Five generations. One workforce. Most companies are still figuring out how to make it work. A handful aren’t – and their playbooks are worth paying attention to.
This week is Global Intergenerational Week (April 24 – 30).
The timing is sharp. Employee engagement among Gen Z and Millennials has dropped to 31% – down from 36% in 2020, according to Deloitte. Meanwhile, over 70% of workers across every generation say they genuinely enjoy learning from colleagues of different ages.
The appetite is there. The structures mostly aren’t.
For EX leaders, this week is less about the hashtag and more about whether your organisation is actually set up to benefit from the range of people inside it. Here’s what the strongest programmes look like – and what you can take from them.
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The Blueprint: Programmes Worth Stealing From
Microsoft: Stop Calling It Informal
Reverse mentoring happens in most organisations. Younger employees share knowledge with senior leaders, ideas flow upward, perspectives get exchanged. It just rarely gets tracked, measured, or taken seriously.
Microsoft made it structural. Matched pairings. Defined outcomes. Leadership accountability. Younger employees formally coaching senior leaders on AI tools, social platforms, and shifting customer behaviours – not as a favour, but as a programme with teeth.
The insight is simple: your Gen Z employees understand how community, peer trust, and social-first engagement shape buying decisions better than most senior leaders do. The question is whether your organisation is set up to let that knowledge travel.
Accenture: Treat It Like a Business Investment
Accenture’s position is straightforward – age diversity is a performance driver, not a culture initiative. Its intergenerational mentoring and sponsorship programmes are measured against knowledge transfer rates, career progression, and team output.
That shift in framing changes everything. When intergenerational engagement is measured like any other business investment — with a hypothesis and tracked outcomes — it stops being a wellbeing programme and starts being a competitive advantage.
IBM: Kill the Stereotypes Before You Build the Programme
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: most intergenerational programmes are designed around assumptions that aren’t accurate.
IBM’s research found that 56% of Baby Boomers describe technology adaptation as easy or very easy – only marginally behind Gen Z at 68%. The idea that older workers are the digital laggards who need hand-holding is, largely, a myth.
Organisations that design around stereotypes build the wrong solutions. Separate onboarding tracks. Misaligned upskilling. Divisions that didn’t need to exist. IBM’s approach starts by interrogating the assumptions – and that changes everything that follows.
SAP: Don’t Overlook the People Who’ve Already Done It
SAP’s Returnship programme targets something most organisations ignore entirely: experienced professionals who stepped away and want back in.
The value is obvious when you say it out loud. These are people with deep institutional knowledge, hard-won client skills, and cross-functional perspective that early-career hires are still building. Pair them with digital-native colleagues and you get teams that are both faster and wiser.
For CX leaders especially, that blend matters. Long-term enterprise relationships require patience, nuance, and experience. High-velocity digital interactions need speed and instinct. The strongest teams have both.
Want to learn more about scaling employee engagement in your enterprise?
Building a multigenerational workforce starts with the right engagement strategy? Read our 2026 guide to Employee Engagement Rollout Strategy on UC Today
What You Can Do This Week
You don’t need a global programme to start. You need a few deliberate moves.
Audit your assumptions first. What does your organisation actually believe about different generations? Is it based on evidence or inherited bias? Start there before you build anything.
Formalise one thing. Pick reverse mentoring, cross-generational project pairing, or a peer learning group – and give it structure. A defined cadence, matched participants, a simple feedback loop. Informal doesn’t scale. Structured does.
Stop designing for age. Design for communication style. The friction in multigenerational teams is rarely about values – it’s about how people prefer to give and receive information. A half-day workshop on team communication preferences will do more than a generational awareness session.
Connect it to your community infrastructure. Platforms like Microsoft Viva, Slack, and Workplace are already in your stack. Are they connecting generations or reinforcing silos? The technology isn’t the gap – the intentionality is.
Measure outcomes, not activity. Track knowledge transfer. Cross-generational project collaboration. Engagement scores by tenure. The relationship between team diversity and customer satisfaction. Participation rates tell you people showed up. Outcomes tell you it worked.
The CX Case
Your customers are multigenerational too. And the teams serving them need to reflect that.
A customer success function staffed predominantly with early-career talent will move fast and communicate digitally. It may not have the depth for complex, long-tenure enterprise relationships. Flip the composition and you get the opposite problem.
The organisations building the strongest customer communities – where trust compounds, peer learning happens, and loyalty sustains – tend to be the ones with genuinely diverse, intergenerationally connected internal teams. That’s not a coincidence. Internal culture shows up in external relationships.
That’s the real business case for Intergenerational Week. Not a hashtag. Not a workshop. A long-term investment in the human infrastructure that CX is built on.
Global Intergenerational Week runs April 24 – 30, 2026. Join the conversation on LinkedIn
FAQs
What is Global Intergenerational Week?
Global Intergenerational Week is an annual campaign that celebrates the value of bringing different generations together. In 2026, it runs from April 24 to 30 and focuses on how organisations, communities, and individuals can benefit from stronger intergenerational connection.
Why does intergenerational working matter for employee experience?
Intergenerational working matters because most organisations now have five generations in the workforce at once. When those employees are properly connected, businesses can improve knowledge sharing, mentoring, engagement, innovation, and team performance.
What are the main challenges of a multigenerational workforce?
The biggest challenges are usually communication preferences, assumptions about age, uneven access to mentoring, and siloed ways of working. The issue is rarely that generations have completely different values. More often, teams lack the structure to share knowledge effectively.
What is reverse mentoring?
Reverse mentoring is when younger or less senior employees mentor more senior colleagues, often around emerging technologies, social platforms, digital behaviours, or changing customer expectations. The most effective reverse mentoring programmes are structured, measured, and supported by leadership.
How can companies improve intergenerational collaboration?
Companies can improve intergenerational collaboration by formalising mentoring, pairing employees from different age groups on projects, auditing assumptions about age, creating communication preference workshops, and measuring outcomes such as knowledge transfer, engagement, and customer satisfaction.
How does intergenerational working affect customer experience?
Customer bases are multigenerational, so customer-facing teams need a mix of perspectives too. Younger employees may bring speed, digital fluency, and social-first thinking, while more experienced employees often bring relationship depth, context, and long-term client knowledge. Strong CX teams usually need both.
