April 2022
In the fourth episode of our ‘In Conversation with…’ podcast series for 2022, Partner Lucy Lewis speaks to Dr Eliza Filby, a generational expert helping businesses understand workplace dynamics and demographic trends through the prism of age and generations.
Dr Filby shares her fascinating insights into the impact of four generations in the workplace, how technology has accelerated generational differences and her views on what motivates people to work which has changed over the decades. Turning to hybrid working, Dr Filby goes on to discuss the dangers of a ‘hierarchy of needs’ approach as well as how it could potentially disadvantage women and ethnic minorities.
To find out more, please visit www.elizafilby.com where you can sign up for Dr Filby’s fortnightly newsletter, read her latest report ‘Mind the Gap: Managing a Multi-Generational Workforce in the Age of Hybrid Working’ or follow her on Twitter.
In Conversation With…Dr Eliza Filby
Series 2: Episode 4.
Lucy Lewis: Hello and welcome to the Future of Work Hub’s ‘In Conversation with…’ Podcast. I’m Lucy Lewis a Partner in Lewis Silkin’s employment team and in this podcast series I’ll be hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders to explore their perspective on what the Future of Work holds.
The pandemic has accelerated longer-term societal, economic and technological trends, and it’s given us this unique opportunity, a once in a generation challenge, to rethink who, how, what and where we work, but although the pandemic has been a significant catalyst for immediate change, it’s only one of the many drivers of change in the world of work; and today I’m really delighted to welcome Dr Eliza Filby to the podcast. Dr Filby is a generational expert, she’s a writer, speaker, social historian specialising in contemporary values, and Dr Filby helps businesses understand workplace dynamics and demographic trends through the prism of age and generations.
Welcome to the podcast.
Eliza Filby: Welcome, great to be here particularly on this spring day.
Lucy Lewis: Indeed, indeed. Now this is really interesting, this idea of different generations having different expectations and requirements when it comes to the workplace, and I wondered if I could start just by asking you to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do because it sounds like a really fascinating job.
Eliza Filby: Yes so I’m Dr Eliza Filby and I started my career as an academic working in Universities, teaching modern British history, and I actually grew to be quite frustrated with the difficulty of not being able really to disseminate my research to a broader audience and confined within academia. So I started about five years ago to learning more and more, researching more and more about the different generations.
I started rather selfishly with my own generation and, I’m a geriatric millennial, 40 this year and I was really interested, in particular how our childhood was very much shaped by the economic and social upheavals of the 1980s and then really our, our prospects of opportunities and inequalities within our generation was really fuelled by the economic crisis of 2007/08, and so I started the millennials and then I realised very quickly that there was this new generation emerging, Gen Z, who were beginning to kind of flex their muscles and have their voices heard and we’re a very different generation, we’re asking different questions, challenging the status quo; and then really also from there wanting to really map out that generational shift within the workplace, within society and within consumption, and I spend my day basically researching the different generational cohorts, seeing how, not just the cohorts themselves, which are I think quite difficult to analyse because they are a generalisation.
What I try to do is tease out the nuances within those generational categories, and then kind of also understand, you know, impose that question which I think is crucial is to what extent are these behaviours reflective of their life stage? So you know the young being perhaps you know politically optimistic and ambitious and potentially naïve in their youth because that’s what you do when you’re young, you challenge the status quo, you are idealistic.
So what is it that’s generationally specific to Gen Z or Baby Boomers, and what is life cycle-specific, life stage-specific whether you’re in retirement or whether you’re a 20 something just breaking out into the world. So I talk to businesses now and I have the great pleasure and joy of speaking to a whole range of businesses about my research and I’ve worked with the Royal Household, I’ve worked with the Harry Potter franchise, I’ve worked with McDonald’s, a lot of legal companies and really helping them understand through the prism of generations how society is changing. Not just in terms of the individual. Not just in terms of those generational cohorts but also the family and also things like how we’re ageing differently because all of that is I think going through a real disruptive moment, and we talk a lot these days about technological disruption and I think actually demographic societal disruption is almost an equally powerful force in society driving change, and you referenced earlier on in your introduction the pandemic and I think what was, without being too morbid about it, what was fascinating about the pandemic was how it almost changed our relationship with the key things in our lives. It changed our relationship with time and you know different, depending on your setup you had really you know I think posing different questions about your life. It changed people’s relationship with their home and the point in purpose and how much time you spent in the home. It changed people’s relationship with their families quite crucially and I think in many respects we are living in the golden age of family and economic dependence on the family; and it changed our relationship ultimately of course with work and that’s obviously since the lockdowns I’ve doing an awful lot on work and the different generational experiences of the pandemic and lockdown, and then ultimately different generational expectations of work, hybrid working and moving forward into the future.
