A practical talk for founders managing four generations under one roof, who want the age gaps on their team to be a source of strength instead of friction.
It’s not just you, the world really has gone mad. The elephant in the room is that for the first time ever we have 4 generations in the workplace (Boomers, Gen X, Millenials and Zoomers), all with very different formative experiences, skillsets, ways of working and fears. Lots of scope for misunderstandings and a recipe for disaster!
And yet mixing very different individuals effectively is the basis of resilient and high functioning teams. All you are actually missing is the Map to get there…
Proud Zoomer Chika Emebo fills in the missing gaps for you with some assistance from avid Gen Xer Mark Stephens. So let’s get rid of those cliches, dig into the real differences between the four generations, and focus on practical actions and ideas which you can take home to implement and make the most of this once in a lifetime opportunity.
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Transcript
Chika Emebo: Hi everyone. I’m Chika. Your favorite Gen Z, hopefully, and today we’re not going to be talking about AI, unfortunately, but we’re actually going to be talking about people. So hopefully that…
Mark Littlewood: More AI.
Chika Emebo: So we’re going to take you on a whole journey. We’ll start with the terrain. We’ll get you to the final destination, and we’ll show you the steps that you need to follow on this journey to ensure that your multiple generations are able to work together as well as they can in the workplace.
So the terrain, the elephant in the room. For the first time ever, we have four generations working together in the office. This means you have people that were around before emails existed working with people that doom scroll on TikTok as a hobby, although that is quite different, it does have its benefits, and we have over 90 years of lived work experience together. So we should leverage that and learn from each other. We all have different habits, different expectations, and different communication styles. Some people even go as far as to say that Gen Z don’t know how to communicate or even make eye contact, which clearly isn’t true because I know how to do those things. But that might have something to do with COVID and being trapped in your college dorm for a couple of years. And these differences can cause friction, but when used well and leveraged, they can also be the thing that makes your company successful.
So we’re going to be having some active audience participation today. So I hope you’re all ready to engage, and I hope you guys are comfortable with answering these questions as well. So if you’re born between 1946 and 1964, you’re a baby boomer. Please raise your hands up. Okay, I see a couple, lovely. And then if like Mark here, you’re a Gen X. That means you’re born between 1965 and 1980. Wow, popular crowd. If you’re born between 1981 and 1996, that makes you a millennial. Very interesting. Okay, don’t know who wins. Can I see the hands of the Gen Xers again? Can you guys make some noise? Okay, lovely. Can I see the hands of the millennials again? Can you guys make some noise? Oh, okay. And then if like me… oh, sorry, it was quite obvious that you guys weren’t the majority. I’m so sorry. And then, if like me, you’re a Zoomer, that means you’re born between 1997 and 2012. Please, please put your hands up. Okay, we are part of the minority as well. Well, yeah, we’re all different, but together, when we come together, we can make some magic.
So great. So I don’t know anything about Gen X, so let’s leave this to Mark.
Growing up Gen X: 1968 and now
Mark Stephens: Okay, so I wasn’t sure how to introduce this. Obviously, if we’re going to talk about the journey, we need to talk about where we came from. I came from 1968, so I said to Mark, “How am I going to tell this business to start our audience?” And he thought, looked thoughtfully, as he hadn’t happened to do. He disappeared in his big underground storage facility for 20 minutes or so. I don’t know what he was doing, but he came back with a big smile on his face and he said, “I think I have just the right thing for you.” So, hold this loud, please. Let me play something in 1968. Whoa! So this is the official BoS ’68 T-shirt. Does anyone remember the BoS ’68? Few of you know. So we are, and we always have been dreamers. So BoS ’68. Anyone know who that guy is? Dr. King. And as we should be believing, he says, “I have a dream,” and I have to apologize for the back of this T-shirt. But you have to remember this was the 1960s. So we have misquoted a famous saying, and it is make software, not war. That is the BoS ’68 T-shirt, and I believe Mark has the entire selection going back to the original BoS 43 conference. If you want to ask him later.
