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Generation Gap
The Millenials move into a newly tough work environment as employers struggle to understand and accommodate them.
by Charles Molineaux
May 20, 2009
"
That perfect career they thought they would have
isn't turning out very quickly. Generation X often struggled with authority. Generation Y struggles
with reality." - Tim Elmore
Lauren Andrews of Alpharetta sums up her rude awakening very simply. "And then I went to my
first job interview!" she laughs.
Now 26, Andrews says she was like many her age, eagerly anticipating a fast-moving
successful career, thanks to years of being told that she was destined for great
things.
After graduating from Georgia State University with a degree in marketing, she abruptly
discovered that her work experience in managing a tanning salon and a spa didn't carry much weight
in the corporate world.
"I would say it was a letdown for me," she recalls, "but at the same time I had my father
standing there saying, 'You're shooting for the sky, and you need a reality check. This is a
reality check.'"
Today's lean economy and sparse job market are providing a harsh reality check indeed for
millions in what is commonly referred to as "Generation-Y" or the "Millennial" generation. At the
same time, some employers are taking a more careful look at some broad-brush stereotypes routinely
applied to the age group and developing new ways to relate to them.
Roughly defined as those born between 1980 and 2000, these young people number upwards of 80
million. Long a coveted target for youth-oriented marketers and advertisers, the Millennials are
now trying to establish themselves in the working world, a world in which the landscape and outlook
have drastically changed for them within the past year. It is also a world for which some observers
say they may be an awkward fit and in which employers are struggling to deal with them as its
future work force ... and ultimately, its leaders.
Like it or not.
It's all about... "I"
"I believe they are self-absorbed, not selfish, but self- absorbed," muses Tim Elmore,
founder and president of Growing Leaders, an Atlanta nonprofit that works with some 50,000
Millennials a year in an effort to cultivate tomorrow's leaders.
He says countless focus groups and surveys of Millennials reveal that "they feel very
special. They feel very entitled. They don't want to pay their dues. Life has been fairly quick and
fairly easy for them."
That is one running theme in numerous analyses of what is also sometimes called "Generation
Why," as in, "Boss, why are you ordering me to do that?" In surveys of businesses, employers report
that their Millennial workers expect higher pay, faster promotion and more flexible work
schedules.
A 2005 white paper by Deloitte Consulting offers the following assessment of Gen-Y: "most
'hovered over' generation ever in our country; unprecedented parental supervision and advocacy,"
and proposes its members have been "basking in 'the Decade of the Child.'"
These are people, says Elmore, who grew up with highly involved parents constantly praising
and affirming them and going to great lengths to boost their self-esteem.
"I have been to Little League awards banquets," he says, laughing, "where ninth-place award
ribbons were given out. Ninth place, if you can imagine that!"
Another recurring theme for observers is the generation's fixation on, and comfort with,
technology.
Unlike their predecessors in the Baby Boom, or even the famously skeptical Generation-X,
Millennials have grown up steeped in ubiquitous consumer electronics. The personal computer was
entering widespread use before they were born, and today they zealously embrace cellphones,
iPhones, iPods, Blackberrys, Trios, laptops and constellations of personal electronic devices for
entertainment, e-mail and relentless text messaging.
"Oh, the texting. Oh, that texting, the texting," sighs Pegine Echevvaria, president of the
Florida leadership consulting firm Team Pegine. "I have hired several Millennials, and I can
definitely say some of them drive me crazy. If you're talking to me, I'm not expecting you to be
texting your friends that 'I'll see you tonight.' If I'm your manager, I want you to be talking to
me!"
Hype vs. Hard Data?
But some employers who work with them suspect the generalizations about Millennials are ...
much too general.
"They really don't want anything different from everybody else in the work force" concludes
Linda Christensen, a shareholder at Atlanta accounting firm Bennett Thrasher. "They want to be
treated with respect. They want to have an opportunity to contribute. They want their work to be
meaningful."
"I didn't want to just take a job to take a job," says Millennial Chloe Lufkin, 25, now a
marketing apprentice at Growing Leaders. "Maybe that's something that my generation wrestles with.