Sorry that was a really long-winded answer to your question, wasn’t it?
Lucy Lewis: It was a brilliant answer and actually it gives us lots to pick up on because I do want to talk a bit about the pandemic.
Before we get to that, you’ve mentioned millennials, Gen Z but actually, we’ve got these four generations, we’ve also got Baby Boomers, we’ve got Gen X and one of the things I know you talk to businesses about is the importance of generational intelligence when it comes to managing and planning their workforce.
I wondered if you could just share a little bit about what you mean by that and any practical examples where you think that’s really made a difference, generational intelligence has made a difference.
Generational Intelligence
Eliza Filby: Hmm and I mean what I mean by generational intelligence is really trying to understand how everyone’s determined by time, and generational categories are a starting point, not an endpoint, and I wouldn’t go around sort of categorising your work colleagues as ‘Oh Gen Z’er over there’ or a ‘Baby Boomer over there’, it’s actually just understanding that we’re all a product of our time and ageism is a corrosive force in the workplace and is, you could argue, the last acceptable prejudice in the workforce; and I think you need to overcome that by understanding people’s different experiences and there are different experiences through time.
So you know it’s very important for a 65-year-old partner in a law firm to understand the type of educational culture that a 21-year-old has experienced or the type of obviously social media experience they have been generating and using since they were early teens, or understanding really how their childhood and early adulthood has been disrupted by a number of political upheavals, whether it be Brexit or whether it be obviously the COVID pandemic; but likewise, that inter-generational understanding goes both ways because ageism can go both ways and so you know it’s about the 21-year-old understanding that the Baby Boomer isn’t just rich because they got lucky, one in five Baby Boomers in the UK, by the way, is a millionaire. It’s understanding okay how and why did that trend of property wealth and investment and now the benefits of that, how did that happen, what were the, what were the challenges of that you know the high-interest rates, economic downturns, the upheavals of Thatcherism in the 1990s recession. It was not that Baby Boomers got lucky.
There’s a real history there that actually people in their 20s need to be able to contextualise and understand and ultimately empathise with; but also you know understanding what the workplace was like 50 years ago when Boomers first entered it, and I think that’s really key but also incredibly hard because one of the weird things about age, unlike say other forms of, you know, diversity, whether it be gender diversity or racial diversity, is that we all were young once and we all get old. So technically we should be able to empathise with people that are younger than ourselves and older than ourselves because we all go through it or we all have been through it unlike other forms of diversity, there should technically be more empathy and actually, all the stats show that within a workplace for example, people are much more likely to be friends with people of different gender, sexuality or race than a different age or generation.
So what is it that’s holding us back and there are, I think the, one of the major problems I think is because technology has accelerated those generational differences and it’s I think also a growing silo culture because of technology but other reasons which I won’t go into, is actually we are living almost in different worlds. We read different news, we read different, we consume different culture, we consume different TV programmes you know so that mainstream culture now has been fragmented because of the internet, and actually it’s created a real divide, and a real differing values which I think is even more extreme than it was in the 1980s. Potentially not as extreme by the way as it was in the 1960s but historically there’s always been a generation gap but I think technology in the last 10 years has accelerated that; and in the workplace of course you’ve got a generation coming through for whom the technology in the palm of their hand is often more sophisticated, much easier to use and they know much more about it than anyone they’re working with and alongside.
