How does the working method and generation influence the assessment of company values?

„Example is leadership“

Albert Schweitzer

Due working on my paper i came to an interesting aspect about a relation of the working mode and employee generation towards the ranking on the company. Quick thought,… quick done. I used my running survey to add this kind of question to until now more then 200 participants. I asked them to rank there company in different terms. First; Corporate Culture, Leadership behaviour of direct superiors, Leadership behaviour of senior management, Transparent company vision and at least the Promotion of young talent/ programmes. They should rank from 1= very good; up to 5 =Insufficient.

What i was aspect was to detect some clear differences in, for example, the working method and the Leadership behaviour. Because, in an agile work mode,… there is no „typical Leader“,… normally. 😉

Or, another example. It could be possible that employees with much experience (out of Generation BabyBoomer) have an completely different view to the Corporate Culture,… or Company Vision as employees out of the youngest worker generation, the Generation Z.

Below you find a Generation Classification what i use.

(Link to Simon Schnetzer: https://simon-schnetzer.com/generation-xyz/ And, by the way, i like the work from Simon very much.
It is worth visiting his page. 🙂 )

The survey is not quite over yet,… but i couldn´t wait. 😉 So i took the data from the survey web page and analysed them with SPSS. After the sorting i still had 179 results to work with. Therefore i splitted them in two parts.

The first one is to see the ranking of the the different terms, sorted after the CURRENT work method from the survey participants. So means, a person who work right now agile for example rate the corporate culture as,… xxx

And as second, i sorted the results after the Generation of the survey participants. Could be that the „older“ employees understood the company vision in a complete different way as the „newbies“ at work. This you`ll find on the right side.

But now,… coming to the result:

The final results surprises me. They show that it make nearly no difference if you sort in direction of work method or Generation,… the result is more or less the same. Even the average between them have only a difference of 0,07,… so nothing,… we can assume this is the same.

I can well imagine that many of the participants were undecided about the rating and therefore chose the „golden middle“ 😉 In addition, the results become more and more „blurred“ on average the more participants there are. Nevertheless, let’s look at it in a little more detail.

If we take a closer look at the distribution on the left, it becomes clear that everything from Classic to Hybrid to Agile is rated somewhat „better“. Especially in Corporate Culture, Company Vision and Talent Management…. here the agile mid set has worked well 😉 I was surprised by the intermediate peak in Leadership in the Hybrid method. In both cases, i.e. direct and senior manager, the value deteriorates on the way from Classic to Hybrid. Since the hybrid method is usually an undefined composition of classic and agile, I have the following assumption: „Hybrid“ is a good choice due to a hasty desire to establish agility in the company, but the framework must also be defined sensibly here. If this does not happen, the expectations and the implementation drift further and further apart. This is a critical point, especially in the area of leadership. The abrupt increase in the area of leadership could be the cause of this.

Let’s take a look at the right side. From BabyBoomer to Generation Z, we cover 54 years. This is further stretched by the overall rapid technological and digital development in the 90s and 00s. As a result, both extremes are moving a little further away from each other. Unfortunately, the differences here are so small that it is simply not possible to make a clear statement or trend.

After taking a closer look at the distribution of the methods by generation, I can explain the small 0.07 point gap. The snake bites its own tail. 🙂 The distribution across the age to the methodologies coincides to a large extent. Therefore, the overall results are almost identical.

But I also have „Aha“ effects here. First of all, Classic is not dead yet. As in Generation Y, 25% of the young Generation Z still works with Classic methods. And further, Hybrid is becoming stronger again and is taking the power of Agile which is becoming less with Generation Z. I think we will hear a lot more about „hybrid“ 😉

I think it’s great that hybrid is gaining power in Generation Z. But, now it is even more important not to let the „slump“ in the area of leadership in the hybrid method (which we have seen before in the left part) become bigger. „Hybrid“ is not the „God-given“ method. Here, too, development work must be managed.

Have a nice day. 🙂

Many greetings,
Christian