So let’s talk about 1968 for those of you who weren’t there, or like me were there, but can’t remember about it. In some respects, it is quite a parallel world. Some things are very different, some things are very similar, and I wanted to focus some ideas on the differences and the similarities. For most of my generation, I’ve had to use expensive landlines. As a teenager in the 80s, I was shouted at by my parents because we had to pay per minute for using phone calls, so you youngsters, you can disappear off on your phones, talk to your friends. You don’t have the rest of the family sitting in the room listening to it, so you are so lucky. But we forget that ubiquitous free global internet communications is a fairly recent thing. We also had a much more limited choice. We didn’t have social media. We had, for a lot of the time, three channels in the UK that did have the advantage that we all watched the same thing, so we actually had something to talk about at school and work. So possibly a benefit there.
In some respects, it’ll look vaguely familiar. 68. In the UK, we had a guy called Enoch Powell who was fired for standing up and giving a speech called “The Rivers of Blood” about how he was worried that mass migration was going to destroy the UK in the next five years. We also had, and I was writing this the week of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinated in the US, and people worried that violence was sparring out of control. We had anti-war protests. We had lots of stop-the-war demonstrations, but instead of Gaza, they said Vietnam on the posters, and the Russians weren’t happy with what was going on in one of the neighboring countries, so they sent some tanks in to restore the right sort of government. There is a French expression that struck me as very appropriate here, which literally means the more things change, the more they stay the same. So lots of change, lots of similarities.
That makes me Generation X. So we are the forgotten generation. We came after this huge group of boomers, and they’ve dominated life. Our nickname was the latch key because most of our parents were far too busy doing things, so they just told us to get the key and let ourselves in, or the MTV generation, because MTV came out in our youth. Put your hands up if you’ve heard of Latchkey or MTV. Whoa, I’m impressed more than I thought. Put your hands up if you’ve heard of Boomers or Snowflakes. Yeah, I think we are a little bit forgotten.
We are the children of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. So we grew up in a post-liberal end of the Cold War life, where things generally were getting better. We also witnessed the whole technical revolution. They did have computers when we came out, but they were far, there were mainframes. We didn’t all have a supercomputer in our pockets, and we didn’t have anything like the internet. So, we were. The cliche was we were slackers, cynical, and disaffected. So you Gen Zs, we invented that way before you lot turned up. But we like to think of ourselves as pragmatic and independent, the one great advantage we had, certainly in the UK, is we got a free university education. We didn’t come out of university with huge amounts of debt. And if there are any UK taxpayers in the audience, I would like you to know that I made sure your money was really well spent. I had a really great time. So, thank you very much.
So that means my formative years were the 1980s and 1990s. So I was lucky enough to grow up when all the best pop music of all time came out. So let’s see if you can recognize any of these people. Shout out if you can. Greatest, greatest. Yeah, excellent. David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, born in the USA, Whitney Houston, and Queen. Excellent. So you do have some good taste. Killer asteroid, because they are all flying around. Because as we now know, the birds are evolved from the dinosaurs. So I actually think dinosaurs is quite a good word to describe the boomers. They are hugely adaptable. They’ve rewritten everything. In the 1960s, they had the sexual revolution. They had political debt. They were politically changing the situation. They reinvented the workplace in the 80s, and now they’re showing how people how to grow old disgracefully. If you want to understand the impact the boomers have had, there is a book that’s worth reading. Sorry, which is called The Pinch, and it explains how a large cohort can move through society and the impact they have, it will also tell you why in the 1980s the governments were furiously cutting taxes because everyone was working and no one was retired, and why nowadays all the governments going bankrupt. So if you want to understand the boomers, that is a book that you should read.
So there’s one last group, and I think they’re difficult enough as it is, so I’ll leave them to you.
Millennials, Gen Z, and the events that shaped them
Chika Emebo: The millennials, I wouldn’t ever say that I’m jealous of them. I personally think they had a first-hand experience of George Orwell’s 1984, growing up from living in real life to migrating to the online era where mass surveillance was on the rise. They were told to follow their dreams, but then faced with the 2008 financial crisis, which meant which meant they were teased for ordering avocado on toast and investing in matcha rather than in properties.
