You have no items in your cart. Want to get some nice things?
Go shopping
So far, my columns have focused on advice for Generation Y, with advice for parents and educational organisations thrown in. Today, I’d like to focus on employers. As I said before, recruiting Gen Y isn’t the problem. Organisations speak their language; they attract these young adults. The issue lies in retaining them.
After careful investigation of both sides of the story, I have concluded that Gen Y isn’t the lazy, careless generation without a work ethic, as some employers perceive. Rather, there is a gap between the way Gen Y-ers want to be motivated, engaged and managed, and the way they actually are.
So, you’re an employer, you’ve recruited a bunch of new graduates, but two years later they’ve all left. What went wrong? Perhaps you claimed to value personal development, but you cancelled their first training meeting because a non-flexible deadline “suddenly” appeared. Maybe you declared individual potential important and that people can climb the ladder quickly if they’re good, but in reality, there is not even a talent management system in place, and you have no idea who your high potentials are. You may have assured them that there is transparent communication and that the door is always open, but what really happens is that you are too busy to properly inform your team of new assignments, and when someone tries the open door there is no one there. Maybe you claimed to be a firm with many international secondment opportunities, which in fact don’t exist. My only advice: walk the talk, or adjust your recruitment language.
What motivates Gen Y? If you ask them, things like “challenging, interesting work” and “fulfilment” pop up. They want a chance to learn from their colleagues and work with great people, to work in an environment without barriers and with transparent communication, to be trusted with some measure of responsibility, and to work at something that means something to them, which can also benefit others. What they don’t often mention, as it’s a given, is the opportunity to continue to learn. The way organisations incorporate these aspects into their organisational model is a whole different story, but from experience, I’ve seen that it’s certainly not impossible.
How does Gen Y want to be managed? Examine larger organisations and you will always find at least oneboss who can handle Gen Y with ease and still be popular. If you observe the two parties, there is already an unspoken understanding of what they expect from each other; they both know what must be said to produce optimal performance. It seems that those bosses feel they can trust Gen Y-ers, and therefore, they allocate them more responsibility. It’s not a coincidence that most of these bosses also have Gen Y kids.
One complaint I often hear from employers is that Gen Y-ers aren’t ready to become managers themselves because they don’t display leadership-type behaviour. Organisations are absolutely right here. Unless Gen Y is currently developing a new leadership style, which could be the case, they are not yet ready for the traditional style of leadership.
The reason for this is that we haven’t had as many opportunities as previous generations did to practice our leadership skills in a pre-work environment. These days, our families only consist of 2-3 children on average, compared to families who had 7-8 children in previous generations. So when we were growing up, we didn’t have as much responsibility for our younger siblings as past generations had. It’s the same at school: we did lots of group work (the system is set up in this way), learned to work together and delivered a result, everyone being equal. It’s not surprising then that in the work environment, Gen Y is very skilled at working as a team but not quite at leading one.
I’m not suggesting that organisations should change their whole organisational model and culture for the sake of Gen Y. Still, this generation will only take up a larger percentage of the workforce in the years to come. So perhaps it’s time to make some changes for the future?
Marjon Huizing
Marjon was born into an entrepreneurial family in a Dutch city next to Rotterdam. She is intrigued by how organisations develop themselves and their people and how an organisational culture is formed. She studied International Business (MsC in Organisation & Management and Human Resource Management) in Tilburg, the Netherlands and Montreal, Canada, and Organisational Psychology in London. After her studies Marjon worked a number of years for Deloitte in the Netherlands. She now runs Excelerate Talent, a HR services organisation that offers coaching, training and consulting services. She also works with individuals to help them develop careers that make them happier and give them fulfilment, meaning and purpose.
Directionally agreeing to the analysis you set out above, I still have to question whether it be fair to say that today’s young people just do not seem to be used to get on with and complete what they perceive as tedious tasks.
From a very young age many would have been presented with a plethora of choices selecting what they think is most fun – or if neither is attractive – opt out entirely. Spoiled with continuous entertainment and attention from parents/ their surroundings, have they lost the appreciation that some things just have to be done – regardless of their ‘fun factor’?
It must be (and is) recognised by organisation that it is critical to harvest the massive potential of this generation, having access to and the ability to deal with information at an entirely new level than ever before, however is it right that organisation/ corporates should change the tune to match this generation’s dance or is it time this generation also learn (the hard way) they are not exempt from climbing the ladder?
Helena, I certainly agree that the fun-factor is very much in place in this generation (and if nothing changes it will be even more so for the next generation). I don’t think that this generation copes very well without any entertainment in daily live; if you have a look around on the tube you will see a lot of youngsters playing their favourite music while playing a game on their mobile. The fun-factor is everywhere. Even some of the degrees Gen Y studied are perceived to be fun-studies. However, I’m not sure (yet) if the fun-factor is the cause for the refusal to do tedious tasks. I think there is another factor in place here: the way we are brought up. One of the first tedious tasks that we come across in live are probably household chores. There are families where children do not have to help out by performing any kind of household chores and other families where children can get away by saying ‘no’ to it. From an early age, next to having a fun-factor in life, they also learn that you can get away by not performing tedious tasks and that somebody else will do them for them.
There is on the other hand still a group of Gen Y-ers that have been told to help out in the house and that ‘no’ was not an answer. If my answer to my mum was ‘I don’t feel like it…’, her reply would be: ‘Then it’s time that you start feeling like it, so now get on with it’. Accordingly, I’ve learned that there are tasks in life that just have to be done. whether you like them or not. From personal experience I can only guess that this group will perform the tedious tasks without too much of a complain.
In this case it’s probably just as football hooligans: the bad ones spoil it for the good ones and everybody only remembers the bad ones…
Should organisations change their tune? My answer would be ‘partly’. Gen Y are speaking out what they want from work/the organisation. Some of these wishes are actually the same wishes as the older generations have, but they never vocalised them. So if an organisation can adapt to those wishes, this will create a more motivated and engaged workforce all together. Secondly, the way organisations are currently set up and run, are devised by Baby Boomers and Gen X. If we think about our organisations and to have them ready for the future, these organisational models and structures could be out of date and may need to be re-evaluate anyway in order to compete in the world economy. On the other hand, just as with your washing and food shopping, I think organisations are legitimate to say ‘just get on with this’ as every job will contain fun-tasks and tedious tasks.