Generational Work Divides Don’t Have To Exist — Just Ask People Who Work With Their Grandparents

There are as many as five different generations in a workplace, and it’s now common for someone at the beginning of their career to work closely at a job with someone who is decades into theirs. What’s much less common is having that person be your grandparent or your grandchild.

But for those who are afforded this rare opportunity, the experience can be a gift. Take Emma Orfield Johnston and her grandfather Steven Orfield. Orfield founded a multisensory design-research lab based in Minneapolis.

“I spend more time with him than I spend with anybody,” Johnston said.

Both work on business development for the lab, which employs three others. Johnston said her grandfather never pressured her to join him, but she moved back to Minneapolis to work the job full time in 2021 once she realized that her studies in psychology and interests in design and art were what her grandfather had been working on for decades.

Orfield had asked his two daughters to join him in the past, but they had declined. When Johnston joined full time, “I had no idea how long it would last, how well it would work. … But my whole life’s about trying new things,” Orfield said.

The good news is that Orfield and Johnston are “kindred spirits” whose energies work well together, Orfield said.

As the more social of the pair, Johnston leads group tours for the lab’s anechoic chamber, which has a Guinness World Record for being the quietest place on Earth, and does graphics, among her many roles.

One of her latest tasks is redesigning the lab’s website. While some colleagues would speak in corporate niceties while tackling such a project, the pair’s deep familiarity with each other has led to spirited debates. “He’s more honest with me than my parents,” Johnston said about the creative friction they’ve had over the redesign. “He’s super direct. And so I think I’m still adjusting.”

“I’ve always been close to Emma from the time she was an infant, and so I’m not surprised at anything about Emma,” Orfield said about working with his granddaughter. “Sometimes I know exactly what I think she’s going to say. And sometimes I know that I’m not going to agree with that, but I know that that’s Emma.”

Orfield said part of his job as Johnston’s grandfather is to challenge Johnston and to hone her professional discipline. “It’s like poking someone to get them to say what they think,” he said. “Because what I like, and I think she does too, is I like honesty.”

Working with your grandparent, in what is known as a “skip-generation” arrangement, can also show you a new side to their personality.

Before they started working together at Baltimore/Washington International Airport in Maryland, Waseem Shaalan, 16, saw his grandfather Awni Ghattas, 72, as the family member who would talk to him about sports cars and buy him video games. Now, on the Sundays when their shifts overlap, Ghattas is his supervisor.

Shaalan’s part-time job as a gate agent for Prospect Airport Services is to push people needing wheelchairs to their gates and to help them with boarding, while Ghattas handles assignments. Shaalan said seeing his grandfather’s work ethic up close is both cool and unexpected. Outside of work, Ghattas is playful. But on the job, he’s all business.

“He’s always making sure everyone’s doing their job,” Shaalan said. “It’s just surprising to talk to him in such a serious manner.”

Ghattas said his grandson is a good worker whom he is pushing to be the best at customer service. “He likes to make good money so I can help him as I can,” he said. Ghattas, who speaks mostly Arabic, said Shaalan helps him too with translating what customers are saying in English.

Working in close quarters can also help grandchildren understand why their grandparent is the way they are.

Jessica Campa, 30, grew up watching her grandmother Diamantina Gutierrez Treviño, 89, diligently typing at her computer in the family-owned record store based in San Antonio. Gutierrez and her late husband, Mexican American composer Salomé Gutierrez, started the Del Bravo Record Shop in 1966. But now that she works closely with her grandmother, Campa said she better understands why Gutierrez is still “the last one turning her computer off, the first one turning it on.”

“Work is her life,” Campa said. “She can’t be home and do nothing.”

When asked if she is a boss or a grandmother to Campa during work hours, Gutierrez said, “I’m her grandmother.”

There is a language barrier between Campa and her grandmother because Campa knows limited Spanish, which is the main language Gutierrez speaks. But they have bonded over their shared duties as Campa helps Gutierrez with filing and computer questions.

Campa said she got the first hug from her grandmother in her life after Campa fixed Gutierrez’s Excel sheet: “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is a core memory for me.’”

What inspires people to work harder and better has long been a topic of interest in academia. In the past, researchers have focused mostly on intrinsic motivation (how much people enjoy their jobs), extrinsic motivation (how much people want power and status through their job) and prosocial motivation (how much people want to make a difference in the world).

But as Jochen Menges, a leadership professor at the University of Zurich and the University of Cambridge, discovered with his colleagues, these motivators neglect a different powerful reason that keeps you going through long, hard workdays: your family.

In a 2016 study, Menges and other researchers observed and surveyed 97 employees working in a Mexican factory for processing coupons about what motivated them to do their job.

“We found that employees with high family motivation tend to perform better at work,” Menges told HuffPost. He said this is because, for one, people who are motivated for their families know that working harder financially sustains the family better.

And when your job is seen as a way to support your family, then “work is a source of pride not just for the employee but also for the employee’s family,” Menges said. The presence of family can make you want to be a good role model and “can encourage employees to get things done more quickly and efficiently to then have time for family needs,” he added.

Based off his theory, Menges said that “grandparents can be more motivated to work harder when they are surrounded by their grandchildren because they may wish to exhibit a high work morale. … In turn, grandchildren may be working harder because they may show their skills and ambition to their grandparents.”

This was true in Campa’s case. When she previously worked for a university’s registrar office, Campa was miserable and just analyzing transcripts “for the paycheck.” But even when she hated her office job, Campa had no interest in working for her family’s record store.

The pandemic changed all of that in 2020. The Del Bravo Record Shop that employs Campa’s mom and relatives was in trouble. COVID-19 shutdowns had stopped in-store business.

“If they don’t have people come into the store, like, what are we going to do?” Campa recalled thinking. “I realized, this is all my family has.”

Campa helped get merchandise online, eventually petitioning her family to work full time organizing events, running social media, and doing “whatever they tell me to do,” she said.

“If it wasn’t for Jessica, I say we would be stuck, because our customers are older, but she brought in new customers with the internet, with Instagram, with Facebook,” said Irma Gutierrez, Campa’s aunt and fellow employee.

Campa is the only officially employed grandchild at the business out of Diamantina Gutierrez Treviño’s 28 grandchildren, but she hopes one day her son could be a great-grandson who continues what her grandparents started.

“Now I see the history behind it, and all the sweat and tears and the determination, the dedication my grandparents had to build this with no education, very little money, eight kids,” Campa said. “I go to bed thinking, like, ‘How am I going to help them?’ or like, ‘How am I going to do whatever I can to keep it going?’”

When work is energizing and meaningful, you do not want the days to end. If she could, Johnston said she would work with her grandfather for a “couple hundred” more years.

But by their very nature, skip-generation work arrangements are a limited opportunity for two age groups to meet and learn new skills and stories from each other.

Campa’s grandmother, Gutierrez, said her husband who co-ran the business with her died eight years ago. “But I don’t feel alone, because I have so much of my family here.” Gutierrez said she’d like to keep working for her husband’s legacy for as many years as possible.

So if you’re ever offered this kind of opportunity, “cherish it” and don’t let the time go to waste, Campa said. “As an adult, I want time to slow down. I want to be able to be present. My grandma is the last grandparent I have,” she said.

“Working in corporate, I never really had time to visit my grandma,” Campa recalled. “After work. I had to go pick up my son and go home and start to get ready for the next day. Now I get to actually sit down to have lunch with her.”

“Even though she’s like, ‘I have work to do,’ she does take the time to talk,” Campa continued. “When I get her in a talking mood, we could be there for an hour and just have granddaughter-grandma time.”