That is new because quite often your young recruits would come in and know less obviously, about a particular area and even though yeah you could say you know there’s still that obviously apprenticeship in the workplace, they have to learn about law and the legal profession and cases etc, etc, and client relationships but essentially they are utilising technology and have a source of constant information that is almost like challenging your workplace culture; and I think you know I’ve seen some really good examples of where in fact one legal profession, firm springs to mind where they actually introduced, it was brilliant actually, they recognised that their Gen Z recruits couldn’t really deal with the telephone. They couldn’t really talk to clients over the telephone. They were really struggling to build up a rapport, get out the necessary information, feel comfortable just using the telephone as a medium, and you know obviously those kids have grown up with holding the telephone not to their ear but to their face; and so they asked, the law firm basically asked the older employees to teach the young kids telephone etiquette, but likewise that skill swap went both ways. So rather embarrassingly they, this law firm knew they had to do something about their YouTube videos because, I said to them you know basically you, if you’re trying to appeal to the Gen Z you’re going, they YouTube something, they don’t Google it, and we YouTubed their law firm and it was one really bad video of an intern slagging them off working for them and it was really bad and so what we had, we did a workshop where the young, the young 21 year olds were teaching the older colleagues about social media, how the recruits, new recruits were going to use it, how they could you know become ambassadors for the company on social media, how they could generate video content that would override the bad stuff; and on that, on that kind of premise of skill swapping you actually built respect because you recognise that everyone has something to teach, and everyone has something to learn, and whether you are old or young that is true today, probably truer than it ever has been and it’s a really quick short cut route to building that inter-generational empathy.
Lucy Lewis: That’s really, really interesting and there’s plenty that I can empathise with there in relation to the example. I told you that we, we’re going to ask you about the pandemic and there’s so much that we could talk about in relation to that, and I am in a little bit going to touch on the return to work which I know isn’t really very Future of Work but it’s a big consideration for people now; but before we do that,
one of the things that we keep coming back to on the Future of Work is this kind of fundamental question and that’s what is it that motivates us to work? And it seems to me that that is something that may be quite different from a generational perspective and I’m really interested in any insights that you would have to share on that.
Motivations for Work
Eliza Filby: Yeah I mean I think, it is the key question because gone are the days where you can just motivate people by salary or status. It used to be that you had your name on the office. It used to be that you, you know, that salary and bonus culture was the keyway of keeping people. It used to be the company car. It used to be you know all of that kind of stuff I think was being questioned in the 1960s and 70s by Baby Boomers by the way who were the first generation to talk about purpose and meaning in the workplace, but it’s really been accelerated by millennials and now Gen Z and I think gone are the days, by the way, when a graduate scheme was the golden ticket to social mobility, fixed salary, purpose and meaning and a professional lifestyle, partly because of all of that is much harder to acquire.
Everything’s a lot more expensive and wages have stalled but also because it doesn’t have the same status that it did and I think it’s rather fascinating, if you worked in the 1980s in the oil industry for example, that was the sexy industry or if you worked in the City, financial services with the big bang and the pinstripe suits and the liquid lunches, that was sexy. If you became a lawyer during the golden year of Ally McBeal you know it was sexy and if you work in technology today in a start-up culture where you know you are fuelling the future, you know from your sleep pods and your ping pong tables, that is sexy and I think it’s, we have to accept that certain professions and sectors have their moment. I think we have to accept that the old incentive of money being the motivator has gone. I think we have to accept that because of the education system by the way, and this is crucial, is you have a very highly individualised education system where you are constantly comparing yourself rather to other people obviously; and it’s highly individualised.
You rarely do actually collective work and group teamwork in school, it’s all on the individual; and we are also living in a hyper-individualised society where personalised technology, over-parenting, and comparison culture are forcing us to think not does work pay me well or do I like my colleagues or is this profession sexy, but actually is this fulfilling my destiny, my journey? Is this in keeping with my brand? A brand that I’ve been cultivating online since I was 13. Actually people are starting to think about work as core to their identity but crucially in a really, I think, agile way and they want their work to evolve as they themselves evolve.
Now I would preface this by saying of course I’m talking about the professions and white-collar workers. I’m not talking about blue-collar workers, although there is a blurring of those distinctions and particularly overlining with a sense of purpose, but when you’re talking about knowledge workers, you have seen in the last 10 to 15 years a desire and acceptance that I need to have something good to say when you are down the pub or in the coffee shop with your mates and one of them goes, you know, what do you do? Oh I’m a nurse, I save lives. What do you do? I’m a teacher, I’m teaching the next generation. What do you do? I work for such and such and sons or such and such a co, you know, and I’m on the treadmill; and I think there’s that need to almost have something to shout about, and almost have something where everyone goes wow that’s cool, and that may seem really facile but equally you’ve got to understand that I think this generation has almost been bred to think like that.