Gen Z is kind of similar. They entered the workforce during the crisis, the financial crisis, which meant for the first time ever, they entered an uncertain job market where the wages simply didn’t match the cost of living. But today, they make up the largest percentage of the U.S. workforce, 36%. So we’re all similar, very different in our own ways. We have faced some great world events, but the way we experience them and the age we experience them at profoundly affects the way that they impact us and our beliefs. So, for example, 9/11 was definitely a tough time, and I’m sure that the Gen X’s that were in the office that they couldn’t get any work done. They were glued to the to the news, and they may have felt traumatized. Whereas I only learnt about 9/11 through history and watching documentaries and YouTube videos, and I was just a baby at the time.
Why shared history shapes how we work
Mark Stephens: Another profound thing that’s influenced our thinking and our culture and how we operate as people is if you can remember when somebody famous that you knew or you followed died for the first time, that would have been the day you realized that you were mortal. It would have also been the day that you realized the world could change quickly, and maybe the world was unfair as well. The classic moment for most that gets quoted is the day JFK died. I wasn’t there, obviously. Martin Luther King, I didn’t remember in the same way. Chika doesn’t remember 9/11, whereas I remember just getting no work done, sitting and watching the TV all day, and wondering if the world had ended on that day. Elvis, the king was dead. Finally, that was the big one for me, as I remember John Lennon suddenly being shot out of the blue in New York in 1980. That was a big UK one. Again, that was unexpected and very profound. And she was very young, so that was a big wake up for people. Michael Jackson died. Sad end to a tragic end to a brilliant career. Osama bin Laden quietly minding his retirement, and the Navy SEALs arrived by helicopter. And the Queen was another big moment in the UK, and that was a big change in continuity because the one thing we all had in common in the UK, however young or old we were, was generally we’d grown up with her as our queen, so these are the days when you suddenly realize that you’re mortal, and you suddenly realize that life can change. And again, whether you listen to them or whether you experience them will affect your opinion.
The reason we’ve spent a lot of time talking about culture and the journeys of different generations is they have a profound impact on who we are, and therefore how we are operating in the workplace. In particular, they affect our confidences. The boomers think they own the place, and most of the time they do because they bought all the houses and everything. By contrast, the millennials and the Gen Z came into an environment where there was the Great Recession or there was COVID. So their experience and their confident levels have been profoundly impacted by that. Gen X, we don’t care what people think. We got used to being the forgotten generation.
It also affects our skill set. So, if you want somebody to do TikTok, she is your obvious choice. If you need a postcard written, don’t go to her. She’s useless on postcards. So I have a selection of analog skills and digital skills. Chika is a pure digital native by contrast. So it’s affected our skill sets and our understanding.
It’s also affected how we think. We will think about things that we have personal experience or matter to us in a very different way to topics that we don’t. We’ve mentioned 9/11, and as I said, I have a very emotional reaction to that because I experienced and I lived through it. By contrast, Chika experienced it purely abstractly as something she learned about in history. It also affects our mental models. The way people navigate in the world and the way they deal with other people is they create mental simulations of them, and they use those to predict what’s going to happen, and then we hopefully our mental simulations match reality. The challenge with mental simulations is they are built on our experience, on our expertise. So often we will find a situation where we don’t things don’t appear to go as we expected to them, and we have to decide whether that’s because the other person’s just a moron. Whether it’s because we’re a moron, or maybe it’s because we’re speaking a different language and having a different conversation, because our mental models are different, and we need to adjust those mental models.
It also, as we’ve said, affects how you can communicate. I spent a lot of my education learning how to write long-form content, so long-form is something that I communicate much better, whereas anything over 42 characters, and you’ve lost Chika on that one. And all of these things are impacting how we work in the office, which is what we’re going to talk about.
Chika Emebo: So, regardless of the generation you come from, regardless of your age, and regardless of the background that you come from, you’re all working together as a team to get to the same destination, and now we’re going to navigate the best way. Well, have an open conversation about the best way to get there.
The real problem isn’t AI, it’s people
Mark Stephens: Okay, so AI has been the big focus of this conference, and understandably so, because it’s the next big shiny thing, and it will be transformational. I can tell you, I have a degree in history that you guys paid for. Thank you very much. So I have studied. I’ve looked at fire. I’ve looked at the wheel. I’ve looked at writing. I’ve looked at printing. I’ve looked at the revolution in transport, the railways, telecoms. So don’t underestimate AI. It will be profound, but it won’t be the first time that everyone said this time it’s different. So we will wait to see. But as a historian, I would bet I would bet against it being totally different. But it would be transformational in ways that we have no idea about at the moment.
