Succeeding with a Multigenerational Contact Center Workforce

The workforce within today’s contact centers spans multiple generations, each with its own expectations, communication styles, and values. All employees want to be respected and equipped to succeed, of course; but the emphasis they place on different aspects of the job varies according to each agent’s age and career stage.

Contact center leaders must recognize these nuances and respond by building inclusive, adaptable strategies that resonate broadly. The goal is not to design one-size-fits-all programs, but to offer enough meaningful options to ensure that every employee finds value in their work experience.

Promote Shared Learning

Employees entering the workplace today bring high levels of technological fluency. They’re comfortable navigating multiple systems and switching across contexts, and they learn new tools quickly. With youth comes energy. Long-tenured team members, on the other hand, bring depth of knowledge that comes from years of customer interactions and organizational insight. They’re more composed under pressure, and better at navigating complex interactions. With experience comes wisdom.

Rather than viewing these different skill sets as obstacles to a unified approach, organizations should view them as complementary strengths to be harnessed for mutual benefit. Younger team members can support digital learning and tool adoption, while seasoned employees can model resilience, decision making, and the kind of empathy that comes with experience. Encouraging peer-to-peer learning, building mentorships that flow in both directions, and pairing people across generational lines for teams, task forces, or training groups creates a learning culture rooted in trust.

Prioritize Work-Life Balance

Younger workers enter the workforce today with a default expectation that their jobs should accommodate life outside of work. They don’t think of remote work or schedule flexibility as incentives but rather as baseline requirements. This mindset challenges older management models where a one-size-fits-all scheduling approach was the norm.

With the help of modern automation tools, contact centers can move beyond static scheduling and build more responsive operations. Real-time tools make it possible to respond to workload fluctuations in the moment, optimizing agent availability and giving employees more control over when and how they work. When agents feel that they have more flexibility and control, they’re more likely to stay engaged, and less likely to burn out and quit.

This is not solely a younger-generation issue. Employees of all ages benefit from more autonomy and control over their time. Whether it concerns a parent balancing childcare or a late-career worker planning for retirement, a little flexibility goes a long way toward promoting loyalty.

Foster a Culture of Well-Being

Younger workers are also more likely than older generations to talk openly about stress, and they’re quicker to leave jobs that ignore their mental health needs. For contact center workers, heavy call volumes, emotional interactions, and rigid performance metrics create daily pressure. Mental well-being requires constant attention to individuals across teams. That’s not easy, especially now that most contact center managers and agents work remotely.

Supervisors need the ability to recognize signs of fatigue or despair, and they need to be empowered to act on that knowledge to support employees who need a boost. Whether that means altering expectations for the day, reassigning responsibilities, or initiating a listening session or a pep talk, their ability to take action must be swift.

Restoring an employee’s flagging sense of purpose or value is an essentially human undertaking. That means the best technology is technology that restores bandwidth to managers and supervisors to address the needs of distressed employees directly. Employees need to know that leadership sees them as people first and values their contribution to the organization. Real-time technology is now available to help identify advanced signs of risk—such as a drop in interaction quality, longer call-handling time, or extended idle time—and to prompt intervention.

It’s also critical for leadership to model this behavior. If supervisors never take time off, skip breaks, or treat exhaustion as a badge of honor, employees will hesitate to show vulnerability. Instead, leaders must demonstrate that maintaining health is integral to performance.

Promote Purpose

A recent Deloitte survey found that 89 percent of Gen Z workers and 92 percent of Millennials believe purpose influences motivation and engagement. Whatever age or skill level they’ve reached, today’s employees want to be part of something meaningful. They want to understand how their contributions impact the organization and the customers they serve. Purpose is not about slogans—it’s about everyday clarity and reinforcement.

Supervisors can play an important role by helping agents connect their responsibilities to customer outcomes. Regular feedback and shared goals create links between effort and impact. Recognition programs should also evolve to highlight contributions aligned with mission and values, not just output volume.

Giving employees the opportunity to participate in social causes, sustainability efforts, or community partnerships tied to the brand strengthens their sense of purpose and belonging. When employees feel aligned with what the company stands for, they bring more energy, creativity, and commitment to their roles.

Leading a Multigenerational Workforce

Succeeding with a multigenerational workforce requires clarity of purpose and systems designed to support variations within a unified framework. Forward-thinking contact center leaders are adopting technologies that streamline operations and support their people as individuals. These tools make it easier to respond to live conditions and give teams the resources they need to thrive.

But technology is only part of the equation. A successful contact center culture is one that blends structure with support, and high expectations with humanity. Understanding generational dynamics is the starting point—but fostering shared purpose, trust, and adaptability is how you turn that understanding into productive action.

John Norton is chief revenue officer at Intradiem. Norton has three decades of senior sales and revenue leadership experience in enterprise technology, with a track record of applying data-driven approaches to driving new business development, customer success, and revenue growth. Norton most recently was CRO at Calabrio.

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