We really feel a need to do something we feel passionate about."
Some experts suspect much of Gen-Y's "tech-obsessed slacker" rep may be a bad rap.
Ginny Olson, a principal with Towers Perrin, a human resources consulting firm, proposes
that the unflattering image is largely hype based not on statistics but on marketing campaigns
aimed at students and younger workers as consumers, not employees.
"I think it's this whole marketing thing," she proposes. "They don't tend to have any survey
data. And when you move to the employment relationship, I don't know that all of those things that
you do to sell to someone are the same thing that you experience in the workplace."
"Not many of ours fit that mold," agrees Lisa Burton, vice president, Meeting Expectations,
a meeting and association management company in Buckhead. "I would say we have a lot of exceptions
to what you've seen in the media."
Burton estimates that Millennials make up as much as 30 percent of her staff and says they
do stand out, but not for any lack of a work ethic. Instead, she says, her Gen-Y employees' most
noteworthy distinction may be their constant demand for input.
"They do want frequent feedback," she observes. "If something needs to be corrected, they
want to know as soon as possible. That's something I wish we, in the older generations, were better
at."
It is on the feedback issue that Echevvaria declares her research has upended another
stereotype. For a soon-to-be-published white paper, she conducted a survey on how Millennials want
to be managed.
"Absolutely overwhelmingly," she declares, "they want to have face-to-face contact with
their managers. They want to get feedback face-to-face. They did not want to be managed through
text or e-mail. That surprised us totally."
Burton says her company has already taken steps to accommodate its younger workers, steps
that may well benefit older ones as well. In the past three years, Meeting Expectations has
instituted monthly one-on-one sessions between employees and managers, quarterly meetings to
discuss goals, and even a social committee that lets junior workers assemble events, thereby giving
them extra experience and ownership of a project without the high stakes of doing it for clients.
Christensen says Bennett Thrasher is now in the third year of its own initiative to open
lines of communication that include coaching for employees and training for managers in dealing
with workers of all age groups.
"We help set up what their goals are in their job. Their coach actually sets some standards
and tries to help them map their goals to what their corporate goals are so that we can identify
early whether there's a disconnect."
It's well worth the trouble, she says, to avoid problems with those few employees whose
personalities truly don't fit the firm's culture. "That turnover can be painful because you spent a
lot of time training somebody."
Shock Treatment
Even as employers puzzle over their newest workers, Millennials are being forced into a
jarring attitude adjustment, courtesy of today's harsh economy.
"They're having such a hard time finding a job. I don't think that they think they're hot
stuff anymore," says Andrews with a sigh.
As an older Millennial, she mentors students at her alma mater, Georgia State. "Some close
friends of mine have lost their jobs and have gone six to eight months without having any kind of
position."
"I think some of them are headed for depression," Elmore warns. 'It's the disparity between
the world they grew up in with Mom and the world they're going into without Mom. That perfect
career they thought they would have isn't turning out very quickly. Generation X often struggled
with authority. Generation Y struggles with reality."
The reality of the tightening job market has already brought profound shifts in outlook.
A new survey by Towers Perrin reveals that between August 2008 and December 2008, the
percentage of workers younger than 30 who feel "disenchanted" exploded from six percent to 65
percent. The percentage of disenchanted workers older than 30 also climbed during that period but,
while steep, theirs was a less dramatic twofold increase from 13 percent to 28 percent.
At the same time, the percentages of workers under 30 who believe strongly in the goals of
their organization, who feel willing to put in a great deal of effort and who say their employers
inspire them to do their best work, fell sharply. Among their older colleagues, those numbers
barely budged during that period.
Olson chalks it up to experience, specifically a lack of experience with economic hard
times.
"If we look at the data," she points out, "you get more disillusionment, the younger you
get. To some extent, it's probably a factor of the experience of being in the work force. The older
end of the work force has been through some of these cycles before. These [younger] people haven't.
It is a shock."
