Walk into almost any small business today and you’ll find people who, despite working towards the same goals, have genuinely different ideas about how work should feel. One employee arrives early, prefers to communicate face to face, and measures their own success by how much they’ve visibly contributed by the end of the day. Another does their best thinking late in the morning, communicates primarily through messages, and judges their performance by outcomes rather than hours. A third wants to understand the purpose behind every task before they commit to it fully, while a fourth simply wants to be told what’s needed and get on with it.
None of these people are wrong. But if a business hasn’t thought carefully about how to accommodate this range, the result is often a low-level friction that nobody quite names – a sense that certain people “aren’t team players” or “don’t take things seriously enough” that, on closer examination, turns out to be a difference in working style rather than a difference in commitment or capability.
Where the differences actually come from
Generational experience shapes working style in ways that are worth understanding, even if individuals always vary. People who entered the workforce in an era of rigid hierarchies and limited flexibility often developed working habits oriented around visibility and presence – being seen to work hard was genuinely important in environments where managers couldn’t easily assess output in other ways. People who entered the workforce more recently have often done so in environments where remote working, flexible hours, and output-based assessment were already normalised, and they’ve built their working habits accordingly.
Neither set of habits is inherently superior. But they can create genuine misunderstanding when people assume their own approach is simply “how work works” rather than one valid approach among several. The manager who reads a junior employee’s 5pm departure as a lack of dedication, and the junior employee who reads their manager’s preference for in-person meetings as a distrust of their competence, are both making the same mistake: interpreting difference as deficiency.
Communication style is another significant source of variation. Some people process information best in conversation – they think out loud, they want to talk things through before committing to a course of action, and they find lengthy written briefs alienating. Others prefer to receive information in writing, absorb it in their own time, and arrive at decisions quietly before communicating them. In a mixed team, the first group can seem impulsive or disorganised to the second, while the second can seem distant or unengaged to the first. Again, neither is right – but without explicit acknowledgement, both will quietly judge the other.
Moving from tolerance to genuine flexibility
The most straightforward response to different working styles is tolerance: accepting that people differ and trying not to let it cause too much friction. This is better than nothing, but it’s not the same as genuine flexibility, and the difference matters.
Genuine flexibility means designing the way work is structured so that different styles can coexist and contribute effectively, rather than simply putting up with deviation from a default. In practice, this often means offering real choice in how work gets done – not just in theory, but in the day-to-day texture of working life.
A useful exercise is to examine which of your business’s working norms are genuinely necessary for operational reasons and which simply reflect preference or habit. A daily in-person check-in might be essential for a customer-facing team where real-time coordination is needed – or it might be a habit carried over from a time when the business worked differently, now maintained largely by inertia. Core hours might reflect a genuine customer service requirement – or they might be an assumption that’s never been tested. Asking these questions openly, and being willing to change things that don’t have a strong operational justification, tends to unlock a great deal of goodwill across all age groups.
Making expectations explicit
One of the most practical things a small business can do is make its expectations explicit rather than assuming they’re shared. This is especially valuable in multigenerational teams, where assumptions built up over different working lives can be particularly divergent.
Explicit expectations don’t mean rigid rules. They mean being clear about what the business genuinely needs – in terms of availability, responsiveness, collaboration, and output – and separating those genuine needs from preferences or traditions. When employees understand which expectations are non-negotiable and why, and which areas offer real flexibility, most people are happy to work within that framework. What creates resentment is unexplained inconsistency: the sense that some people get flexibility and others don’t, based on criteria that are never articulated.
This clarity is also worth applying to feedback and development conversations. Different employees have genuinely different preferences here – some want frequent, informal feedback and find formal appraisals stressful and artificial; others prefer structured, scheduled conversations and find ad-hoc feedback unsettling. Asking people directly how they prefer to receive feedback, and then honoring that where possible, costs very little and tends to make those conversations substantially more productive.
Finding the shared ground
For all the differences in style and expectation that a multigenerational team contains, there is usually more common ground than the friction suggests. Most people, regardless of generation, want to feel that their work matters, that they’re treated fairly, that their contribution is recognised, and that they have some degree of autonomy over how they do their job. These are not generational preferences – they’re fairly universal human ones.
Building a team culture around those shared values, rather than around a particular working style, gives a business something that everyone can buy into. It means that when differences in style do create tension – as they inevitably will from time to time – there’s a foundation of shared purpose to return to. Differences in how people work become much easier to navigate when everyone involved feels that the business fundamentally respects them and values what they bring.
The businesses that manage this well tend not to be the ones that have eliminated all difference in their teams. They’re the ones that have created enough psychological safety for difference to be named, discussed, and worked through – rather than suppressed until it eventually surfaces as something more disruptive.
If you need any further advice on balancing different work styles, do get in touch.