How do you define work? I was at the Washington Workplace Summit last week when the lunchtime keynote speaker, Jeff Utecht, ended with a line that really stuck with me and sent me down a mental rabbit hole.
“Leadership is not choosing one generation’s definition of work over another. It is creating a definition of work that works for all.”
And then I started to wonder, have we ever actually had an agreed upon definition of work, or have we just been operating on accepted norms?
Utecht walked through how each generation defines work differently, and the contrast is striking. Baby Boomers define work as responsibility — a long-term investment in stability and identity. Gen X sees it as a practical exchange of skill for opportunity. Millennials define work as personal growth connected to meaning and purpose. Gen Z sees work as one part of life, not the center of it.
Those are generational norms, not individual guarantees. I’d be willing to bet there were Boomers in that room who never defined work as identity, and Gen Z workers who are outworking everyone around them. Generational patterns tell you where someone might be coming from. They don’t tell you where that specific person actually is.
Which means the labels are a starting point, not a conclusion.
Every generation walks into the workplace carrying assumptions about what work is — what it’s supposed to feel like, what it’s supposed to give you, what you owe it and what it owes you back. But those assumptions were never written down. Never negotiated. Never spoken out loud. They were just absorbed, the way you absorb the rules of the house you grew up in.
The tension we keep calling generational isn’t really about generations. It’s that the old definition of work was never a definition at all. It was a set of conditions. Scarcity. Limited options. A social contract enforced by pressure, not agreement. And now, with AI reshaping what work actually looks like day to day, those unspoken definitions are getting harder to ignore.
There may not be a universal definition of work, and that’s okay. What matters isn’t finding the one definition that works for everyone. What matters is whether you and your direct boss have ever actually compared notes on what work means to each of you. That’s where trust gets built or broken. That’s where friction is born. And that conversation, for most people, has never happened.
There’s a simple place to start, and it doesn’t require a consultant or a culture overhaul.
In Lean Six Sigma process improvement the best place to start is understanding what the customer actually values. It’s called the Voice of the Customer (VOC for those who speak acronym). It sits in the Define phase of the DMAIC process, and the premise is simple: before you try to improve anything, you need to understand what the customer actually values. Not what you assume they value. What they actually care about, in their own words. And the customer doesn’t have to be external. It can be the person sitting across from you at your next one-on-one.
In this case, you and your direct boss are the customers. Using VOC allows you to put down your defenses and pick up your curiosity. If you’re a manager, ask your direct report what a good day at work actually looks like to them. What feels worthwhile and what feels like noise. What would have to be true about this job for them to still be here in three years. If you’re an employee, ask your boss the same questions. You might be surprised what you find out.
AI can tell you a lot about generational trends and workplace patterns. It cannot tell you what the person sitting across from you actually thinks about their job. That’s still a human conversation.
Those aren’t soft questions. They’re the foundation of every functional working relationship and most people never ask them because they feel awkward. But that awkwardness isn’t a sign the question is wrong. It’s a sign the conversation is overdue.
To be better at work, we need clarity. And clarity starts with a conversation, not a company-wide initiative.
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