In this case study we look at a client who’s multigenerational workforce struggled to find their way with each other.
The challenge
A small office supplies and workplace solutions company came to us with a challenge that many established businesses will recognise. With thirty years of history behind it, the team reflected that longevity, roughly half the staff had been with the company for more than a decade, while a handful of newer, younger employees had joined more recently and were struggling to find their footing.
The problem wasn’t conflict, exactly. The two groups were perfectly civil with one another. But there was a clear distance between them: experienced staff felt that newer employees lacked commitment and didn’t understand how the business really worked, while younger employees felt they would never quite be accepted or trusted with anything meaningful. Client knowledge, relationships, and institutional memory sat almost entirely with the longer-serving staff, with no real mechanism for any of it to be shared. When we spoke with the business owner, it became clear that this wasn’t a personality problem, it was a design problem. Nobody had ever deliberately built the conditions for integration, and the default had been to hope that proximity would eventually do the job on its own.
Our advice
We recommended three areas of focus.
The first was restructuring how the team handled client accounts. Rather than individual ownership, where one experienced employee managed a client relationship largely alone, we suggested moving to a paired model, with each major account handled jointly by one experienced and one less experienced team member. Critically, this had to be a genuine pairing, not a token one: both people attending client meetings, both involved in correspondence, both expected to contribute.
The second was addressing communication. Different parts of the team were using entirely different channels with no shared understanding of what was appropriate for what, generating quiet frustration on all sides. We facilitated a single team conversation to agree a simple framework: which types of communication belonged where, and what response times were reasonable for each.
The third was creating regular, informal space for the team to connect as people rather than as colleagues with tasks to complete. We suggested a monthly informal lunch with no set agenda, not a structured team-building exercise, but genuine unstructured time that would allow relationships to develop naturally.
What happened
The paired account model proved more valuable than anyone had anticipated. Experienced employees passed on client knowledge and relationship skills that couldn’t be learned any other way, while newer employees contributed fresh perspectives and digital fluency that clients were increasingly expecting. One pairing led directly to a contract renewal the business had been at risk of losing, after the younger team member identified a client need that the experienced colleague then had the relationship capital to act on.
The communication framework took around an hour to agree and immediately reduced a significant amount of low-level friction that had been quietly draining goodwill for some time.
The informal lunches produced something less predictable: over several months, they gave rise to genuine cross-generational curiosity. Experienced staff began sharing knowledge about how the industry had evolved; younger employees began explaining their thinking around areas like digital marketing and new platforms. What had been two separate groups sharing an office gradually became something more like a coherent team.
Two years on, some of the original long serving employees have retired and new people have joined but the culture has proved durable, because it was built into the way the business operates rather than relying on any particular individual to sustain it.
Top tips
Proximity isn’t the same as integration. Teams that share a space but lack deliberate structures for collaboration will naturally fragment along lines of familiarity, which in a multigenerational workforce often means age. Good intentions aren’t enough; the conditions for connection need to be designed in.
Knowledge transfer only happens if it’s built into the work itself. Informal lunches and good relationships help, but the most durable knowledge sharing in this case came from pairing people on real accounts with real stakes. When collaboration is genuinely necessary for the work to succeed, it happens, and the learning that comes with it sticks.
Small friction points compound over time. The communication issues this team experienced weren’t dramatic, but they were quietly eroding goodwill every day. Addressing them took an hour. Leaving them unaddressed would have continued to cost far more than that in accumulated frustration and misunderstanding.
Outside perspective matters. The business owner had noticed that something wasn’t working but was too close to it to see the pattern clearly. Having an adviser who could name what was happening, and suggest practical, low cost ways to address it, made the difference between observing a problem and actually solving it.
If you need any further advice, do get in touch.