Look up “employee engagement” online at a bookseller, and you will likely find a numerous selection of volumes. Topics range from branding to productivity, from psychology to leadership. One topic recently caught my attention, as it seems to have become more relevant: generational differences in gaining employee engagement. It of course has relevance to PR, and we must learn more about how it is relevant.
Matters about generational differences on a broad, social scale have been a popular topic of analysis at least since the baby boomers noticed significant differences in the ways they grew up compared to their next cohort, “generation X.” More recently, analyses have expanded to address the subsequent generation under their referent of “generation Y” (a.k.a. “millennials” or “net generation”). The generation after this is (what else) “generation Z” (a.k.a. the “new silent generation”).
The matter of managing not only younger generations of workers, but also mixed generations of workers has risen to prominence. And that new prominence is with good reason: People work longer in their lives as more and more new workers join the ranks, especially in professional fields like public relations.
At its most basic level, the generational differences in the workplace revolve around values. Generational analyses about workers’ values provide insights about not so much differences in kind but in degree. These analyses confirm that values about work, leisure, professionalism, reward, punishment, and so on prevail. The key seems to be expectations for living up to these values as all generations of workers negotiate them with each other, starting with employers’ employee handbooks and branching out to workplace interpersonal interactions.
In public relations, so many budding professionals come from colleges and universities as interns and recent graduates. They collaborate and, most of all, learn from seasoned professionals at all stages in their careers. So having both sensitivity to and sensibilities about generational differences is an important aspect to successful leadership, followership, and operational success.
Employee engagement in public relations necessarily spans multiple generations, each with much to offer the other. A line of specific research supporting that done about leadership in public relations ought to focus on generational complementarity, not just differences, among PR pros. One important result should be discovering grounds on which PR can provide organizations with greater, measurable value because of its diversity of generations who all work hard to inspire cooperation between organizations and their publics. Let me know if you are interested in such research.
Peter M. Smudde, Ph.D., APR, is Associate Professor, Illinois State University.
