Later this morning we are running our mini KM Bootcamp and I'm sure this issue will come up for discussion - in a survey completed by Randstad in US late last year they found that:
"although boomers have a lot of knowledge and experience to share with Gen Y workers, 51 percent of them and 66 percent of matures reported little or no interaction with their Gen Y colleagues. And the three younger generations reported little or no interaction with matures on the job."
They say the solution is to increase the opportunities for collaboration between older and younger workers on projects and to encourage a learning culture - of course none of this will happen overnight. Clearly this is a HR challenge, but its also a problem many of us would classify as a KM issue too... Maybe its as much a problem of generations sharing knowledge as it is different management practices working together?
You can download the survey report from the Randstad Website.
It might have something to do with the structure of work, now. I no longer work in a team with people at different levels of the organisation, but with teams of my peers. By natural attrition, most of them are my age or older. I wonder how widespread that experience might be?
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