Worcester Business Journal

wbjournal.com | August 25, 2025 | Worcester Business Journal 9 CHEERS TO YOU! Continued on next page getting this social conscious mindset transition, said Mosher Berry. "Employers are missing that for the most part. ey're not grasping how im- portant that is to young people," she said. For Gen X, this time of clashing is ripe with potential, said Valerie Zolez- zi-Wyndham, CEO of equity-based leadership consulting firm Promoting Good in Worcester. "ose of us in the middle have this really beautiful opportunity to be the bridge between those two other genera- tions," Zolezzi-Wyndham said. "at top generation is going to retire, and those organizations that have not invested in this new generation are going to be losing business, losing employees, losing everything." Shifting norms rough her work assessing the differing experiences of those working within the same companies, Zolez- zi-Wyndham has observed when it comes to cross-generational complaints, the common denominator is oen the contrasting ways generations define their commitments to and boundaries for the work they do. "One of the big challenges that exists that creates this conflict on intergen- erational teams is that there isn't work done to set shared definitions and shared expectations, and so there's assumptions that are coming in from both sides that don't go addressed," she said. Common tensions rise to the surface and circle the different ways genera- tions prefer to communicate, she said. Whether it's a preference for in-per- son vs. remote work, calls vs. texts, or boundaries around working hours, she sees employers and employees jump to conclusions about each other's prefer- ences not always accurate. ese varying preferences are very ap- parent for Lexi Brissette, the 25-year-old vice president, commercial real estate specialist at NAI Glickman Kovago & Jacobs in Worcester. Most of our employees are Gen X For likely the first time in history, five generations are participating in the modern workforce. From the Silent Generation of the 1920s to 1940s through Gen Z of the late 1990s to early 2000s, employees are now often working side-by-side with those multiple decades away in age. When polled online, the plurality of WBJ readers said most of their companies' employees belong to Gen X. What generation do the bulk of your employees belong to? Silent Generation: 1928 - 1945-0% Baby Boomers: 1946 - 1964 13% Gen X: 1965 – 1980 29% Millennials: 1981 - 1996 25% Gen Z: 1997 - 2012 5% We have a pretty even mix of more than one generation. 25% Valerie Zolezzi-Wyndham, CEO of Promoting Good in Worcester

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