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Creating an Employee Experience That Works Across Generations

Tara Karver was pitching a project her team had built to her CHRO when the conversation took a more candid turn. Karver, the head of HR for enterprise learning and skills at Pearson answered questions candidly, telling her CHRO that the questions were making her feel stressed. The call moved on.Days later, her CHRO told her that Pearson’s AI-powered Communication Coach had flagged the exchange as a missed opportunity: Karver’s honesty was a natural cue to pause and ask what was going on. Karver’s own copy of the coach had a suggestion for her, too: Be more direct and assertive when presenting material.“That’s where AI is so powerful, where it really connects humans and makes us better communicators,” Karver said, during an executive panel discussion at From Day One’s Philadelphia conference. Panelists shared how companies can create positive experiences for workers across generations, from benefits and recognition, to learning opportunities, and more. “People want to do a good job, and they want to be recognized for it,” Karver said. Preferences differ by career stage, though. Early-career employees want skill building, mid-career workers want leadership opportunities, and veterans want to mentor.Josette Jean-Francois, VP of talent management at B. Braun, sees younger employees reshaping how feedback flows. “They’re not waiting for feedback. They’re asking for feedback,” she said. They also want short, on-demand learning in place of eight-hour classes, and career moves that go sideways as well as up.Benefits for Every Life StageAllison Russell, VP of total rewards at Lincoln Financial Group, says generational labels do little for benefits design. Two Gen X employees can live very different lives: One cares for young children, another for aging parents, one is healthy and another is managing chronic illness. Employees now expect support well beyond the workplace, she says, at every life stage and event. The answer is a flexible ecosystem of programs, even though personalizing everything is administratively daunting.Panelists spoke about "Creating an Employee Experience That Works Across Generations" in PhiladelphiaAI could make that personalization practical. “We expect everything to be instantaneously at our fingertips,” Russell said, describing the shift from yesterday’s “Amazon experience” to today’s ChatGPT standard. The ideal, in her view, is a benefit that surfaces itself at the moment someone needs it, rather than a flyer that arrives after surgery.Transparency as a Focal PointMatt Sandler, global head of executive and equity compensation at Kenvue, focused on the importance of transparency. “If you’re removing a benefit or adding a benefit, just be transparent about why you’re making that change,” he said. He urged plain language over corporate lingo.He speaks from experience. Kenvue cut long-term incentives when it spun off from Johnson & Johnson, and it is now being acquired by Kimberly-Clark, a deal expected to close within months. Some employees’ pay will rise and some will fall. Sandler said the first cuts barely dented retention because the company explained them. “Amazingly, our attrition really didn’t go up,” he said.Sandler also offered a pay philosophy. If a company can exceed the market median on one component of compensation, he says, make it base salary, because cash matters in anxious times and base pay feeds into 401(k) and other benefits. He prefers giving larger long-term incentives to fewer people, noting that Kenvue’s all-employee equity award produced grants as small as $600 for some of its 22,000 recipients.Moderator Earl Hopkins, features reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, asked the panel about “the tension between what employees say they want and what the organizations themselves believe they need.” When employee preferences and business needs diverge, leaders have to make the case for what the organization needs while helping workers understand what’s at stake. That means spelling out the risks of standing still alongside the opportunities that change can create.Skills as a Business MetricCaitlin Collins, director of program strategy and outcomes at Betterworks, rejected the idea that development competes with performance. “They’re not really competing priorities,” said Collins, an organizational psychologist. She called evidence of skills a leading indicator of business outcomes. Companies that decouple the two see development fade, she said, because nobody tracks it.Karver urged leaders to name the skills they want, whether AI fluency or agility, and decide how to measure them. Sandler’s advice was to pick one or two tools to prioritize instead of eight.Measuring What AI DeliversMost employers can’t yet tell good AI use from busy AI use, says Russell. Lincoln Financial allocates tokens to employees and tracks consumption. “I don’t think most companies are doing that well yet,” she said. A worker who burns through every token may add less value than one who nails a few high-impact uses. Leading organizations are moving past utilization toward measuring value, and toward rewarding employees who share what they learn, says Collins. AI brings its own stress, panelists agreed. Karver finds that tasks that once took days now take minutes, yet she has no spare time, because everyone produces work faster. Her leadership team now puts well-being first, helping staff prioritize tasks. What Comes NextAsked what leaders will need to rethink in three to five years, panelists shared different priorities. Collins predicted higher talent density as AI lets teams do more, which makes people matter more. “Managers are going to be the most important,” she said.Karver and Jean-Francois both chose learning agility. “We’re all going to need to fall in love with learning,” Karver said. Jean-Francois added that leaders must learn to guide others through ambiguity, since waiting for answers means nothing gets done.Russell pointed to a harder constraint, the rising cost of healthcare, including GLP-1 drugs, which is pushing employers toward painful cuts. She urged companies to reinvest savings in other benefits so employees don’t feel their overall value has shrunk.For all their differences on pay, benefits, and the pace of change, the panelists emphasized the same point: The tools will keep changing, and the human habits around them matter more. Karver’s missed pause is a small example. Software spotted the moment, but only a person could act on it, by stopping to ask what was going on.Collins put the stakes plainly. “I don’t think we ever lose sight of the value that our people drive,” she said, “because the competition is just going to get harder and harder.”Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)