But we’re still going to be stuck with the old problem. We’re going to be still our biggest problem as business is people. If you haven’t had a chance to get it yet, this is this month’s Harvard Business Review, which Mark revealed earlier. There is a brilliant article in it by our very own Bob Moesta talking about jobs to be done. So if you didn’t pick it up at the airport, pick it up. Notice it’s not AI; it’s how to really motivate people, something we still appear to be struggling and get no better at, despite practicing it over and over again.
So let’s talk about people. Gallup had some rather scary figures, so let’s see what your guesses are like this. So this is a workplace poll. So they asked how many people are actively engaged in work in the workplace in 2025. Shout out some numbers. Any guesses? Okay, you’re not a pessimist. Let’s see if it’s really that bad. 31%. So if you have 100 average people, 31 of them are actually doing probably 90% of the work. Let’s talk about actively disengaged. These people are actually working really hard. They are working to avoid doing any work whatsoever. So, how many of those 100 people do you think are actively working really hard to not do any work. Okay, 17. So that means 52 people are showing up and doing some work. 31 are doing pretty much all the work, and 17 are working hard to avoid doing any work.
If you’ve got an average team, so definitely, if you take away nothing else from this talk, you want to avoid an average team. They are bad news. The most common reason that people say they work well or they stay at a job is because of the people. When Mark interviews ex-founders and he says, “What do you miss most about selling or leaving the company?” Generally, the most popular answer, and I haven’t prompted him. Let’s see what he comes up with.
Mark Littlewood: It is.
Mark Stephens: It’s the team. So what’s critical to us is to get that team right.
Build your A-team, not your friend group
Mark Stephens: So let’s talk about the team because that’s our group of people at work. And the team is quite a special construct because if our hiring is done right, when we walk in and meet our first our team for the first time, our response should be, “Wow, I’m just the normal person here amongst all these slightly odd boss and misfits,” because unlike our friendship group, our team should be built of people we wouldn’t naturally associate with because we want people with complementary skill sets. In particular, we want people across the age groups so that we can learn off each other and build off each other. Obviously, hiring is a completely different talk, and this is my pitch mark here for 2026 talk.
But let’s move on to how we can get those people to work together because this is what we want to build, anyone know who these people are? The A team, right? Group of slightly oddballs who are molded together into a lethal fighting team, and that’s what we want to create in the office. So diversity, as I’ve said, is a key feature, not a failure of teams. If you choose people, you don’t want to choose people at work for your friends. You want people like me and Chika. You know, I’m old enough to be her dad. We both went to different environments, but together we are much better. You know, and we produced an average talk, whereas it would have been really crap if it had just been one of us. So we’re feeding off each other. So the team is the important thing.
This is a particularly famous team. We have anyone tell me who this team is? The Beatles. Yes, thank you. So we have John and Paul, who were notorious for arguing together all the time and wrote all the really great songs. We have George, who played the guitar? And ironically, the most streamed Beatles song is George’s “Here Comes the Son,” not anything that Paul John wrote. And then we have the fourth Beatle, who you know the joke is he wasn’t the greatest drummer in the world. He wasn’t even the greatest drummer in the Beatles. So, but he was the key ingredient that made it work. So when he left the team, all these superstars actually went back to him and begged him to come back because he was the magic ingredient that gave them all star quality, which is why if you go to Harvard Business School, they will teach you that every star team needs its Ringo. That is the only howl of the talk. I apologize.
So that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to take groups of people who are different. We’re trying to come up with ways to make them into a solid team together. So let’s talk about how we can do that and ways we can do that.
Rules for navigating a multigenerational team
Chika Emebo: Okay. Now that we’ve unpacked the importance of forming your A team, let’s go over how you’re going to navigate this journey, and some rules that you should consider.
