Part 1: Designing Work for Longer Lives – Communication, Age Inclusion and the Future of Work
- Michèle Dennison
- Aug 7
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 hours ago
Part 1: The Problem No One Is Talking About in Multigenerational Workplaces
7th August 2026
Over the next three weeks. I’ll be sharing some reflections from my journey into longevity, age inclusion and the future of work. I want to start with a simple observation: the biggest challenge is multigenerational workplaces may not be age at all.
I didn’t come to intergenerational work through theory. I came to it through my own lived experience and a growing a sense that something fundamental was shifting in how we work and live but that pinning it down was a little like trying to nail jelly to the wall.
For most of my career, I’ve worked with organisations on people, performance, and change.
Questions about longevity and contribution weren’t a top workplace priority, if they were even asked at all. But over time, they stopped being abstract trends and became much more immediate. As they became personal, practical and real I found myself asking:
What does a good working life look like across 50 or 60 years?
How do we keep experience, energy, and skill flowing across generations rather than siloed by age?
The reality is that work has already changed. It’s our understanding of it that hasn’t fully caught up yet. What surprised me as I began exploring these questions was how quickly they stopped feeling like workplace issues and started feeling like human ones. The more I learned about longevity and demographic change, the more I found myself reflecting on my own future as well as the future of work.
Questions about relevance, reinvention, contribution and belonging suddenly felt less theoretical. They felt personal.
Perhaps that’s why this topic has stayed with me. It sits at the meeting point between organisational effectiveness and individual experience. It prompts us to think not only about how we design better workplaces, but how we create working lives that continue to offer meaning, connection and opportunity over much longer time horizons.
And the more I see, and listen, the more I’ve become increasing convinced that intentionally focusing on communication across generations offers the key to unlocking the potential of the multigenerational workplace.
We’re Not Just Working Longer, We’re Working Differently
We’re living through a structural shift. Longer lives mean longer, non-linear careers. Instead of the neat progression from education to work through to retirement, we now see:
Career breaks and reinvention mid-life
Portfolio careers and side ventures
Periods of caregiving, learning, or transition
Multiple “peaks” of contribution, not just one
And all of this is happening inside the same organisations, which points to a simple but profound change - multigenerational teams are now the default. No longer the exception or a future trend, they are our present reality and have been for a while.
So Why Does It Still Feel Difficult?
The dominant narrative about generations focuses on difference. We hear that:
Gen Z want flexibility and purpose
Older workers want stability and structure
Each group has fundamentally different expectations
But the more time I spend observing organisational life, the less convincing that story becomes.
Yes, we’re inevitably shaped by the time we grew up in – I’m a proud Gen Xer and my world view was shaped in the1980’s - but what I’ve noticed is that what looks like generational difference is often something else:
Differences in experience, not age
Differences in life stage, not identity
Differences shaped by context, not characteristics
Which raises a more useful question: If age isn’t the real issue - what is?
When I first became interested in intergenerational workplaces, I assumed the biggest challenges would be obvious. Different attitudes to technology. Different expectations of career progression. Different communication styles. Yes the more organisations I observed, the more I noticed that these visible differences were rarely the root cause of problems. More often, people were carrying assumptions about one another that had never been tested through conversation.
The Pattern I See Everywhere
The answer isn’t so much conflict as silence. Intergenerational challenges rarely show up in organisations as overt arguments or big bust ups. They’re typically much quieter than that:
Assumptions that go untested
Preferences that aren’t articulated
Small misunderstandings that never get surfaced
On the face of things, everything looks fine. People say they’re comfortable working across age groups. Managers feel reasonably confident. Organisations assume things are working.
“But there’s a difference between comfort and connection - and that gap matters more than we realise.”
The Hidden Communication Gap and Why it Matters
A 2024 LinkedIn study found something surprising:
1 in 5 Gen Z workers haven’t spoken to someone over 50 at work
2 in 5 people over 55 haven’t directly spoken to someone from Gen Z
In organisations where multigenerational working is the norm, that’s extraordinary. Because when people don’t communicate directly, assumptions fill the space.
“They prefer everything instant”
“They don’t like feedback”
“They’re not interested in learning new things”
“They’re difficult to manage”
Any of this sound familiar? Most of these assumptions are rarely tested, yet they shape behaviour. This isn’t about the big moments. They show up in the small, everyday interactions:
How quickly we expect responses
How we interpret silence
Whether we give feedback - and how
What we consider “professional” communication
When expectations are different but unspoken, people fill the gaps with guesswork. And guesswork is where misunderstanding grows.
The Real Issue Isn’t Age
“After working in this space, I’ve come to a simple conclusion: Intergenerational challenges are rarely about age. They are about misaligned, and unspoken communication expectations. Which means the solution isn’t managing difference more carefully. It’s making communication more explicit.”
A Different Way to Think About It
If we stop focusing on generations as fixed identities, something shifts. Instead of asking:
“How do we manage Gen Z?”
“How do we engage older workers?”
We start asking:
“How do people prefer to work?”
“What assumptions are we making?”
“What conversations are we not having?”
That’s where I believe the real opportunity lies.
What Comes Next?
In Part 2, I’ll explore what happens when organisations deliberately create opportunities for people to have the conversations that otherwise never happened and why curiosity may be one of the most underrated workplace skills of all.
This Blog was written by Michèle Dennison
Michèle is a future of work strategist, writer, facilitator and coach focused on longevity, demographic change and intergenerational practice. She helps organisations and communities translate the realities of longer lives and greater age diversity into practical action, connecting people and ideas to drive collaboration and innovation.
This Article was first published on Michèle's Substack in August 2026.
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