Part 2: Designing Work for Longer Lives – Communication, Age Inclusion and the Future of Work
- Michèle Dennison
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 hours ago
Part 2: When Organisations Start Listening
13th August 2026
In Part 1 of this series I suggested that many intergenerational challenges are actually communication challenges. This week, I look at what happens when organisations create space for conversations that would otherwise never happen.
One of the most common things I hear when talking to leaders is “We thought everything was working fine.” And in many ways, it is. There’s no crisis, no visible conflict, no obvious breakdown. But when organisations, and their leaders take a moment to really listen, a different picture begins to emerge; not of conflict, but of missing conversations.
Culture Is Created One Conversation at a Time
We hear a lot about the importance of culture and how to change and mould it. It’s often treated as some sort of dark art - abstract concept, captured as a set of values, principles and worthy statements on a wall or screensaver. But in practice, culture at its simplest is much more tangible. It’s how we talk to each other:
Who speaks – and how
Who’s heard
What feels safe to say
What gets avoided
And it’s here in the small, repeated, often unconscious interactions that intergenerational challenges tend to show up.
A Simple Intervention that Changed the Tune
A powerful example of changing the cultural tune comes from Sanofi’s Generations+ employee network. Working with ProAge, they created a programme called Pass It On.
The premise was intentionally simple. Participants were asked to reflect on two questions:
What assumptions might I be carrying about age?
What could I offer to teach - and would genuinely like to learn?
That’s it. No heavy framework or complex design. Just a starting point for conversation.
What followed was a learning exchange, without fixed roles and the hierarchy of “teacher” and “learner.” Individuals simply paired up, small groups formed and conversations unfolded naturally. Skills, experiences, and perspectives flowed both ways and that mutual exchange made all the difference.
What I particularly like about this intervention is its simplicity. In a world where organisations often search for sophisticated solutions, this started with curiosity and a willingness to ask better questions rather than training, a policy or a grand change programme.
I've increasingly come to believe that curiosity is one of the most undervalued workplace skills. When curiosity disappears, assumptions rush in to fill the gap. When its present, people become more willing to explore rather than judge, and to understand rather than categorise or pigeon-hole.
What Shifted?
The feedback was striking. Participants described conversations they’d never had before, greater understanding across experience and life stage, and stronger, more human connection and working relationships. But perhaps most importantly, people began to see each other differently, as individuals rather than generational categories.
That observation feels particularly important. The longer I spend in this field, the more sceptical I become about reducing people to generational labels. Labels can sometimes provide useful shorthand, but they can also obscure as much as they reveal. Every generation contains enormous diversity of experience, circumstances and perspectives. Real connection begins when we move beyond categories and become genuinely interested in the person in front of us.
Mike Mansfield, CEO of ProAge summed it up well, “What Pass It On did was make communication explicit. This simple act was the key to unlock and surface assumptions that had been invisible. And it created permission to talk about things that would otherwise remain unsaid.”
The Role of Employee Networks
Employee and Business Resource groups play a crucial role here. These voluntary, employee-led networks often amplify underrepresented voices, surface lived experience, influence policy and practice and create connections beyond immediate teams. In the case of intergenerational work, they can act as a bridge between different parts of the organisation, different life stages and different ways of working. They do this by building community, helping surface and facilitate insight that can reshape how work itself is designed.
Organisations often underestimate just how much insight, knowledge and experience is sitting silently within their own workforce. Not because people are unwilling to share it, but because work rarely creates the conditions for those exchanges to happen naturally.
The Bigger Lesson
What this example shows is simple but powerful. Most organisations don’t have a generational problem. They have a communication gap. And that gap isn’t filled by more policy - it’s filled by better conversations.
The irony is that most organisations are sitting on an extraordinary amount of experience, insight and learning. Yet much of it remains locked inside teams, functions, age groups and informal networks. Rather than creating knowledge, intergenerational practice at work is about helping existing knowledge move more freely.
Conversation on its own Isn’t Enough
The Sanofi example is powerful, yet there’s a limit to what a focus on culture and conversations alone can do. You can encourage open dialogue and can create space for reflection, but if the way work is structured works against those conversations, progress stalls.
Culture can open the door. But operational design determines whether people can actually walk through it. That’s where we turn next in the final part of this series.
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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