What Home Care Leaders Need to Know About Managing Millennials, Gen Z, and Baby Boomers in Elderly Care
As a home care leader attending the recent Home Care Association of America (HCAOA) conference, one keynote session stood out: Jason Dorsey's presentation on generational trends. Dorsey, president of The Center for Generational Kinetics and one of the leading researchers on generational differences in the workplace, shared insights that immediately reframed how to think about managing multi-generational teams.
Here's the reality of leading a home care agency today: teams span four generations, from Baby Boomers approaching retirement to Gen Z workers just starting their careers. Meanwhile, clients are primarily in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, each with their own expectations about how care should be delivered. Managing this generational mix effectively isn't just about reducing friction - it's essential for retaining talent and creating an environment where everyone can thrive.
Below are three trends every home care leader should understand.
Trend 1: Younger Generations Are Tech-Dependent, Not Tech-Savvy
There's a critical distinction that Dorsey emphasized: younger generations aren't necessarily better at understanding technology. As he put it during his keynote, Millennials and Gen Z "don't know how technology works - they just know they cannot live without it."
What Tech-Dependent Actually Means
Many Millennial and Gen Z employees can navigate an app intuitively, but they often can't troubleshoot when something goes wrong. They've grown up expecting technology to simply work, which creates specific expectations. When systems are clunky or require workarounds, they become frustrated quickly.
For Gen Z especially, Dorsey notes that "technology is the experience." If someone has always ordered from Amazon and received delivery within hours, they have no context for complex, multi-step processes. This isn't about being entitled—it's about baseline expectations shaped by their entire lived experience.
Implementation Implications
If you're implementing new software for scheduling, documentation, or billing, it needs to be intuitive from the first interaction. Younger staff won't tolerate systems that require extensive training manuals or multiple workarounds. Their expectations are specific: mobile-first design, instant notifications, visual interfaces, and quick response times. These aren't nice-to-have features - they're baseline requirements.
The Client Side
Interestingly, more elderly clients are becoming tech-dependent too, especially younger Baby Boomers entering care. They expect text updates about caregiver arrivals, digital payment options, and online portals to manage their care. This creates a dynamic where both staff and clients have rising expectations about technology, but neither group has much patience for systems that are difficult to use.
Testing Before Rolling Out
Before implementing any new technology, have staff from different generations test it. If your youngest workers say it's confusing, it likely won't work. If your oldest workers can use it comfortably, you've found something truly intuitive. The goal isn't to cater to one generation—it's to recognize that technology expectations have fundamentally shifted, and clunky systems now create friction on both sides of your business.
Trend 2: Generations Are Defined by Behavior, Not Birth Year
Dorsey challenged the typical approach to generational definitions during his presentation. He criticized speakers who define Millennials as "born 1980 to 2000" simply because "20 years" is a round number. Instead, he argues that generations are defined by formative events and shared experiences.
The 9/11 Example
As Dorsey explained, "You cannot be born after 1995 and process the significance of September 11th, 2001 in the way those born before 1995 do." If 9/11 has always been history to you—something you learned about in textbooks rather than experienced—you're not a Millennial. Similarly, Dorsey noted he could learn about the JFK assassination, but he would never experience it the way those who lived through it did.
This insight matters because it shifts the focus from arbitrary age ranges to actual behavioral patterns shaped by shared experiences.
What This Means in Home Care
The reality on the ground confirms this. Some 62-year-old caregivers eagerly adopt new scheduling apps and text updates to families throughout the day. Meanwhile, some 28-year-old employees prefer phone calls and paper schedules. The difference isn't their birth year - it's their exposure to technology, previous work experiences, and personal communication preferences.
Similarly, some 85-year-old clients insist on video calls with their caregivers and manage their medications through smartphone reminders, while some 70-year-old clients want everything handled through phone calls and in-person visits.
Better Hiring and Matching
For Hiring: Instead of screening candidates based on age, assess actual behaviors—how they prefer to communicate, their adaptability to new processes, their approach to problem-solving, and how they handle feedback and change.
For Client Matching: Look beyond age compatibility. Match caregivers and clients based on communication style preferences, comfort with technology, personality and interests, and care philosophy and approach.
When you focus on behavior rather than birth year, you make better hiring decisions and create stronger caregiver-client relationships.
Trend 3: Diversity Is the Baseline, Not the Goal
Perhaps the most striking insight from Dorsey's presentation was about diversity. He shared a personal story about his daughter, who attends an international school and has never known a time before there was an African American president or before marriage equality existed.
What "Normal" Means
As Dorsey put it, for younger generations, "diversity is what's normal." They grew up in diverse schools, communities, and workplaces. Working alongside people from different backgrounds, identities, and cultures isn't progressive or notable to them—it's simply expected. This means they expect workplace environments where everyone is treated with baseline respect and dignity, not as a goal to work toward but as a given.
How Expectations Shape Retention
For leaders managing Millennial and Gen Z staff, this creates a specific challenge. What feels like adequate diversity efforts to one generation feels like the bare minimum to another. Younger employees aren't impressed by diversity initiatives or inclusive language in handbooks - they're evaluating whether the actual environment matches those words.
When younger caregivers see colleagues treated differently based on accent, appearance, or background, they draw immediate conclusions about whether this is a place they want to stay. When they watch how leadership handles uncomfortable situations involving bias from clients or other staff members, they're assessing whether this agency aligns with their values.
Building Retention Through Inclusion
Agencies that successfully retain younger workers foster environments where inclusion is embedded in operations, not announced in meetings. This means everyone on the team understands that respect is non-negotiable, regardless of who the request comes from. When issues surface, leadership addresses them directly rather than avoiding discomfort. For example, when a client requests "no foreign caregivers," effective agencies explain their values clearly and help clients focus on caregiver qualifications instead.
Younger staff also notice representation. If leadership, management, and decision-making roles only reflect certain backgrounds while frontline positions reflect others, that tells a story. If training materials, marketing, and client communications only show certain types of families or caregivers, that tells another story.
The Business Case
The home care industry faces a talent shortage, and younger workers have options. They will choose agencies that genuinely value diverse perspectives and experiences over agencies where they feel their contributions are limited or overlooked. Creating an inclusive environment isn't about programs or statements. Instead, it's about consistent culture, real accountability, and a willingness to engage in difficult conversations when values are tested.
Moving Forward
Jason Dorsey's insights at the HCAOA conference provided a framework for understanding what drives different generations in the workplace. The key takeaway: stop managing by birth year and start managing by behavior, expectations, and values. Agencies that adapt to these shifts, implementing intuitive technology, focusing on behavioral compatibility, and embedding inclusion in daily operations, will be the ones that attract and retain the talent they need to thrive.
The generational differences in home care aren't obstacles to overcome. They're opportunities to build stronger teams and deliver better care when understood and managed effectively.
Ankota's mission is to enable the Heroes who keep older and disabled people living at home to focus on care because we take care of the tech. If you need software for home care, EVV, I/DD Services, Self-Direction FMS, Adult Day Care centers, or Caregiver Recruiting, please Contact Ankota. If you're ready to accept that the homecare agencies of the future will deliver care with a combination of people and tech, visit www.kota.care.
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