Pilita Clark: Move over millennials, perennials are on the march

You have to hand it to millennials. And also to baby boomers, Generation X and Gen Z.

They are all impossible to ignore. Hardly a day passes without mention of at least one of them, especially when it comes to the way we work.

As I write, a scan of my inbox shows that in the past week alone I’ve had news that millennials are “the most supportive generation” in the workplace and UK baby boomers are the “only generation” still working at pre-pandemic levels.

Middle-aged Generation X workers are stunning younger colleagues with tales of all the things one could do in the days before work email followed one home, and the youngest Gen Z lot are allegedly struggling most to budget for Christmas.

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The thing about all these developments is they are based on a grand illusion. The idea that we think or behave differently purely because we belong to this or that age group is deeply flawed.

Other important influences shape us: the impact of ageing, and so-called period effects that eventually affect everyone regardless of age, such as war, pandemic, or the invention of the smartphone.

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The profusion of blather about snowflake millennial narcissists and greedy boomer technophobes has little to no basis in fact. But what if this cliched thinking feeds real generational hostility in the workplace?

New research suggests this may be the case, at least in the US.

Baby boomers and millennials there really do find each other more unlikeable and threatening than other adult generations, says a paper published last month.

The nature of their mutual dislike differs. Boomers fear that millennials’ world views undermine important traditional values. Millennials have more tangible concerns about boomers blocking them from political power and financial comfort.

Interestingly, animosity levels declined after researchers told both groups that popular stereotypes about millennials and boomers were unfounded, and reminded them that each group one day would be — or had been — the same age as the other.

Older people are, meanwhile, going back to some form of work after retiring and brands face pressure to appeal to people of different ages, not just the latest consumers

But the paper reveals a dispiriting fact about those stereotypes. As Stéphane Francioli, one of the study authors, told me, “the fact that people believe in them has real consequences”.

Scholars have been noting the defects of generational generalisations for years. A very good book, by Prof Bobby Duffy of King’s College London, came out in 2021.

In 2020, a report by the venerable US National Academy of Sciences specifically warned employers against taking generational stereotypes into account when shaping recruitment, retention and other management policies. “Doing so is not strongly supported by science and is not useful for workforce management,” it said.

Yet employers continue to treat younger workers as lazy, selfish job-hoppers, and older ones as frail, untrainable change-haters.

So could artificially constructed assumptions about how we are supposed to behave at certain ages ever fade away?

If Mauro Guillén, the outgoing dean of the Cambridge Judge Business School, is right, the shift has already begun.

In his upcoming book, Guillén says that after universal schooling and old age pensions took off in the 19th century, life began to be organised into rigid stages of learning, working and retiring.

Now that we are living longer, with very different technologies, he thinks we are poised for a “post-generational” society of perennials or people defined by how they work, learn and live, not by when they were born.

There’s already evidence of people failing to act their age, he told me, starting with an explosion in the share of those over the age of 30 across the world who are doing some form of online education.

Technology has driven that shift and another sign of the perennial: large companies run by young entrepreneurs in their 20s or 30s overseeing much older workforces. That’s been a rarity outside family-owned firms until now, says Guillén.

Older people are, meanwhile, going back to some form of work after retiring and brands face pressure to appeal to people of different ages, not just the latest consumers.

I like the idea of the perennial, though I’m not convinced generational labels will ever vanish. Humans are hard-wired to categorise and generalise. It’s made us the species we are. Still, the world would be a better place if we kept a closer eye on reality. — Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023