Millennials & the Workplace

I had a conversation last night that sort of solidified a lot of things I’ve been thinking about over the past 8+ months and so I decided it was finally time to write about it.

The conversation I had was with my sister who works in Human Resources and a gentleman we met who is a CA and who has his own company. We were talking about generational differences among employees at a company/organization and what sort of problems come about as a result, but more importantly what positive changes occur as a result.

This man was in his 50s, and he’s been working for many years in a field in which 60+ hour work weeks are more than encouraged, they’re the norm. More than that, you’ll be more successful if you’re in the office for 12+ hours a day (and that doesn’t include the time you spend working via Blackberry or home office). This is the way you succeed… by stretching yourself as thin as possible and sleeping as little as you need to survive.

This man has a pretty small company from what it sounds like (in terms of number of employees), and one of his newer staff members is a 27 year old woman. What I loved about this man (we’ll call him Tony) is that he spoke so highly of his 27 year old staff member, and what he said was that he’s learning as much (if not more) from her as she could be learning from him. He said she’s aggressive and smart and stubborn, all in positive ways, and that she’s a great worker. Does she work 60+ hour weeks though? No. She works 9-5 every day… no more than that. What did he say about her productivity? She gets twice as much done as other employees of the company who work 1.5 times longer than her. She is likely the most efficient member of the company, and yet she doesn’t practice the time-honoured tradition of “burning the midnight oil”.

My sister, who as I said works in HR, lent credence to what Tony has observed, as this is what she works with a lot in her organization. In her workplace (and many others), there is a mixture of generations working in the same place. People as young as 22-24 (like me!) might be working in the same place as people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and even 60s. Their experience and lifestyles vary, and so do their expectations of their workplaces. As an HR person, it’s my sister’s responsibility to figure out how to make employees’ experience with the organization work with whatever expectations/needs they might have. You can’t just make it the requirement across the board that employees put in extra hours because that’s what it takes to succeed, because for the "millennials"/"echo boomers"/"generation Y", even 40 hours seems like too much… at least in terms of what your superiors expect you to do in 1 week. You can probably get it done in 20 hours.

And that brings me to another point. We get a bad rep (us millennials) for being tech-obsessed, having short attention spans, not being able to use language as well, etc., etc. However true some of these things may be, there are also extremely positive aspects of us as a result of the time we’ve grown up in. I think we know better, faster ways to do a lot of things. I think we realize how many resources we have access to when we have an Internet connection. I think we can do a lot “on the go”. The examples are endless… As with the 27 year-old CA, I too feel sometimes that I’m twiddling my thumbs at work because a project took me about half the time my superiors assumed it would. I’m not alone. That said, it doesn’t mean that 20-hour work weeks should become the norm, because now we have so much time to get so much more done. Efficiency, that’s what it is.

Another difference in the work place of the millennials is that individuals graduate from post-secondary education with a different concept of what their career will look like. I think my Mom and Dad’s generation looked to the future and envisioned themselves in a 40-year career, with no more than 2 positions. Longevity was looked upon as the ideal. Land yourself with a great position at a great company and stick with it for as long as you can. Now I don’t know about you, but that’s not how I see my career, and that’s not what I want my career to be like. Maybe it has something to do with attention spans, I don’t know, but I look forward to a career of moving around quite a bit… I want to stay at every job for at least 2 years, but then I want to move on to something else, and then something else, and then maybe when I get to the top of the ladder I’m looking to climb, then I’ll settle myself into something longer-term. But before I’m the boss? I’m moving around as much as I can. That’s the career I want for myself.

The last point I wanted to discuss was Internet use at work. Toronto Life did a good issue with some articles discussing Internet monitoring at companies and banning certain sites, etc., etc. They discussed some of the top companies in the world and how many of those companies actually encourage you to spend up to 20% of your work day doing personal stuff. There was lots of discussion about the benefits of this “personal time” and how it leads to much happier and more efficient use of the other 80% of your day. There was also examples like, “Taking 10 minutes to do online banking is better than taking 30 minutes to actually go to the bank during your workday”. It’s true – it’s all about efficiency. How can I most efficiently use my time? Also, how positive is my attitude towards my work? If it’s more positive when I can take a few minutes here and there to do something for me, then isn’t that better in the long run? I believe wholeheartedly that it is.

So there you go… some food for thought about different generations and the workplace. I love living in this time period… wouldn’t trade it for anything!