Between the great resignation and disengagement, it is easy to blame the younger generations for the situation that companies are experiencing. Faced with growing and lasting difficulties in attracting talent, we tend to take the famous generation Z as a reference, pointing at it or trying to imitate it.
In every era, companies make mistakes by imitating those they wish to attract. "Looking young" has always been an obsession of recruiters and the source of their discredit.
Yet the challenge has never been to look young, which is tantamount to disguising oneself - unless of course your average age is under 30, the real challenge is to make sense, in the name of one's company culture.
But what is it really?
The stronger a culture is, the less need it has to copy the trends of the times.
The acceleration of the change in corporate lifestyles post-Covid is such that the very notion of generations and its by-products "generation clash, generation conflict... "no longer makes any sense. The great fundamental expectations towards work are levelled by the arrival en masse of the Z generation on the job market (born between 1994 and 2010). Their codes are becoming references for the notions of quality of life, pro/personal balance, societal and environmental commitments, exemplarity, leadership...
The revolution in the workplace is based above all on the "revolution of the no"; from now on, everyone will reject what they do not like.
Yesterday, the company was a world of compromise, today attitudes are becoming more radical, driven by the rise of individualism.
Young people and seniors tend to radicalize in the same way, the first ones by convictions, the second ones by dejection, but the result is the same: a fragility of the social body with "old people" who understand more and more the attitude of young people (normal, it is their children's generation).
Yesterday, digital technology explained in part the clash between generations, today the fluid world (read the work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman who accurately anticipated today's world) connects all stakeholders.
On the other hand, the discontinuous degradation of the level of education over the last 40 years (read "La fabrique du crétin", volumes 1 & 2 by Jean-Paul Brighelli) confronts the professional world with a major challenge for which the seniors have an essential role to play.
We have substituted equal opportunities for a utopian egalitarianism, which, as a result, leads to a leveling down
In 40 years, the level of reflection and analysis is inversely proportional to the rate of success of the baccalaureate; the lock of the so-called higher studies cannot correct any more the gaps in general culture and the difficulties to conceptualize; in fact the company becomes in the first years of professional life the place of intergenerational initiation which decompartmentalizes and opens the minds.
This is why it is no longer possible to expect immediate profitability from a new recruit without first having acculturated them.
The learning and educational company is on the move.
This reality is a big bang for general management and managers who have been trained (not to say trained) in the "inhuman" short-term culture of always more, right away.
Managing by guiding through cultural commitment and the meaning given to the action is an imperative for aggregating useful talents in a collective animated by the same shirt.
Transmission is becoming the first item of attractiveness and loyalty, but we still need to know what to transmit and how.
The level of managerial harmony in most large companies is so low that over the last two years we have seen an explosion in departures within 6/12 months of recruitment.
The cultural issue is a response to the growing individualism that affects all generations; in the next 10 years, the last dinosaurs who gave everything to their work, some spending their whole life in a single company, will have left the professional world; with them, a bygone idea of self-realization through work will disappear, submerged by the idea that there is a real life beside work.
So how will the company evolve in the face of emerging hybrid solutions?
In order to stay on course and risk disappearing, the modernism of the corporate culture is the only useful compass to orientate oneself and continue to create a sustainable community.
At a time when the metaverse promises the worst and the best for humanity, the company must take care to protect its "Humans" from the traps of the virtual by remaining perfectly real and authentic for each of them.
One thing is sure, the clash between generations will not take place, replaced by this one between the virtual and the real. A clash of culture and life.
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