Ctrl-Alt-Delete: Generation Y reboot the workplace
Lorraine Mallinder
A new generation of employees is about to shake up the existing order in your workplace. Not only do they have the attitude, they also have the skills and savvy to boot. Some serious adjustments to your comfort zone will be required. Employers, for the most part, are totally unprepared.
Never has the generation gap been so wide, it seems. Accelerated cultural and technological change has played its part in the creation of a generation that challenges traditional perceptions of youth. Easy to caricature, far harder to define, they have been labelled with a variety of catchy titles, such as ‘Generation ringtone’ and the ‘echo boomers’. But perhaps the most common tag is ‘Generation Y’, a reference to their older siblings, ‘Generation X’ (born in the 1960s and 70s). The cut-off point between generations is always hard to define, but common opinion has it that the Y-ers were born between 1980 and 1995.
Cut to the chase
Discerning, suspicious, confused, sceptical and contradictory are just a few of the jumble of adjectives that have been applied to this generation. ‘They grew up with cell phones, pagers, laptops and bottled water, in a world of AIDS, crack and terrorist attacks,’ says US-based Y expert Eric Chester in a 2002 piece from The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Chester puts his own spin on the Y phenomenon, coining a new term, ‘Generation why’, in the process. Why indeed?
The question ‘Why should I?’ has probably been repeated ad nauseum by younger generations since Elvis first sparked off youth rebellion with his controversial pelvic thrust. But, for once, this sounds less like the petulant whine of rebels without a cause and more like the simply put, not to say blunt, question that it is.
Your response had better be snappy because the Y-ers don’t hang about. This generation lives fast. Immersed from an early age in a world of bits and bytes, many of them were booting up computers long before they learned to read and write. While baby boomers might have dozed beside their radio sets and Generation X enjoyed vegetating in front of the television, Generation Y are becoming masters of the digital world just by doing what they do in their leisure time: visiting chatrooms, playing games online and downloading MP3s. The web being the cornerstone of the latest industrial revolution, this generation is equipped for the workplace in a way that preceding generations were not.
The ease with which this generation is able to navigate between media, mouse clicking at breakneck speed, is already leaving older generations light years behind. This digital generation is capable of overturning what would traditionally be viewed as ‘intellectual authority’ in their homes, their classrooms and at work.
No dice
Not that ‘authority’ of any kind cuts much ice with Generation Y anyway. This is a generation that has grown up fast witnessing the pranks of older generations on their personal TV sets. Indeed, the typical bastions of society are looking none too reliable. Think Bill Clinton lying under oath about ‘that woman’, think dodgy accounting scandals in major corporations, think about a generation of baby boomers leaving a rather hefty pensions bill to . . . guess who.
Generation Y comes equipped with highly efficient bullshit detectors. And these are not deactivated when they enter the workplace.
All-consuming consumerism
But, no hard feelings, for the Y-ers are a pragmatic lot. There was a time when older generations would look on fondly as the young ’uns rallied to the causes of the just and the good, but times have most definitely changed. Let’s get one thing straight here—Generation Y are above all ultra-individualistic, their cause par excellence none other than all-consuming consumerism. They do not use politics, religion or class to express themselves, but products which help them forge their own identity. And we’re not just talking jeans and mobile phones here. Inextricably linked with identity is the activity that occupies over half our waking hours: work. Youth attaches substantial importance to the employer brand.
But don’t expect undying brand loyalty. Blind emotional attachment to work ended in the 1980s and 90s when parents were losing their jobs due to the effects of mass downsizing and outsourcing. Back then, Generation Y were already learning about resilience and self-sufficiency, attributes that have fostered an entrepreneurial mindset. Loyalty to an organization hinges on whether personal goals are being achieved, achievements that will build up the employee’s own brand on his CV, enabling him to climb onto the next rung of the career ladder. Smart organisations have already understood that the employer–employee relationship is as much about ‘what’s in it for them?’ as ‘what’s in it for us?’ Could it be that Y employees will pave the way for a more equitable deal in the workplace?
As baby boomer iconoclast Bob Dylan once rasped, “The times they are a-changin”. It certainly looks like Generation Y are going to be keeping employers on their toes and this might not be such a bad thing. Chester advises employers to drive change rather than to resist it and points out that the high-speed, stimulus-rich world that Generation Y inhabits has made them “adept at multi-tasking, fast thinking, passionately tolerant in terms of diversity and astoundingly creative”. Employers who don’t move with the times are unlikely to make it with this generation. They will be the losers.
References
Trigaux, R. (2003) ‘Generation Y needs new business model’, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
15 December 2003.
Excerpt from Above the Clouds © 2008 EFQM. All rights reserved.