Like the rain, recessions fall on the just and the unjust, and on people of all ages. But not every age group will face the same problems or react to them in a similar way.

Some pundits are predicting that, in the coming age of austerity, the workplace will be the setting for intergenerational conflict. Tensions over unequal pension arrangements or varying attitudes to work may cause trouble.

Others argue that now is the time to invest in youth. My colleague Luke Johnson last week recommended hiring “as many bright young things as you can afford”, in the hope that “their dynamism will counteract the inevitable conservatism of an existing institution”.

Most of us are familiar with that alphabet soup of labels that is supposed to define different age groups – Generation X, Generation Y and so on. The trouble with these labels is that they lump together all kinds of people with different outlooks and concerns. In fact, your views are affected by the stage of life you have reached. Parents of teenagers face many similar challenges, whether they are in their 40s or their 60s.

The headlines tell us that, in broad terms, every cohort is struggling. Gen Y – those born between 1981 and the mid-1990s – is upset. In the UK, about 1m (one in five) 16-24-year-olds are out of work. Notoriously impatient, Gen Y’s high expectations of the world of work are not being met. They have been “derailed” by the recession and “slapped around the face,” said Alison Chadwick, group talent director at advertising agency AMV BBDO, at a conference in London two weeks ago.

Gen X – those born between the mid-1960s and 1980 – is grumpy. They are “least likely to stay with their current employer”, according to research from the consultancy Deloitte. The once fashionable “slacker” generation – irreverent, semi-detached – has been supplanted. Lisa Chamberlain, the 40-year-old American author of Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction, says Gen Xers find themselves squeezed between still powerful baby boomers and the digital natives of Gen Y. “We were hip for like five minutes in the 1990s,” she told Canada’s National Post. “Our moment in the sun came and went pretty quickly, and it wasn’t very sunny while it did last.”

Baby boomers – the postwar generation that, experts say, stretches all the way to include those born in the early 1960s – are worried. Their pensions have crumbled. Retirement has been postponed. Some have been hit by redundancy. Others have enjoyed expensive lifestyles that they can no longer afford.

All in all, this workforce of Ys, Xs and boomers is not a happy one. But that is just the surface-level story. Managers need to dig deeper. Consider the supposedly homogenous Gen Y grouping of 15-28-year-olds. Beneath the surface, you find four separate types of person under that heading: students, young singles, young couples and young couples with children. Each sub-set has different priorities. They may not have all that much in common.

Robert Barnard, chief executive of Decode, a Toronto-based consultancy that specialises in understanding younger workers, says he can demonstrate these differences very easily when he is addressing a mixed-age crowd.

First, he asks his audience to sit together in boomer, X, or Y groups. Then he asks them to sit as singles, couples, parents and so on. “Half the room changes seats,” he says.

Mr Barnard has another party piece. He asks everyone to consider what time they would prefer to start a morning meeting. The “empty-nesters” say 8.30: make a nice brisk start. Parents with school-age children say 9.30: get the school run out of the way first. Singles and couples without children say 10.30. “These differences have to do with life stages, not date of birth, and with the experiences you are actually going through right now,” Mr Barnard says. “This is what employers need to understand.”

Seen this way, a lot of generalisations about Gens X and Y, and the boomers, are revealed as inaccurate. Knowing that a colleague is 25, 38 or 62 years old tells you virtually nothing about them.

What are the implications for managers in all this? As they seek “more from less”, and put employees under greater pressure, they need to understand what stage of life individual employees have reached. What are the pressures at home? What are their commitments? Some colleagues will be more flexible than others. The ambitious can be stretched. Not every twenty-something wants the same thing.

Commercially, businesses need to get much smarter about how demand within age groups will vary according to the life stages people have reached. Treating all 18-34-year-olds, or all over-50s, as the same makes little sense. The downturn has exposed this sort of lazy thinking, for example in the property sector. So many of those “luxury” inner-city apartments aimed at prosperous young singles with identical life plans? Empty.

There are big prizes to be won by companies that lose the fixation on date of birth and instead focus on what people want and need now.

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