The oldest Gen Xers are fast approaching 35 years of age. One outcome is that they’re starting to find themselves being included in some influential forums inside of their workplaces, as they continue to challenge current structures, values, cultural norms, visions and policies. Some (most) companies have been caught off-guard. This emerging group of ‘young-snots’ is supposed to grow-up and adopt the values and world views of senior and more experienced Baby Boomers in the work-place.
The oldest Gen Xers are fast approaching 35 years of age. One outcome is that they’re starting to find themselves being included in some influential forums inside of their workplaces, as they continue to challenge current structures, values, cultural norms, visions and policies.
Some (most) companies have been caught off-guard. This emerging group of ‘young-snots’ is supposed to grow-up and adopt the values and world views of senior and more experienced Baby Boomers in the work-place.
This isn’t going to happen. Generational Theorists have been shouting it from the roof top for years now… this is not a phase that Gen Xers are going through. It’s a value system – a world view. You don’t grow up and out of value systems and world views. Baby Boomers never ‘turned into’ their senior Silent Generation parents and bosses, and Gen Xers aren’t going to either. These are young Gen Xers growing up into older Gen Xers. It’s as simple as that.
The question that must be asked and answered right now is…how are you (Baby Boomer manager) going to attract, recruit, retain, reward, motivate and get the best of your Bright Young Things?Because if you’ve learned anything, then it’s that your Bright Young Things don’t do things they way your current older staff do things.
I sat yesterday in a local pub with a friend who’s just taken over the position of regional manager inside of a large financial institution. He has a couple of ‘challenges’ that have emerged since taking on his new position, and off-loaded them as we sat slowly drinking our beer. The one that caught my attention was a request he’d received from one of his Bright Young Things. He had a hobby outside of work that required him to be available earlier in the afternoon than the business currently allowed him to be available. He simply wanted to start earlier in the day and leave earlier in the afternoon. The problem was that the current business policy only officially gave him the ability to be flexible by 30 minutes and not 1 full hour as required. What was he to do?
The person concerned was a valuable member of the team. He told me he was tempted to ‘do a Ricardo Semler’ (you’ll have to read 7 Day Weekend), but he wasn’t sure of the fall out? If he did this for one person, what were the chances his entire staff might approach him during the following week with similar, equally valid requests? Sound familiar?
One might be tempted to write this story off as fairly normal in any business setting, and as old as any organisation itself. People have always wanted ‘out of the ordinary’ working times to accommodate their hobbies and out of business activities. Except for two things: Firstly managers are starting to accommodate these type of requests more and more, because they’re realising, and this is my second point, that for Gen Xers, this is the stuff that causes them to stay or leave a company.
In Namibia last month at the conference of a large multi-national, I had a conversation about these types of requests with the HR Director of this particular company. He spoke of an annual job fair in Chicago that their company attended every year. Over the last few years he said they’d started to notice some very different questions being asked by prospective candidates. Instead of the normal questions about profitability, career opportunities and vision statements, candidates were asking questions like, ‘can I bring my fish tank and dog to work’; ‘are their child-care facilities’; ‘what is the dress code’; will I be able to decorate my own working space’? The questions being asked had more to do with integrating their life into the work space, than whether the company concerned was going to be profitable in the next 5 years.
Last week I received an e-mail from a Bright Young Thing working in a company we’ve done some work in. Here are a few of the questions they asked:
“ Is it a realistic to want to be treated as an asset
(specifically but perhaps not only as an employee)? – Or is it idealistic?
“ What are my responsibilities as such an employee?
“ How did you yourself determine your passion?
“ Why do I not have a thing about which I am completely sure?
On our GameBreaker site we’ve started to collect stories from Bright Young Things and their reflections on the company they’re working in. The brief on the web site has been for stories about companies getting it right, and companies getting it wrong. It’s been a slow start, but perhaps it’s worth a visit every now and then. Especially if you want to hear from Bright Young Things the world over. (http://www.tomorrowtoday.biz/gb/story.htm)
The question that must be asked and answered right now is… how are you (Baby Boomer manager) going to attract, recruit, retain, reward, motivate and get the best of your Bright Young Things? Because if you’ve learned anything, then it’s that your Bright Young Things don’t do things they way your current older staff do things.