The once high-flying Millennials are certainly placing a new premium on stability. The
Towers Perrin survey found that in December 2008, workers of all ages identified "secure position"
as the most important consideration in their work experience, eclipsing the previous
across-the-board priority "work/life balance." That was a slight shift for workers older than 30
who had previously named a secure position as priority No. 2. It was a major change for
workers younger than 30 who, the previous August, said they considered a secure position as only
their fifth priority.
Lufkin says the retrenchment is a struggle for people like her who grew up constantly being
told the sky was the limit.
"That's just not always the case," she laments. "You just had a lot of affirmation if you we
were in a healthy home environment and people were believing in you and saying you were going to be
great and you have a lot to offer. We learned that if you did everything right in the formula that
equals success, then it would be an easy road. I've just found that it's not."
Elmore says a little trial by fire may be helpful for America's youth, especially if
frustrated employers may have been giving serious consideration to better motivated foreign workers
as an alternative. "The kids in India are very willing to work," he observes. "They are hungry for
a job. Maybe the economy is going to make [American Millennials] hungry. Let's see."
Up to Speed
Even now, employers struggle with a lesson that may be termed "remedial office etiquette."
Gen-Y's affinity for informality sometimes clashes with what is considered appropriate workplace
behavior and, perhaps most visibly, attire. Echevvaria chuckles, "I have had to have discussions
with some of my staff. One girl came in and she had a nice pair of pants and a shirt, she bent down
to go file, and the pants were so low that the thong stuck out! Well, that's inappropriate dress!"
Clothing retailer Stein Mart reports it saw tremendous popularity for its workshops on what
is, and is not, appropriate business wear. (A company representative says it was "painful" when the
program was discontinued earlier this year in a round of budget cuts.)
Andrews, now a senior manager for sites and contracts at Meeting Expectations, sees the
need.
"There is a mentality that we're more laid back. 'Business casual' is wearing flip-flops and
jeans." Today, she gratefully acknowledges the strict rules at her first post-college employer,
Ritz-Carlton. "I think that was almost the best thing that happened to me. You had to wear a full
business suit every day. There were certain guidelines on open-toed shoes, closed-toed shoes, the
jewelry you can wear, nail polish, down to the nitty-gritty. Now I don't run into any issues."
Christensen sees some effort to bring new workers up to speed as a necessary investment, in
part because waves of aging Baby Boomers will eventually retire and have to be replaced, but also
because it's in all employers' interests to bring the best and brightest on board, even if it takes
some doing.
"These are your future. This is your succession planning. So, you owe it to yourself to
listen to the great ideas that they have and to motivate them to want to be here," she says. "And
the only way they are going to be motivated to be here is if they feel like they're contributing
for us and not just a worker bee or cog in a machine that just keeps going."
Echevvaria has one more theory about the alarms over Millennial workers: amnesia.
"The people who've been complaining are the Baby Boomers," she says snickering. "I culled
all the articles that HR people were writing back in the '60s, and '70s, about 'those hippies' and
'those young people who don't want to work.' If you take out the pictures, the articles being
written today are the same. Aside from technology difference, everything today is the same as what
was being complained about back then. Suddenly those of us in the Baby-Boomer generation
forgot what we were like when we were young."
Olson suspects that, in today's increasingly age-diverse multigenerational workplaces,
Millennials may also be easy targets, getting unfair blame for on-the-job friction that may be more
a product of inadequate company policies. "We have data," she says, "that illustrated that
companies with good HR practices, good training programs, good performance-management systems tend
not to have these generation differences as much as those organizations that have, perhaps, not
been paying that much attention to those issues. So something like, 'I'm early in my career and I'm
not getting enough feedback on my performance' manifests itself in people saying, 'We've got some
problems here.'"
Christensen says it can be as simple as listening, and maybe explaining a little.
"With older people, you say 'do this' and they do it," she observes. "The younger people
want to know why. It's a challenge if you're under the gun, but I have three kids so I'm used to
hearing 'why, why?' Ultimately you get a better work product if they do understand why. And if
you're willing to potentially recognize that you may have hired somebody who's smarter than you,
you open yourself up to learning from them."
