In the office, we’ve been talking a lot about generations lately. It seems like many clients and prospective clients want to talk about how to design a balanced benefits program that appeals to employees in different parts of their life cycle. You’ve undoubtedly heard these types of questions… “how do we deal with the crush of Baby Boomers getting ready to retire?” Or, “how do we engage these millennials?” By most counts, there are about 75 million Americans in the Baby Boomer generation (born from roughly the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s), and about an equal number of millennials (born from roughly the mid-1980s to 2000), so you’d be forgiven for focusing on them and forgetting the 50 million-ish people born during the roughly 25-year period between these two groups. But do we do so at our own peril?
In the interest of full disclosure, we have quite a few of these folks in our office, including yours truly. I’m part of Generation X, the generation “doing the quiet work of keeping America from sucking.” Jokes and self-importance aside, why should we take pains to not forget Gen X? Well, about 68% of Fortune 500 CEOs are now Gen Xers, and a large swathe of other executives and entrepreneurs also grew up watching John Hughes movies and listening to Nirvana. This is also the generation that we are largely talking about when we talk about the “sandwich generation”: adults who are both trying to raise children and take care of elderly parents. Clearly this sleeper generation has unique needs as compared to the retiring Boomers and the up-and-coming millennials. And they are arguably the most important demographic to consider from a recruitment and retention perspective, since they feed the ranks of the executive class.
So how do we take care of the generation that “might be our last, best hope?” Many clues exist in prior posts on this blog. First and foremost, it would help to ensure you’re looking through the Total Rewards lens so that you’re balancing the benefits at your company in a way that appeals to not just the Boomers or the millennials, but to Gen Xers also. I might suggest work/life balance is a good place to start – we think about millennials as the ones who don’t want to be tied down to a traditional office, but it may be equally important to a Gen Xer who raises kids and cares for an elderly parent at home.
Think also about what financial/insurance products you can offer at the workplace. Long Term Care is a benefit that is long past due for its time in the spotlight. Anyone in the sandwich generation likely sees the value of such a product, because they have a front row seat to the financial stress of elder care. Seems like a logical program to evaluate.
Yet another consideration is communication. Millennials, as you might expect, consume a massive amount of information online, checking in on social networks on an hourly basis. And believe it or not, Baby Boomers consume more online content than either Gen X or millennials. But Gen X consumes more like 5-10 hours of online content per week, and tends to react better, for instance, to email rather than other marketing techniques. These trends suggest that we need to be very thoughtful about not only designing our benefits program, but also how we communicate it.
If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you know I’m a big proponent of really digging into companies’ human capital strategies and getting these things right. We’d love to help your company have a Gen X strategy, too. If you’re interested, drop me a line at bayoubenefits@gmail.com
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