You’re seeing the changing status of professions where the legal profession, the financial services, even the medical profession although they say the pandemic has slightly changed that, they don’t have the same status that they did even 10 years ago, and I think that this gen… this new generation as well is starting to think looking at their parents going I don’t want to work as hard as that, and I was speaking, I speak to a lot of you know professional mid-lifers who are you know have young teenage kids and they will say yeah my kids you know they, they just look at us and go we don’t want to work that hard, and that’s not they don’t want to work, but they want to be working therefore in something that is fulfilling, that is satisfying an individual need or purpose and desire or dream, and one that almost doesn’t feel like work, and I think there’s a total jarring between kind of traditional corporate culture and people’s idea of themselves and their world, and what they want to do is look at their phone and go right that’s the world I inhabit and then go into the office and go yes that office reflects the world I inhabit, and quite often it doesn’t.
Lucy Lewis: That is, that is really, really interesting. Taking us back a little bit to the here, here and now and I said I’d ask you about hybrid working, return to work, it’s not necessarily Future of Work but it is very much front and centre of people’s minds at the moment and I know you’ve written a really interesting report about managing inter-generational workforces in the hybrid world.
So I wonder if you’ve got any practical insights for employers in this moment that are thinking right how do we actually get this hybrid working world working.
Hybrid Working Model
Eliza Filby: Yeah I mean I would almost slightly reframe it first of all. I don’t think we should talk about hybridity. I think we should talk about greater autonomy. So one of the things that the last two years have told us is that workers did not feel they had enough autonomy, and they couldn’t and did not have the choice between how they spent and divided up their time; and so I think we need to reframe it as a conversation about autonomy and people’s use of their time.
The second thing I think companies need to be thinking about is if, we’re introducing greater flexibility, it is illogical and inflexible to have a rigid-flexible system that is delivered and announced upon high. Flexibility only works within, I believe, small teams, and I think why small teams are crucial here is because flexibility needs to go both ways. It needs to be reciprocal. The individual worker that is allowed, you know, to be in control of their time has to understand that that flexibility is in line with other people’s working habits, and they cannot be selfish when they’re trying to be flexible. They have to understand their responsibility to others and that can only really work in small teams. So the notion of greater autonomy and greater flexibility, I believe, is in a small team operation, a small team level.
And the final thing I would reflect upon on this subject is that we cannot have a hierarchy of needs, so for a long time, and I’m a mother of two small children, I empathise with this hugely, but for a long time women in particular, but also men, had a really difficult conversation if they wanted to leave early for work to do the school run or had a nativity play or, it was always a really difficult conversation they had to have with their line manager about getting that, taking that time and making up for it later. That’s gone which is brilliant, but I really fear a couple of things about hybrid working. I fear that those with kids are almost allowed greater flexibility or almost accepted that they have to have flexible working, and that’s a valid reason for work and flexibility rather than those that want to invest in themselves, or perhaps those that have to look after elderly parents, or those that, you know, have other responsibilities.
So I don’t want there to be almost a kind of flexible working that just actually satisfies working mums with small children.
The second thing I worry about is that it actively disadvantages women and people of colour because all stats indicate that women again, women with small children, are the ones that are most supportive of flexible working arrangements and actually ethnic minorities as well prefer working behind a screen. They feel that it’s a safe environment. They feel more you know more integrated and actually feels a more democratic place, and actually the danger is of course is that yes you introduce flexible working but then in 5 to 10 years down the line you have an inequality issue; and so flexible working leads to a D&I crisis and we’ve come so far in the last 10 years haven’t we in, in addressing that issue and I’d hate for that to pull us back. So a culture of presenteeism cannot prevail.
