The Postgenerational Workforce: From Millennials to Perennials | Deloitte

Understanding generational differences in the workplace have been a topic of interest for many years. However, “with careers becoming more dynamic and complex, generation—or any single attribute—is of limited value in understanding the workforce.” This fact raises whether traditional workforce segmentation approaches, anchored in generation, should remain the focus of future workforce strategies. This article provides an in-depth view of how various insights into generational differences are becoming less relevant to understand the workforce. It posits that developing talent strategies to meet workers’ needs will require a deeper understanding of workers’ individual expectations. Such an approach entails gaining complex insights into the workforce on their interests, values, preferences, and opinions. For example, MetLife identifies five factors that organizations should consider in workforce segmentation: 1) Demographics such as age, gender, income, education, and life events, 2) Firmographics such as job tenure, company size, industry, role, and blue vs. white collar, 3) Attitudes toward life such as optimism toward the future, future vs. present orientation, orientation toward change, and sources of pleasure/stress 4) Attitudes toward work such as work-life balance, attitudes toward retirement, and motivations for staying at the job. 5) Needs from employer such as career development support, salary, benefits, work culture, and work subject matter. By applying this “consumer marketing insights and data analytics” approach to understanding their workforce, organizations can avoid the trap of oversimplifying a complex and multifaceted topic. Other ideas are discussed.