跨代际团队管理：推拉对话与包容文化提升敬业度

Gallup’s 2025 workplace poll puts a number on something most founders already suspect: out of 100 average employees, only 31 are actually engaged. Fifty-two are showing up and doing enough to get by. Seventeen are actively working hard to avoid doing any work at all. Before you factor in a single generational difference, most teams are already carrying dead weight.

That was the starting point for Chika Emebo and Mark Stephens at Business of Software USA 2025, in a talk about running a team that spans four generations, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z, often in the same room, sometimes reporting to a boss the same age as their own child.

Mark, who runs UK software company IDRsolutions, and Chika, a Gen Z member of his team, built the talk as a back-and-forth between their two generations rather than a lecture from one. The point wasn’t that generational differences are a problem to manage around. It’s that they’re the raw material for a better team, if you’re deliberate about it.

Your team should feel like the wrong crowd

Mark’s argument for hiring across generations rests on a simple test: if hiring is done right, walking into your team for the first time should feel like you’re the normal one among a group of slightly odd misfits. A team isn’t a friend group. It’s built from people with complementary skills you wouldn’t naturally choose to hang out with, which is exactly what makes it work.

He points to the Beatles. John and Paul argued constantly and wrote the songs everyone remembers. George Harrison wrote “Here Comes the Sun,” now the most streamed Beatles track, ahead of anything Lennon-McCartney produced. And Ringo Starr, by his own admission not the best drummer in the world, or even in the band, was the ingredient that made the group work. When he left, the others asked him back. Every strong team, Mark argues, needs its Ringo: the person who isn’t the obvious star but holds everyone else together.

Culture without the emotion

The most practical idea in the talk borrows from Bob Moesta’s jobs-to-be-done framework, applied to people instead of marketing. Every six months, Mark sits down with everyone on his team and runs through a simple pushes-and-pulls conversation: what’s pushing you away from this job, and what’s pulling you toward it. Doing it with everyone, on a schedule, strips out the fear that normally comes with “can we talk.” There are good reasons to leave a job, wanting to move from a small company to a bigger one, and bad ones, feeling disrespected or unable to use your skills. The framework exists to tell the two apart before they turn into a resignation.

Chika’s answer, when Mark asked how a business selling PDF conversion software (not curing disease, in his words) gives Gen Z the meaning they’re often accused of demanding, was more specific than the usual “purpose” answer. She wants a safe space to make an impact, to see her ideas taken seriously and have the results reach customers, plus the autonomy to be herself outside strict role boundaries. The skills she’s picked up in the office have paid off directly: one brand partnership from her side work as a content creator was worth over $2,000, funded by communication skills she says she wouldn’t have built without the job.

Small things signal culture

The talk’s smallest example carried its biggest point. Mark’s office got asked to bring in their own milk. One team member spent a Saturday designing “milk monitor” badges as a joke, and now everyone wears one. The badges aren’t the point, the fact that the whole office is in on the joke together is. He contrasts that with humour that splits an office into two camps, which he calls a straightforward sign of a toxic culture.

The same logic runs through his advice on self-expression: let desks look different, let laptops carry different stickers, ask new hires directly how they like to work and receive feedback rather than assuming. Demand conformity all day and then ask people to be creative in a meeting, and you’ll get nothing, because you’ve spent all day training the creativity out of them.

None of this replaces the harder structural questions a mixed-generation team raises, hybrid schedules, who works from where, how much autonomy is too much. A Q&A question from the audience about a Gen Z developer who wanted to work from Spain all summer got a blunt response from Mark: if someone doesn’t want to be in the office, the more useful question is whether you’ve actually sold them on why being there is worth it.

The full talk, including the audience Q&A, is available on the BoS site.

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