me off. We would just never do that, and with generations, somehow it's become acceptable. I don't think it should be. One of the stereotypes that I thought the caller was going to say about Millennials is they expect trophies for participation.

I had a young Millennial in one of my programs who said, "I didn't give myself the trophies. My coaches and parents and teachers kept giving me trophies. That's the world you told me existed, so don't criticize me for coming of age in that time," and I thought that was so telling that the times can really shape us. Also it doesn't acknowledge that people of different races, different genders, different sexual orientations, economic classes have totally different experiences of different eras. The stereotypes, they can be funny, I'll admit it, but they also can do a lot of damage.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I think this point, and perhaps this is me as a Gen Z parent, with two Boomer parents who were raised during the Great Depression or just coming out of the Great Depression. Both of them are just absolute, like financial whizzes. They can stretch a dollar into next week and the week after and the week after. They also raised my siblings and I to be a little bit, at least a little bit more willing to spend the dollars, not have to save every single one of them.

Again, we came of age at a time when one could get jobs, and then my kids, who are a Z and an Alpha, boy, their understanding and thoughts about money are even quite radically different than mine. I'm not sure if that's generational so much as it is American Dreamish. That if each generation just manages to do a little bit better financially, our young people will have a different understanding of fiscal constraints.

Lindsey Pollak: I titled my book The Remix for this exact reason. The answer shouldn't be the Boomers did it right. Melissa, you did it wrong and your kids are doing even worse. The answer should be there's value in all three of those experiences and perspectives. Just like a remix song takes a classic and makes it modern, you don't throw away the classic forever and say, "Well, that song is from 30 years ago, forget it." You say, "This song is amazing but let's modernize it, let's take the best of all perspective."

Another word that I've heard around, I think it was coined by a blogger named Gina Pelle is to be a perennial, which is that you know your history, but you keep up with the times. I think your family if you mix all of those different perspectives, is going to be in a really good place because you're not throwing away one generation's perspective, you're incorporating all of them to get the best result.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In West African traditions, that is the Sankofa, you look back to go forward, I like that framework. Lindsey, I want to talk a little bit about age discrimination in the workplace. I have certainly heard this from both sides. I've heard it from younger people who say they show up in the workplace ready to get their work experience and are often derided as having insufficient work capacity, and I definitely hear it from older folks who say, after a certain age, it becomes impossible to even change jobs because there is such age discrimination.

Lindsey Pollak: Yes, legally, the definition is discrimination for people over 40, but I have heard examples, as you mentioned, from across the spectrum and a lot of states are changing the law to acknowledge that age discrimination can happen at any point. I think it's very real, there was an internet meme that went around that said, "We want to hire someone aged 20 to 25 with 30 years of experience." That seems to be what everybody wants. It's absolutely true.

Or you see it in a more hidden sinister way, which is that a job listing will say, "We want someone energetic," which is code for somebody younger, or the caller who made the assumption that an older person with hunt and peck typing will not be good at technology.

I would probably say the biggest feedback that I hear from people of all generations is like a younger person saying, "I like to talk face to face, please don't assume that I only want to do Tik-Tok because I'm 23," or someone who's 72, who says, "I love technology, I'm really adept at technology, don't judge me because I have grey hair." I think we have to stop these assumptions.

Someone might have 20 years of experience in an industry and be a Millennial, someone might join that company yesterday and be a Baby Boomer. There's such a great mix today. For the record, more people are working older and later into their lives. Look at the president of our country, he's the oldest we've ever had. There are more Americans over the age of 85 in the workplace than ever before in history, 85. People can work much longer and I think companies that appreciate and acknowledge all the different ages are going to succeed particularly after the pandemic, which has shaken up everybody's need for workers.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When you talk about appreciating and acknowledging, I'm also thinking about that job listing that you're talking about there, 25 years old with 30 years of experience. One of the reasons that companies often want to hire the 25-year-old is because they're less expensive. You can actually get entry-level workers in a wide variety of fields who, as you pointed out, older generations might expect things like healthcare benefits, retirement benefits, certain kinds of security packages in ways that younger folks who are coming through for the first time in this radically change workforce may not expect it.

I'm wondering if there is also a way that the workforce writ large takes advantage of younger workers by not providing them the same securities that older generation secured, for example, through labor unions?

Lindsey Pollak: Absolutely. I think the decline of unions, certainly the decline of companies offering pension plans to all employees. Many Baby Boomers but almost all traditionalists had access to that kind of financial support. I don't think it's just young people, I think that the employment scene is challenging for anybody. There are so many more gig jobs, consulting roles, no health insurance. There are definitely systemic problems there.

I will say one thing that I'm seeing is some industries and companies are embracing people in midlife and older specifically. To give one example, I went to a plumbing conference and they said, "We're having a really hard time finding 18-year-olds who want to train as plumbers, so we've started promoting the profession to people in their 30s and 40s who want a second career to be entrepreneurial, to work with their hands, to make a difference to the environment."

I think you're going to see more and more industries and companies realize that if they just go for the younger talent, they're not going to get what they want, and if you consider this great resignation in the war for talent today, companies are going to have to offer higher wages and benefits to get any talent. I'm hoping that maybe this is the opening that I've been waiting for and hoping for when we do see increased wages, more power to the employees, and more opportunities for people younger and older who maybe have been marginalized.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's just do a little advice-giving. For folks who are managing in a multi-generational workforce, what are some key things that they should know?

Lindsey Pollak: Be explicit in your expectations and boundaries. If I say, "Hey, Melissa, get in touch with John," I might mean, call John on the phone and you might interpret that as text John. If I have a goal of exactly how I want you to do that, I need to be really specific.

The second is, make sure that your unwritten rules, whatever those are, are written. Exactly what time are people expected to show up? What's appropriate dress? What one generation might assume is not necessarily what you as the leader might assume. I was working with a student affairs professional to college, and he said to his generation Z students, "Call me any time," and so they called at two or three o'clock in the morning. He said, "That's not what I meant, call me anytime up until 10:00 PM because I think that's reasonable." Just don't make assumptions, be explicit.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Yes, don't never with the call me any time, that's not the thing. My door is always open? No, not always. What about on the other side? If you're a worker who's not yet, or maybe just not in management, what are some of the things that you should know about interacting in this multi-generational workforce?

Lindsey Pollak: My grandpa used to say there's a reason you have two ears and one mouth, use them accordingly. Listen twice as much as you talk. Again, we make assumptions. "Oh, you've been here so long, you must be really traditionalist in your thinking." Maybe not. To say, why are you doing it that way? Can you show me how you learned that? What do you think of this? It doesn't mean that you have to change your opinion but really being open to other perspectives is really powerful.

What I would say to every individual is to think about having a multi-generational network of professionals. A lot of us hang out with people in a variety of ways who are exactly like us. If you want to succeed in this very multi-generational work environment, make sure that you know people, professionally, of all different ages.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Lindsey Pollack is a career and workplace expert and author of the book The Remix: How to Lead and Succeed in the Multigenerational Workplace. Thanks, Lindsey.

Lindsey Pollak: Thanks for having me.

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