You will be able to discuss communication preferences with colleagues of any age without relying on labels.
You've probably heard the jokes. Gen Z won't pick up the phone. Boomers print their emails. Millennials need praise for everything. Then there's the version that sounds more serious: a team lead explaining that the new hires "are just like that, it's their generation".
Some of these jokes describe real people. None of them is a reliable guide to the colleague in front of you. This lesson is about the differences that do show up across ages at work, and how to deal with them without relying on labels.
Labels like Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z group people by birth year, usually in spans of around fifteen years. At best, they describe loose averages: broad tendencies shaped by the technology and economy people grew up with. Even those averages are debated, and the boundaries between generations are drawn differently by different sources.
And people within any age group differ widely. A 28-year-old who grew up helping in the family business may prefer phone calls and formal emails. A 55-year-old who spent a decade at a tech start-up may live in Slack. Two 30-year-olds in the same team can have completely opposite habits. Upbringing, education, previous employers, personality and plain individual taste all matter far more than birth year.
So treat any statement of the form "people of age X are like Y" as a possible habit to ask about, never a fact to act on. Using a label to predict how one person will behave tends to be wrong often enough to cause problems, and it's unfair to the person.
That said, colleagues do differ in ways that cause real friction at work. They're just better described as preferences than as generations. The ones that matter most day to day are about channel and formality.
Channel: who calls, and who messages. Some people find an unplanned phone call efficient and friendly. Others find it intrusive and would much rather get a message they can answer when ready. Some like voice notes. Others, as lesson 2.2, Chat messages that do not need a second message, mentioned, find them slow to listen to.
Formality: how people open and close messages, whether they use titles, whether a one-word reply feels efficient or rude. "Dear Mr Seah, I hope this finds you well" and "hi, got a sec?" can both be normal at work. Which one fits depends on who's writing to whom.
Timing: who expects a reply in the evening or at the weekend. One colleague sends messages at 10pm and doesn't expect an answer until morning. Another reads a 10pm message as urgent and lies awake about it.
These differences cause the most friction when each side assumes their own preference is the obvious default. Here's an exchange that went wrong:
Mr Seah, a 52-year-old finance manager, calls Shanice, 26, about a budget query. She doesn't pick up. He calls again. She texts: "Sorry, in a call. Can you WhatsApp me?" He's irritated that she won't take the call. She's irritated that he called twice for something that could have been a message. Neither of them is wrong. They just never discussed it.
The fix is simple, and it works for any age. Ask people how they like to be contacted:
"Quick question so I don't annoy you. For urgent things, do you prefer a call or a message? And for non-urgent stuff, is chat okay or would you rather email?"
Most people are pleased to be asked, because hardly anyone does. Ask early in a working relationship, when someone joins your team, or when you start working with a new department. Write the answers down if you work with many people.
Asking also avoids the mistake in reverse. If you assume an older colleague prefers formal email and write to them that way, you might seem stiff to someone who'd much prefer a quick chat. If you assume a younger colleague hates calls, you might miss someone who'd prefer a five-minute conversation to a long thread.
Shanice and Mr Seah sorted it out with one exchange. He now messages first for anything routine, and she picks up when he calls, because a call now means something is urgent.
One structured way to bridge age gaps is reverse mentoring, where a junior colleague and a senior colleague teach each other. The junior person might teach a new tool, how a platform works or what customers their age think. The senior person might teach how decisions really get made, how to handle a difficult client or how the industry has changed.
It works when both people have something real to teach and both see it that way. It fails when it becomes a token exercise, such as a junior person showing a director how to post on LinkedIn once, with nothing flowing the other way. If your company offers it, or you set up something similar informally, agree in advance what each person wants to learn.
Think of two colleagues you work with regularly who are noticeably older or younger than you. Recall how you usually contact each of them, and whether you chose that channel because you knew their preference or because you assumed it. If it was the second, you already have your first question.
Ask two colleagues of different ages how they prefer to be contacted for urgent and non-urgent matters, and note the answers.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).