Your culture isn’t one thing. It never was.
We need alignment!
Consistency!
This is how we all do things around here - it’s our culture!
Organisations can spend a lot of time seeking one common culture when the truth is more complex.
Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends report pointed out that reality means a ‘culture of cultures’. That comes from individual teams as the ‘best places to cultivate culture, fluidity, agility and diversity’.
Whilst they need a common core, they should not be the same.
Yet doesn’t a single culture look great on that values pull-up banner?
The organisations doing this well are not abandoning culture. They are building that culture of cultures with a strong shared foundation, and enough deliberate flexibility to accommodate the differences in the workplace that are not going away.
Some of those differences (surprise surprise, you knew it was coming) are generational.
Expecting everyone across the full generational range to experience the same organisational culture in the same way is not sensible or ambitious.
So what to do?
Here’s four aspects to consider.
TL;DR
Five generations now work side by side, and Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends report says organisations should stop striving for one common culture and build a ‘culture of cultures’ instead. The problem is not the ambition, it is the assumption that culture means the same thing to everyone. This blog argues for strong shared foundations with enough flexibility to accommodate the generational differences that are not going away.
1. A single-culture model was always a convenient fiction
The idea that an organisation has ‘a culture’ that everyone experiences in the same way has always been more aspiration than reality. Culture is not a document on the intranet or a set of values on the wall. It is the lived experience of working somewhere and that experience is shaped by your role, your manager, your team, your career stage and, increasingly, the generation you belong to.
What changed is not that cultures suddenly became more complex. It is that the range of people being asked to share one became dramatically wider. When your workforce spans 50 to 60 years rather than 30 to 40, you are not managing a single cultural moment. You are managing several simultaneously.
The organisations that still talk about their culture as though it were a single, universally experienced entity are operating on an outdated model. The cost of that outdated model is visible in their engagement scores, their exit interview data and their generational retention gaps (should they look).
Acknowledging that your culture is not one thing is not a sign of weakness but the starting point for building something better.
2. Determine your shared foundation
Arguing that culture cannot be one thing is not the same as arguing for cultural chaos.
Every organisation needs a genuine shared foundation and the shorter the better. It needs values and non-negotiables that define what it means to work there, regardless of generation, role or seniority. Without that foundation, you do not have a flexible culture. You have no culture at all.
You have a far better chance of people remembering it if there is a clear narrative to go with it which links it together. If you go around your top table and they cannot tell you then there’s little chance it has percolated down the organisation.
The mistake is confusing their shared foundations with everything else. There is a difference between what is shared and what is universal. It does not need to be the exact same experience if you work in operations or sales, but it does need to feel like you work for the same company.
The generational perspective is that, even within those component teams, it will not be universal as to how people experience it in practice. Expectations about how feedback is given (and should be taken), formality in communication can vary generationally.
In The Snowflake Myth, I make the point that organisations need to determine what they want to be the same for everyone and that list should be much shorter than most currently assume. The more common denominators you have the less chance they will be common.
3. Gen Z has changed expectations of authenticity
Every generation has had some expectations of the organisations they join. What makes Gen Z distinctive is the specificity and intensity of theirs, particularly around authenticity.
This is not a preference for niceness. It is a genuinely different relationship with institutional trust shaped by a formative experience of seeing them fail and not meet their interests.
For Gen Z, culture is not what you say it is. It is what they observe day to day. The gap between the values on your website and the behaviour of the person who manages them is not a minor inconsistency to be forgiven. It is a fundamental breach of trust that justifies looking elsewhere even (or perhaps especially) if you have just started.
This creates a specific and underappreciated challenge for organisations trying to maintain a single cultural narrative. Older generations are more willing to accept a degree of gap between aspiration and reality; they have been socialised to expect it. Gen Z has not, and even in the current job market, they won’t if they can go elsewhere..
As is the case with so many other aspects, what were ‘Gen Z expectations’ a few years ago are increasingly everyone’s. Boomers, Gen X and Millennials now have higher expectations of authenticity too.