Firstly, you should be open to having a curiosity mindset, and having a curiosity mindset doesn’t just mean the new Gen Zs or the new grads eagerly and desperately trying to learn from the senior people on the team. It means you should be open to everyone learning, everyone contributing, and everyone being actively involved and actually taking their ideas seriously. Avoid stereotypes; they’re like models, useful but not accurate, and they can be detrimental to your team. Try to not be judgmental and never assume, and also be mindful of generational fears. So currently, working with four different generations in the same office, this means you could turn up in a position, and your boss could be the same age as your child, and you need to be okay with that and learn how to navigate that. After all, we’re all after the same goal, and we’ve done quite a lot of work with Matt and Nopadon from Systems. If you’ve not heard of them, check them out on LinkedIn, and they always push us to test and use data with our experiments. So we don’t just experiment with our marketing; we also experiment with our dynamics in the office and outside of the office, and this includes the locations we work in. So we found out that coffee shops are not the best. We just spend too much time drinking lattes there. So we tend to work from home or in the office, and we have a great balance of that. And speaking to some of you, everyone has different dynamics and also family lives as well. So if you’re a parent, you might want to finish off in office earlier and be able to pick up your child after school. And things of things like that need to be understood, and a safe space needs to be created for environments like that, we need to experiment with communication styles, the types of meetings that we have, and the point of the meeting. Not everybody needs to be there. Just make sure your time is all being used wisely. And we also do informal training sessions, but I’ll let Mark explain what that’s all about.
Bonding as a tribe
Mark Stephens: So, Russell Crowe from the Gladiator, and one of the great takeaways is that tribes bond over shared experiences. So, what we try and do at IDR Solutions is we create opportunities to get out for fun days to do stuff. A month ago, we went up to London. We did go karting, we did archery, we did bowling, and then we had some food. We did a great starship command the time before. So we do two away days, and the idea is just to get people to hang out together and enjoy time.
What we are very against is fake fun, particularly if you have people with children. The last thing you want to say to them is there is a mandatory pub evening, everyone has to come out on a Friday night or their weekend. So we think it’s important that you create opportunities for your team, particularly if they’re remote. We’ve had other companies talking about away days to hang out together and just do stuff. Because as Russell advised us in the Gladiator, whatever comes through that gate, we stay together, we survive, and that’s what we’re trying to build: is teams that work well together.
I’m always interested in the language you hear on people who work in companies. If you hear people saying the company does X or Y, then I would suggest they have an engagement problem. The word you want to hear is we do this, we do that. Us is generally by default us is me and my group of friends, and then the world outside is them. What we’re trying to do in our company culture is we’re trying to get people who wouldn’t normally regard us as part of the group to be part of us.
I generally find humor is a good indicator of company culture, particularly if you have a joke that’s a global joke. So this is our office crowd from Leicester. They’re a mixture of millennials and Gen Z, and our landlord asked us to bring in the milk. So one of them, Kieran, spent his Saturday morning designing milk monitor badges. So you can see they all have their milk monitor badges, and the joke is we’re taking it far, far too seriously. But the key point on this joke is everyone is in on the joke. What I don’t like is humor, where there is two different groups within the workplace. That is a toxic culture, in my opinion. Let’s mix things up, Chika.
Reverse mentoring
Chika Emebo: So multiple generations in the workplace is great for diversity, but diversity shouldn’t just be treated as a tick in the box. So, if you do have a team with mixed generations, then ensure they actually work together, mix up the groups, and allow them to teach each other. Allow them to lean into their strengths and keep each other up to speed. And consider doing reverse mentoring. So, yes, the newbies can learn from the senior people on the team, but us newbies or Gen Zs have things to teach too, especially since we are digital natives. So allow everyone to learn from each other.
Talking about culture without the emotion: jobs to be done
Mark Stephens: So we’re big fans of Bob Moesta’s jobs to be done, and he did an amazing talk in BoS 2022, where he took jobs to be done out of the marketing environment. He said, “Why don’t we apply it to culture and people, specifically hiring?” And he brought out this book. And what I where I think this is really exciting is Jobs to be done gives us a very non-emotional way to talk to each other. And these conversations on how people work, the team dynamics, they are happening whether we like them or not. So the key question to us is whether we want to be involved in these conversations, not whether they’re taking place. Just ignoring them is not a way; they won’t go away.
