Simma was interviewed for a recent Human Resources Online article, “Bridging the Generational Techno-Divide”. The author investigated the ongoing challenge that many companies have in building trustful, constructive relationships between employees across the generational spectrum. According to the article, companies large and small are struggling to overcome the wide gap in new technology skills that exists between older employees of the Baby Boomer generation and their Generation Y counterparts.

This was a major issue at a large company that Simma consulted for, and she was able to improve knowledge transfer between the two employee groups through the development of a program that encourages back and forth mentoring between Boomer and Gen Y employees. The program is described in greater detail in the HRO article.

“The boomer managers were going to be retiring and the younger employees needed their knowledge, but the groups were really afraid of each other,” she says. “The older employees were afraid they were going to be made prematurely irrelevant, while the Gen Yers were afraid the older people weren’t listening to them.”

With Lieberman’s assistance, the company created a “cross-mentoring” program in which the boomers created a process for transferring knowledge to the Gen Yers, while the Yers taught the boomers how to use technology to get their work done faster.

“Each group taught the other about generational differences,” she says.

You can read more about Cross-Generational Communication here.