Organisations that use integrity as a headline value without the behaviours to back it up will find that it is not just Gen Z who sees through it.
4. Middle managers need to own their culture
Organisations who get it right still need their team leaders and middle managers to build on a clear, shared foundation to make the most of what they have. Parroting the party line does not equate to leadership.
Owning culture? By that I mean at least taking a lead on it. And the starting point is knowing their team, and ensuring their team knows each other. That needs to include a generational perspective.
One of the most fertile sources of intergenerational friction in the multigenerational workplace is a mismatch in what people expect from their managers. Not because some expectations are reasonable and others are not, but because they were formed in entirely different contexts.
Let me preface this with my standard line that differences within generations are far bigger than those between. These are STEREOTYPES folks, but I’m using them to make a point.
Boomers, shaped by hierarchical structures, largely expect managers to be decisive, consistent and authoritative. Gen X, values competence and straight talking above warmth. Millennials want managers who see their potential and connect their work to something bigger. Gen Z expects managers to be transparent about their reasoning, genuinely open to challenge and interested in them as people.
Stereotype klaxon over.
A management culture built entirely around any one of these expectations will fail at least three of the four cohorts. Yet organisations can have an implicit management standard, usually shaped by whoever holds power, and apply it universally.
A more honest approach acknowledges that good management is contextual. The non-negotiables — fairness, clarity, accountability — remain fixed. The style in which they are delivered can and should flex. Leaders who understand this are not inconsistent. They are intelligent. In a multigenerational team, the difference matters enormously. Better still to explain the reasoning and get the team talking about their own perspectives.
Remember that
Culture is not one thing — it is the lived experience of working somewhere, and five generations can experience it very differently.
Shared foundations still matter. The mistake is thinking everything needs to be universal, rather than identifying the short list of things that matter most.
The goal is a rich culture that makes the most of all you have, not a cultural monoculture.
FAQ
What are the shared foundations that every generation can genuinely agree on?
The list is shorter than most organisations currently assume, but more important for being short. Here’s an exemplar set: mutual respect, honest communication, a shared standard of professional conduct and clarity about what good performance looks like are places to start. Even better if those foundations are co-created with employees across all generations rather than handed down. The process of building them can be as important as the content.
How do we avoid this becoming ‘different rules for different people’?
By being explicit about what is fixed and what is flexible. The non-negotiables apply to everyone and are enforced consistently. What varies is not the standard but the style: how feedback is delivered, what good communication looks like, how autonomy is granted as trust develops. This is not inconsistency. It is contextual intelligence, which is the same skill great managers have always deployed, now applied with generational awareness.
Why is Gen Z specifically so hard to retain through standard cultural approaches?
Because Gen Z has a lower tolerance for the gap between cultural aspiration and cultural reality than any previous generation. The gen z characteristics that employers find challenging are largely the same characteristics that make them excellent employees when the conditions are right: high standards, a nose for inauthenticity and an expectation of genuine engagement.
Where does a leadership team start if it wants to build a genuinely multigenerational culture?
Start by asking each generation what they actually experience, not what you assume they experience. Run structured listening sessions across cohorts, look at your exit interview data through a generational lens and be honest about which generation your current culture was implicitly designed for. The answer will usually be illuminating and occasionally uncomfortable. That discomfort is the starting point for something better.
How can I help you?
1. Talks, workshops and seminars - I am an award-winning speaker. My talks include recruiting and retaining Gen Z, understanding Gen Z, overcoming the challenges of the multigenerational workplace plus those relevant to the topics above. Speaker showreel here.
2. My book The Snowflake Myth is out now - to receive a free chapter please click here. You can order the book here.
3. One to one coaching programmes for senior leaders who are swamped by their jobs so they can thrive in life. Click here to discover where you are on your journey from Frantic to Fulfilled? Just 5 minutes of your time and you will receive a full personalised report with guidance on your next steps.
4. Team coaching programmes - working IN a team is not the same as working AS a team and yet they are often treated as if they are the same. I help teams move from the former to the latter, and generate huge shifts in productivity and outcomes.