In particular, we nicked Bob’s slides from the talk, so I had a slide on pushes and a slide on pulls. And what I do is every six months I sit down with everyone in the team that I’m responsible for, and we run through this, and it gives us a non-emotional way to talk about it, because we’re doing everyone as well. There’s no immediate reaction. If your boss says, “I want to talk to you,” you know that generates an immediate fear for most people. You know, either am I going to be fired, or have they heard I’m looking for a job? Our belief is certainly in the jobs realm there are good and bad reasons for leaving. If there are good reasons, like we’re you’re a small company, you want to work in a big one, that’s fine. We want to be in that conversation. We want to help you. Bad reasons, like I feel disrespected, or I’m not understood, or I don’t get to use my skills, we want to fix those.
Adopt a small-company mindset
Chika Emebo: We believe all companies, regardless of size, should adopt a small mindset. And a small mindset means you’re a small group with the same goals, but you share a big passion, and you’re all trying to get there. So have clear communication and effective meetings that are impactful, as I said earlier, meetings where you don’t need to be there and it’s a waste of time, need to be disregarded, and you should only be there if it’s actually important for you to be there. Play to your strengths. One of my favorite things about small teams and big companies can be can work in small teams too. Is that you actually know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, so you can cover each other’s backs and get to the end goal faster, and share your wins. You’re one team working towards the same thing. Adapting quickly is also a great pro for working in small teams. You’re heading to the same destination, but you can always adapt your process, and that’s where experimenting comes in as well. Always gather your data and improve, and share the results so that you don’t have to, so you don’t make the same mistake twice in your team.
Let people be themselves
Mark Stephens: We also want to encourage diversity because there’s a danger in in certain places where we beat the creativity out of people 95% of the time. Then we take them into a meeting and we say, “Come up with some new ideas,” and they don’t have any because we’ve encouraged them to not have any ideas. So we like to encourage diversity in whatever ways we can, particularly little small ways. Allow people to express themselves. I think if you walk into an office and every desk is slightly differently arranged, that’s a good sign of a healthy culture. And simply, if you look at our laptops, they’re covered in stickers. I have a completely different set of stickers to Chika, but I think if people get a chance to express themselves during the workday, when you bring them to meetings and when you ask them to be creative, they will be able to do that. I think if you beat, if you insist on conformity all of the time and then ask them to be creative, you’re just going to confuse them.
We’ve also nicked. This is one of Matt Nopperdon’s pages again, which we shamelessly nicked. So when we onboard people, the best way to find out how people want to work is to ask them. So we ask them, how do you think? How do you work? How do you operate? How do you like feedback? It needs to be opt-in. All of these things need to be opt-in. You can’t. The management can’t say everyone is going to be creative, or in the way they can’t say everyone’s going to use AI. This has to be something people adopt because they see the benefits of it, and flexible feedback options. A word of warning here: If you ask everybody, or you ask most people, how do you want your feedback? Where naught is really, really kind and 10 is really brutal, they all say 10, and then you give it to them, tell it to them like it is, and then they all get upset. So have a little bit of iteration on here and experimentation. Some people sometimes people turn out their opinion is not quite how they like to be treated. When they said 10, they meant eight, really.
So I have a question for you, Chika. So, like a lot of people here, I run a software company.
What Gen Z actually wants
Unknown Speaker(s): Yes.
Mark Stephens: Our software processes PDF files that converts them into HTML5. We’re passionate about it. If you’ve been unlucky enough to sit next to me at lunchtime, you will know how passionate I am about it. You can imagine the poor guy on the plane who had eight hours with me. And yeah, we think we do a good job. It’s important to our customers. Academia serves out 66 million PDFs to the academic community, but fundamentally, we are not changing the world. We are not saving kittens. We are not solving global poverty. So, you Gen X want you, Gen Y, sorry, Gen Z want more meaning in life. So, how do we, as business owners, encourage you guys and address that issue?
