Staff Trek: The Next Generation

Sometimes I find myself in conversations about what the future generation will mean for businesses, and more specifically the ways in which HR may need to respond to the impending subsidence of the baby boomers in preparation for the tsunami of GenY+-ers. There’s some generalised anxiety about it, but very little in the way of specifics. But from what I’ve read* and observed there are real trends – some good, some bad – that would be worth thinking about. The biggest single trend is that GenY+ are active participants entering a world largely structured around assumptions that they will be passive recipients. By way of disclaimer, I think it is sometimes hard to distinguish the kind of commentary on ‘turbulent youth’ that has been commonplace since Plato from GenY+ characteristics – but I still think the following are worth consideration:

Baby boomer boo-boos:

Hierarchy: GenY+ doesn’t get hierarchy. They distrust it. They are networked, they trust their peers, they respect people for what they know more than how old they are. This makes increasingly good sense in a world where things change fast and expertise and experience are fleeting. So trust is hemorrhaging from top-down structures such as internal comms, traditional advertising and broadcast media and conventional management models as peer-to-peer recommendation and interaction gain ground. From a genY+ perspective a hierarchical organisation is not a meritocracy – almost by definition. A meritocracy is flat (if a little bumpy) and fluid.

Non-participative events: organisations thrive on them – classroom-style events, often called meetings or presentations, in which one person talks for most of the time, then allows a few minutes for questions. Compare this format to the forum, blogs or tweets. Stephen Fry gets 140 characters – same as the rest of us. It is up to us to decide whether to follow him or not; ultimately ownership of the space rests with us. In a forum no-one’s voice (except the moderators) carries inherent weight, instead respect must always be earned. The GenY+ attitude strikes previous generations as arrogance – but really it is a purist model of meritocracy and inclusion: ‘we will listen to everyone, but space in our attention has to be earned’. GenY+ are distinguished most clearly from GenX and earlier by their need to share what they experience online – as they experience it.

Life/work balance: this is some weird notion cooked up by GenX people who still think there is some way of distinguishing between life and work. This is surely some terrible form of bad faith: as if your work wasn’t part of your life. Ask a GenY+ ‘are you working right now?’ and they will struggle to answer a significant part of the time. And by inference inflexible working environments which simultaneously fail to acknowledge the contributions made outside working hours and the potential for sloth within them seem relics of a Victorian age. The office, a workhouse.

Unwritten rules (and to some extent rules): GenY+ expect more transparency about the rules, and have a low tolerance for task environments where the rules are not clear. In games what you can and can’t do is generally made explicit from the outset – moves permitted only f you happen to be on good terms with a certain player are not features of any game environment I know. More generally, rules are there to be explored and pushed to their limit: often the best rewards are to be found in the most inaccessible places. GenY+ are results-driven, rule averse. ‘tell me what you want done and I’ll figure out the rest’.

Being told how to do things: the wild-west of online breeds entrepreneurial, problem-solving attitudes. Typically there are many way to achieve the same outcome, and in technology anything is possible. Games are much the same, often every task can be accomplished differently, depending on your character. Organisations which set GenY+s a task, then prescribe a way to do it may leave employees feeling frustrated and undervalued.

Dis-connectivity: being in any situation where one is required to focus on a single task or disconnect from the online network which one inhabits. The problem is partly one of attention-span but principally an experiential issue: if the way that you experience the world is in terms of its currency in your networks, switching off your networks disconnects you from the event ‘If I can’t tweet, what am I listening for?’

GenY shortcomings:

Thorough consideration: GenY+ struggle to think things through carefully. Their world is awash with superficiality and instant reactions. They suffer from adult attention-deficit disorder. They tend to allocate too little time to weighing up pros and cons or considering all perspectives. Their strategic vision may be poor and they may miss the bigger picture or the long game in the pursuit of immediate achievements.

Loyalty and care: in the online world people flit in and out as the situation requires: acquaintances tagged in the same picture, brief encounters in the heat of battle, fleeting wifi-allegiances. GenY+ increasingly inhabit a world where organisations pay them by the day and they, in return, owe no debt of allegiance. Their media is organised in a bubble around them, wrapping them in a blanket of traffic which relates only to their own personal needs and desires.

Old fashioned communication skills: spend enough time exchanging text-speak chat online and the ability to put together a carefully argued white paper, or build a relationship face-to-face is going to suffer. Substantiation of this widely-shared view will have to await the longitudinal research, but a combination of factors ranging from shorter, more reflexive patterns of communication together with the egocentricity of online environments seems to me to make this highly likely.

In summary, I suspect there are significant implications for organisations looking to attract and assess good staff, for the onboarding and training process, for policy, and for the way that an organisation is structured in order to achieve short and long-term objectives.

*For example the CIPD conducted some solid research into this (http://www.cipd.co.uk/hr-resources/survey-reports/organisations-generation-y-employees-web-2.0-technologies.aspx ), and the book ‘The Kids are Alright’ (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kids-Are-Alright-Generation-Workplace/dp/1422104354/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1308062035&sr=1-1) draws some more general conclusions based on a variety of research findings.