June 17, 2026
Only a Quarter of Today’s Multigenerational Workforce Collaborates Well – and AI Is Widening the Gap
Only 26% of employees experience real ‘generational synergy’ in their jobs. The other three in four work somewhere that has not established how generations learn from one another.
These findings come from O.C. Tanner’s first annual State of Generations at Work report.
Generational synergy is what happens when generations collaborate together and use their differences to produce better outcomes than any of them would alone. The report links strong synergy to higher customer satisfaction, more innovation, and lower burnout, and finds that most organisations are failing to capture those gains from their multigenerational workforce.
Drawing on responses from 5,702 employees across 17 countries, alongside nine focus groups of employees, leaders, and HR professionals, the report’s central argument is one of missed business opportunity.
Organisations have spent years trying to manage generational differences, when the real potential lies in turning that difference into something useful. “The future favours those who build with it,” said Dr Alexander Lovell, Vice President of the O.C. Tanner Institute.
The Generational Contracts: What Each Cohort Expects From Work
The report introduces the idea of ‘generational contracts’: the notion that each generation entered the workforce under different economic and cultural conditions, and carries a different sense of what it owes an employer and what an employer owes it.
Baby Boomers, who came of age in more stable years, tend to offer loyalty in exchange for security.
Gen X, who entered during waves of downsizing, learned to trade competence for autonomy, and are markedly less trusting of institutions; the report finds them 30% less likely to trust senior leaders.
Millennials look for meaning in exchange for commitment, with 80% saying it matters that their employer is ethical.
Gen Z, the report’s community-seekers, want inclusion in exchange for engagement, and 77% say inclusion is very important to them.
These contracts are different starting assumptions about work, and when they go unrecognised by organisations they cause friction. Poor communication and collaboration that stems from generational conflict is associated with six times the odds of burnout.
A Word of Caution on Generational Stereotypes
Any framework like this carries a risk of generational stereotyping, and research from Culture Amp offers useful data on this.
Comparing young Millennials in 2015 with Gen Z in 2024, its analysts found that the trait most often pinned on Gen Z, a supposed lack of commitment, showed up just as strongly among young Millennials a decade earlier. The same pattern held for manager favourability and career optimism, both of which track with being young rather than with any particular generation.
Culture Amp’s verdict is that low commitment has more to do with being young than with belonging to a particular generation, which aligns with O.C. Tanner’s position that generational strengths and struggles are not fixed traits. The key takeaway from both studies is to design for difference without reducing people to their birth year.
The Business Case: Linking Generational Synergy to Customer Satisfaction
The value, the report argues, sits in that synergy rather than in managing difference away.
For a customer-facing organisation, the headline number is the one linking that synergy to customer satisfaction. Where synergy is present, the odds of high customer satisfaction are 10 times greater, with eight times the odds of innovation, 10 times the odds of organisational growth, and 11 times the odds of adapting well to change.
These figures describe increased odds from a single cross-sectional survey, so they point to association rather than proven cause, and the research comes from a recognition company with a clear point of view.
How AI Disrupts Cross-Generational Knowledge Transfer
The report’s most current thread concerns AI, and it complicates the usual optimism about workplace tools. Nearly half of employees (44%) say their organisation’s encouragement to use artificial intelligence (AI) has made them seek out human subject-matter experts less.
The shift is most pronounced among younger workers, the very people organisations expect to learn from more experienced colleagues: 52% of Millennials and 49% of Gen Z report turning to human experts less, against 26% of Baby Boomers.
The mechanism O.C. Tanner describes is worth noting. When an organisation pushes AI hard, younger employees read it as permission to ask the machine rather than a colleague, and the cross-generational knowledge transfer that synergy depends on begins to break down.
Employees who experience synergy are three times more likely to seek expertise across generations. And where people both value AI tools and work in a culture of synergy, the odds of customer satisfaction are 17 times greater.
The tool, in other words, works best when a strong foundation of human connection is also present. One focus-group participant captured the balance well: “I use AI to interpret dense regulations, but I listen to my boss – 40 years of experience matters.”
Blaire Palmer, Founder and CEO of That People Thing, sees the same dynamic from the leadership side. “When leaders are obsessed with people getting into action rather than creating space for collaboration, people will use AI instead,” she says. “It’s faster, requires less discomfort – AI will typically reinforce your opinion not challenge it – and get you to a decision (regardless of whether it’s a good one) more swiftly.”
Her conclusion is the part that should catch the attention of leaders pushing hard for AI efficiency: “The outcome is competence but not excellence. And organisations can’t afford to be only competent today.”
Beyond Recognition: Belonging as the Foundation
O.C. Tanner’s own answer to multigenerational workforce collaboration is recognition, and the report makes a strong case for it. Integrated recognition is associated with 16 times the odds of generational synergy and 19 times the odds of trust in the organisation. O.C. Tanner is a recognition company, so recognition is where its model naturally lands. But it is one route rather than the whole journey.
The harder work is the one Palmer describes: leaders using their influence to listen for the friction their people experience, removing those obstacles, and “creating spaces where difference can exist without a rush to harmony or action”. That is about the design of everyday collaboration, and creating conditions in which people choose to reach out to a colleague rather than a chatbot for guidance.
At its core, this is a question of psychological safety and belonging, whatever generation you belong to. People reach out to those who are different from them, and offer up what they know, when they feel they matter and that it is safe to do so.
Building generational synergy, then, needs to start with people feeling that they belong, and that their contribution counts. Recognition plays a part here, but it is not the full story.
What This Means for EX Practitioners
So what does building generational synergy look like in practice? A few starting points:
- Protect time for collaboration, not just delivery, so people have room to ask a colleague rather than default to the fastest answer.
- Pair AI use with human check-ins on the work that carries judgement, risk, or hard-won context.
- Recognise cross-generational help when it happens, so reaching across the age gap becomes a visible norm rather than a favour.
- Listen for the friction your people name, remove the obstacles you can, and resist the rush to smooth every difference away.
