Never before have Australian workers toiled alongside colleagues so many decades apart in age — a span of four generations.

In small teams and across huge workforces, their workmates are dealing with first pregnancies and menopause, the trials of small children and the deaths of parents, moving out and downsizing.

Gaby Koronis is 69. She’s a Baby Boomer with three children in their 40s.

Jess Klose is 23. Born in the year 2000, a Gen Z, she is about to take over Gaby’s job.

Gaby prefers in-person contact and phone calls, while Jess — who successfully begged her mum for a mobile phone when she was 16, seven years ago — largely uses digital tools.

“Her communication style is a little bit more different to how I say my generation would communicate. And she loves her paper,” Jess says.

“She is a paper fanatic, she prints everything off, writes everything down!

“I am ‘Full Tech’, I will bring my laptop and I’ll write notes.

In meetings, Gaby is often the only person who attends with a notepad and pen.

“Yes, I will put my hand up for that one,” she says.

“Old school: pen and paper. When you have IT issues, you don’t have them with pen and paper.”

Like millions of workers across the nation they’ve had to embrace change to deal with colleagues and bosses where the age disparity is measured in decades.

“It probably didn’t sit well with me,” says Gaby, reflecting on how her team over time took to tapping meeting notes on their phone.

Together work

This Adelaide office, of private health insurer Medibank, is emblematic of work sites across the nation.

On the day the ABC visits, Hayden Harris is working from home.

The 47-year-old, who manages employees in South Australia, has four daughters aged between 20 and two — and one of them is sick.

Hayden worked for his parents’ business and at 17 got a job in a sports store earning $5.42 an hour, cash that came in an envelope.

“It was very much in that era that whatever the boss said, went,” he remembers. There was little questioning or challenging.

Hayden has seen huge shifts in how decisions and directions are communicated, with the aim of getting the best out of people.

“The style of leadership and management that I do now versus say if I went back to when I first started managing almost 25 years ago, is hugely different,” he says.

“I was probably more that Old School — ‘I made the decisions, this is the way it goes’.

“Now I need to actually consider that feedback. And on reflection, probably a combination of the two is a much better way of moving forward and doing things.”

This gels with the finding of social researcher Claire Madden.

“It can be quite confronting for the older generation, seeing the shifts that have been demanded by the younger generations in the workplace when it comes to leadership,” she says.

The previous “hierarchical model” doesn’t work for many workers in Generation Y and Z.

Age bracket

The definitions of different generations are contested, but tend to fall into broad categories based on birth years that span around 15-20 years.

The categories are ropey, and change depending on the expert or report you’re reading.

Swipe to see the general definition for each generation:

Baby Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964.

Generation X were born between 1965 and 1980.

Generation Y, also known as Millennials, were born between 1981 and 1995.

Generation Z, also known as Zoomers, were born between 1996 and 2012.

But while generations have shared experiences and some life stages — like parenting young children or bouts of poor health — age isn’t everything.

“I think a lot of the views and perspective, both personally and from a work perspective, comes more down to the individual rather than the age,” Hayden says.

He notes that many of his colleagues defy the categories society sometimes tried to put them on.

“I’ve worked with people that are ‘young old people’ and ‘old young people’,” he says.

Stereo… types

When people were born doesn’t determine the kind of personality or work ethic they have, or the choices they’ve made in their lives.