Chika Emebo: Okay. Luckily for me, I’m not really looking to solve world peace, but if I could do that, that would be great. I am looking for fulfillment, and I feel like a lot of Gen Z and a lot of people are as well. So, creating a safe space where we can make impact, our voices are heard, and we can see our ideas taken out and see the impact it has on our customers and within our team is great, and also being able to learn across generations. So I’ve learned many things from Mark that have helped me in my personal development journey as well as my career, and having autonomy. Don’t flush, Mark. Having the autonomy and flexibility,
Mark Stephens: her knowledge of 80s pop culture is now unsurpassed,
Chika Emebo: and the flexibility to also be myself and express myself. So, for those of you that don’t know, I am also a wellness enthusiast and a content creator, and the skills I’ve learned in the office have allowed me to communicate very well with many brands, and one of my recent brand deals I closed was over $2,000, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if I didn’t learn the skills that I do in the office. And just being able to actually make an impact, which helps in my confidence a lot, and doing things like speaking at BoS, so that’s why I love BoS.
So we’ve discussed Gen X, we’ve discussed Gen Z, and we’ve discussed all of the generations. But we’d love to hear from you guys. What is it like? Working in a multi-generational workforce,
Mark Stephens: and how do you make it work? Mark wants the T-shirts back now.
Q&A
Mark Littlewood: Yeah, yeah, I want those. Those are archives. There’s too much to talk about here. I’m thinking we should probably move conversation to lunch. Has somebody got a question slash point they want to make? Because this is, thank you. It’s fabulous. I feel old and seen. But I think this is a much is a much broader thing. So we’re going to take a point from Dominic over here or question, and then we’re going to wrap it, but then move it.
Mark Stephens: Yeah, we have our breakout afterwards, so if you want to come to our table,
Chika Emebo: that’s the question.
Mark Stephens: Spot us from the T-shirts.
Dominick Reed: Is it on? Yeah.
Mark Stephens: Yeah. Yes. Which generation are you first?
Dominick Reed: I am millennial.
Mark Stephens: Sorry.
Dominick Reed: Born 87. I’m happy with that. Anyway, so I have a question for Gen Z and something what we are struggling with, and that’s the point regarding to autonomy and flexibility, and all of these topics about Gen Z wants to be digital nomad. They don’t want to come in into the office. While on the other hand, we see that it’s actually extremely important for people to meet, create, like really build the relationships, you know, within these generations. But the problems which we are having specifically with Gen Z in our office is that they just don’t want to come in, right? They want to work like all the summer, like from Spain or whatever. So, like, how should I tackle this as a CEO?
Chika Emebo: Well, I would say you should try to meet them in the middle, but still show that you know you’re in control, so they don’t disrespect your kindness. So consider hybrids. So what we do is we go into the office three days a week most of the time. We
Dominick Reed: we do that twice a week, and it’s still an issue. So, and one people can actually one is Thursday, and second one they can pick themselves.
Mark Stephens: Why are they saying they don’t want to come into the office? Because it sounds like you haven’t sold them on the benefits of coming into the office.
Dominick Reed: So, one of them, and I’ll give you like the specific example of one of the guy. He just said it’s a developer. He just said that he wants to sit all day in his pajamas and drink cola, and so. I’m not making this up, you know.
Mark Stephens: Do you think you might have hired the right guy? Okay,
Dominick Reed: that’s fine. Let’s have a lunch, and we can chat more about it. Okay.
Mark Littlewood: Good luck seeking pajama market fit. That’s the thing. I think on that bombshell, would you like an apple or a pepper?
Chika Emebo: I’ll go for an apple.
Chika Emebo
Zoomer, IDR Solutions
Chika is a sales and marketing expert at IDR Solutions, where she uses the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework to understand what truly drives customer decisions. By refining ideal customer profiles and creating targeted strategies, she helps businesses build stronger relationships and achieve meaningful engagement.
Chika is also founder of ANGELDUPE, a premium wellness brand. Her approach is rooted in her passion for personal growth and her commitment to creating impactful solutions.
Chika enjoys breaking down complex ideas into actionable strategies, inspiring others to reach their full potential.
Mark Stephens
Founder, IDRSolutions
Mark is the founder of IDRsolutions (which develops software to do lots of cool stuff with PDF files).
In 2009, Mark Stephens did a Lightning Talk at BoS, “Asteroid Impact – Are you a large lizard or small and furry” which looked at the challenges of running a software company.
He is a self-described passionate Mediaeval Historian, St. Andrews graduate and owner of a very dry sense of humour.
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