And then finally I think, and this goes back to what I was talking about autonomy at the beginning of this answer, it’s about trust and trusting that people will do the work obviously that’s, you know, I think we’ve got over that conversation and those paranoias, but I think it’s also about creating an environment where people know the value of collaboration and coming in the office. Now that means that you actually also have to create an office that people get a sense of FOMO if they’re not there, but it’s also I think trusting in the values of the company and that people want to be there, or people want to engage with their colleagues, or people want to do that and actually I think a lot, where a lot of companies have suffered the last two years is they’ve been at their most productive and people have done a lot of work, and a lot of money has been made, and a lot of time, almost too much time has been spent working, that actually, do you know what you’ve lost their hearts and minds, and they may not be actively looking to leave but those company values, that sense of belonging has not been nurtured, has not been nourished and so I think companies need to reflect on the fact that yes home-working and flexible working has worked, the great experiment has worked but they need to start compensating now and fast for what has been lost in the last two years, because you will lose people. In fact you may already be losing people because they’re thinking well you know I can do this remotely. Why am I, what, what is keeping me here actually? What is holding me here? How much do I actually belong to this company? How much do I need to feel a re-instilling of these values, and I think that’s the danger of hybrid working and that’s the purpose and point of the office which needs to, I think, really needs to be reinforced.
Lucy Lewis: That’s really insightful and will I know be very useful for people that are looking at how they create a purpose for their office space, the things that will encourage people to return to the office for some of, for exactly some of the things you’ve been talking about.
My final question, and it’s a question that I’ve asked all our guests on this podcast series. We all know that the world of work is going to look really different in 10 years’ time. Almost certainly in ways you and I can’t predict today but if you had the power to ensure one change for the workplace of 2032, what would that be?
The Future of the Workplace
Eliza Filby: I think automation has the potential to get rid of the dull stuff we don’t like doing, and I think that if technologists can get it right and now actually there’s more money in technology and work tech than there’s ever been because people are trying to deal with this issue of how can we create technology that brings people together in one space, even though they’re in different places, but automation you know, I feel like has a great potential to you know allow humans to do what they do best, which is build relationships, be creative, collaborate, and then let machines and algorithms do the rest and that would be my, my hope.
The difficulty with that, and there’s two difficulties. The first difficulty is that actually you learn a lot by doing the dull stuff. You know I spent a lot of time in a call centre, working in a call centre when I was young and I hated it. I hated it so much but, and I was, I was selling Now TV, cable TV what was then and it was, it was so dull but do you know what it taught me so much about convincing people of an argument, trying to sell them something, all really actually useful skills and there’s quite a lot of research that says actually doing menial tasks is incredibly useful in your training. So I think that’s the first danger.
The second danger is I think of course on a broader scale automation and machine learning is going to eradicate a lot of jobs. So what do we do with those people? They need to be constantly upskilling and that’s blue-collar and white-collar workers and so one of my fears is we let happen what happened here in the 1980s where we de-industrialised you know the mining towns and still towns of Britain, and we put nothing in its place and we let the long term unemployed just basically you know not really enter, re-enter the workplace. We did not train them for something else. We did not put in another infrastructure or an industry to support them. So where does that responsibility lie for upskilling and retraining? And by the way I mean you know in a way lawyers are as much and accountants are as much, are as vulnerable to this as you know others.
So what, whose responsibility is it? Is it the Government? I doubt. Is it the individual? I suspect not because a lot of that, the generation that’s going to be most vulnerable to automation will be the generation that’s got 30 grand debt from a first degree, and potentially more if they do a masters so who, it’s not going to be the individual and I suspect therefore the onus for training will be, will fall on the companies, and that actually is how you keep people, because as we know with our kids, there’s no greater investment that you can make in the, you know, in your kids than in their education and actually if you invest in people’s education, which we’re going to have to do a lot anyway in the workplace, across all generations by the way, not just the young, then I think there’s, you know, it’s such a testimony to your investment in that individual and your belief in that individual, and your loyalty to that individual, and I think we need to bring some of that back. It’s been eroded I think a long time within companies and I think there needs to be a return to a sense of obligation to your employees; and I think that should come in the form of constant training that is personalised, bespoke, driven by the individual not by the company so that it’s you know individualised learning but is I think the key to creating an agile workforce fit for the 21st Century.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you so much Eliza. It’s been a really fascinating conversation and there’s been some brilliant insights you know both longer-term challenges, things to consider, but also the really practical stuff as well. If anyone listening would like to find out more you can visit Eliza’s website www.elizafilby.com. Thank you.