Christine Garzia, Jacques Cordina and Alex Grech
How can organisations manage a workforce spanning up to five generations, increasingly reshaped by the rise of AI?
This question sits at the heart of Working Across Generations, the first phase of a multi-phase research programme examining digital literacy, generative AI, and multigenerational workplace dynamics in Malta.
Drawing on eight focus groups with 64 participants aged 18 to 65, spanning education, social partners, policy, civil society, employers, and youth organisations, this report offers grounded, stakeholder-informed insight into how workers across generations are experiencing rapid technological change. Its findings challenge age-based assumptions and point instead to what organisations can actually do.
Beyond age: what really drives workplace friction. The research finds that friction in multigenerational workplaces is driven less by age itself and more by the gap between what different people assume is normal and what organisations have made explicit. Communication norms, learning expectations, GenAI use, and what counts as professional behaviour are all areas where implicit assumptions diverge, and where clear, shared expectations make a measurable difference.
Six findings that reframe the conversation. From the most visible fault line in multigenerational workplaces, communication channel mismatch, to the pipeline risk created when GenAI automates the routine tasks that have traditionally built junior talent, the report surfaces six practical signals for organisational leaders. It also unpacks two fundamentally different relationships to work: one built on belonging, the other on contribution, and explains why treating them as the same retention problem is where organisations tend to go wrong.
A framework for action. The report translates its findings into five organisational pillars and a tiered set of practical actions, from a one-page communication charter and monthly safe-to-learn slots, to longer-term strategies for protecting early-career development and embedding transversal skills as core infrastructure rather than optional extras.
A call for evidence-based practice. Malta’s compressed labour market, SME-dominated, demographically diverse, and under acute retention pressure, makes it a revealing lens for dynamics that larger economies are beginning to feel. The mechanisms documented here are designed to transfer. An appendix guides readers through replicating this work in their own jurisdiction.
Who Should Read It
Employers, organisational leaders, and HR and learning professionals will find practical frameworks they can test and adapt without large budgets or formal infrastructure. Policymakers, skills bodies, and social partners will find evidence relevant to workforce strategy, lifelong learning design, and the governance of AI in employment. Educators, trainers, and researchers working on digital literacy or future of work questions, particularly in small states and SME-heavy economies, will find a replicable methodology and a set of working hypotheses worth testing in their own contexts. And anyone who has ever wondered whether the friction in their multigenerational workplace is really about age, or about something else entirely, will find an answer here.