Modern-day workplaces are far more diverse now than ever before. This diversity brings with it the need for a nuanced approach to the management of human resources, especially from a human risk perspective. There are of course several lenses through which to assess the level of risk a human being poses to an enterprise – if the assessment is to be conducted thoroughly. One such lens is that of age. When it comes to age, a common practice is to assess human risk according to the generational group into which an employee falls. Four generations are commonly implicated in this exercise, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y more commonly known as Millennials, and Generation Z or Gen-Z for short. Birth date ranges for categorization purposes differ slightly depending on the source consulted, but roughly, Gen Zs are born in the late 90s to late 10s. Millennials are born between the early 80s and mid-90s. Preceding the Millennials, Generation X members are born between the mid-60s and early 80s. Finally, Baby Boomers have birth dates falling between the mid-40s to mid-60s. Some categorizations include the group preceding the Boomers that known as the Traditionalists, but there is little to consider about these individuals from an enterprise risk perspective as most of them are either retired or deceased.
Each generation has both desirable and undesirable employee traits: Below are some of the common descriptors attached to the different generations:
Gen-Zs: Fearless, smart, practical and flexible impatience.
Millennial: Optimistic, multi-tasking, team players, talented, well educated, achievement oriented, entitled, selfish, inexperienced, and disloyal.
Gen Xers: Self-reliant, tenacious work ethic, adaptable, pessimistic, arrogant, demanding in the workplace, lazy and disloyal.
Boomer: Workaholics, unwaveringly loyal to employers, challengers of authority, competitive, diligent, attentive on the job, strong-willed.
Although these traits are important factors to consider for recruitment and management strategies, the employee market is necessarily and inevitably concentrated with individuals of reasonable working age. It is expected that by 2025, Millennials will form roughly 75% of the working class. That is presumably the reason for the targeted scrutiny of this group. The ubiquity of the millennial in the job market means that employers aren’t generationally spoilt for choice. The only reasonable way forward is to understand how best to manage millennials according to their unique traits to produce maximum efficiency and mitigate millennial human risk, even if the committed Boomers and Gen Xers seem more desirable.
There is no question that the concept of humanity and the individual human being are significantly complex creatures. A strong human risk management framework requires in part a thorough understanding of human psychology and adult development. Some academics strongly recognise and observe the nuances associated with human beings and their individual behaviours, and even advise against generalisations based on these generational groupings altogether, asserting that “generations” as we know them are merely social constructs rather than empirical phenomena. Perhaps generational generalizations are a shortcut around the tough work of human risk analysis, but the prevailing perspective, even if one ignored the studies, is that whether it be related to age, race, sex or nationality, birds are certainly of some feather. . .
