Print This
Email ThisManaging Generation Y isn’t all that different from managing anyone else. You need to demand a lot, manage a lot and respect the fact that they have a life outside of work. That being said, there are some things that Gen Y employees believe that past generations may not have thought at the same age. So for all you confused managers out there, here’s a list of things you should consider accepting when it comes to managing Generation Y.
1. What time he comes to work
Sometimes I come to work at 7 AM. Sometimes I come to work at 11 AM. Sometimes I’ll find myself all alone at the office for the better part of a day because my Gen Y co-workers are somewhere else. Lucky for us, we work at a start up where we only care about face time if there is an important meeting. I don’t mind if no one is at the office because I know that sometimes when I come in at 7 AM, I have a hard time concentrating and get no work done. And sometimes when I come in at 11 AM, I spent the entire morning in front of my laptop at home, getting a ton of work done.
If you’re managing a Gen Yer, and there are no important meetings on the schedule, don’t worry about what time he comes to work. Because, as we all know, results matter. Hours don’t.
2. What time he leaves work
Yesterday I left work at 3 pm to take a nap. Today, I’ll be working well past dinner. Maybe you got the point already, but I’ll say it again, hours don’t matter. Older folks can use the “I need to pick my kids up at school” excuse and walk out of work guilt free. We twentysomethings aren’t quite so lucky. You can only come up with so many doctor, dentist and family emergency excuses before they are worn out.
Create an environment where people don’t judge ANYONE who decides to leave early on a sunny Friday afternoon to meet up with some friends, because everyone trusts that the work will be done come Monday morning.
3. What’s on his computer screen
Don’t be surprised to see Facebook, Twitter, Brazen Careerist, ESPN, Gmail, Word, Excel and Powerpoint all open at the same time on your Gen Yers screen. In fact, only having those tabs open would be a fairly focused afternoon for me.
But it’s OK. We can still get our work done. All that stuff is open because, quite frankly, we’re all a little ADD. Sending out a tweet or leaving a comment on a blog is a necessary distraction every 20 minutes or so. Honestly, lots of Gen Yers wonder how anyone can sit at a desk and do nothing but work for 8 straight hours without going insane?
4. His ultimately meaningless fashion statements
When I worked for IBM, I was on a project at the Pentagon. As you might guess, this required a full suit every single day . As if this wasn’t painful enough, I swear my military co-workers shaved every hour on the hour. So when I walked in with my day old stubble, I felt a little out of place.
But you know what? I actually look better with a little stubble, and I would trade shaving for 10 extra minutes of sleep any day of the week. At one point I decided to grow a goatee. I wanted to see when my boss would tell me to shave it. He told me to shave it after a week. I told him it was in style and kept it for another week.
The message is: you’ve got to look past a little facial hair, or a pair of open toed sandals, and just worry about your employees’ work ethic and production if you want to get the most out of them.
5. Anything he does at happy hour
Everyone loves happy hour. It’s the time to kick back, relax and unwind from a long day of work….with the people you just worked with. Things happen. Drinks happen. We’re all young, we’re in our prime partying years and some of us handle our liquor better than others. So whatever you do, don’t judge your Gen Y employees based on what happens toward the tail end of happy hour.
The truth is, the managers should be long gone by the time things get a little crazy. And if they’re not, they should be getting a little crazy too. The worst thing I ever did at a happy hour (well, 2 hours after it officially ended) was engage in a little too much PDA with a co-worker. Not sure what came over us (hint: alcohol), and luckily no one saw it, but I can’t imagine what would have happened if anyone did. My advice: ignore what happens at happy hours, if you can’t, then I’d advise you stay away from the party.
6. His lack of “experience”
It’s OK if your Gen Y employee doesn’t know how to punch a time clock and can’t relate to your high school summer job experience. It has nothing to do with whether he will work hard for you. There is definite truth to the claim that you need to work hard as a child to learn the value of a dollar and the value of hard work, but what summer jobs can offer us is different now.
Your Gen Y overachiever couldn’t have settled for a summer job at McDonald’s if she’d wanted to, because a summer spent flipping burgers is not going to get you into Harvard. And it probably wouldn’t get you into a lot of less competitive schools. But a summer spent volunteering in Africa will go a long way toward getting you into a good college, and it betters the world, too. Look past her lack of traditional experience, teach your Gen Yer how to do the little things that she’s missed (even if you think it’s stupid), and figure out how to capitalize on the knowledge and experience she gained from leading her business organization or studying abroad.
7. His personal phone calls
When you were an entry level worker, maybe you wouldn’t have dreamed of calling your girlfriend to say hello right after lunch or dialing up your mechanic to schedule a time to drop your car off for service. But work and life are no longer two distinct entities and this goes for both the office and at home.
Look past the fact that it’s not business for everyone all the time at the office. Because just as I have no problem making personal calls at the office, I also have no problem making a business call or sending an email during my “personal” hours in front of the TV. Life happens 24 hours a day and now, so does work. So look past the personal phone calls at the office and enjoy how your Gen Y worker will use the whole day to get those results you need for the business.
For more timely, relevant, and engaging articles, subscribe to Brazen Careerist.
This is an excellent, excellent post. I don’t have anything to add, really — you make a ton of great points.
I like your #6 especially. A Gen Y pastiche: “I’ve reworked your web site code and generated a new organizational innovation strategy, but I need help operating the photo copier. How do I staple sort?”
I agree with you…to a point.
I just don’t think the blanket assertion for managing Gen Y works. For every Gen Y’er out there who keeps her Blackberry close and available when they use flexible time, there is a guy who is taking advantage of it by sitting on Facebook updating his profile every 10 minutes.
If Gen Y was generally accomplishing as much or more than their peers while doing all of that, I don’t think it would be an issue to many managers. I think the problem comes in that this is seen as a benefit to employees (because it is) and then a few people abuse it or production goes down and it goes away.
What is more important than managing to generations is managing to individuals. Individuals who have individual needs and who need different levels of structure. Managers also need to realize that what an employee thinks makes them successful isn’t always what actually makes them successful. I think both Gen Y and managers need to acknowledge that because of Gen Y’s lack of experience with work, we rarely know how we best work over the long term and that working under conditions you’d rather not is part of learning about how you work best.
I totally agree with you–except for one point.
I agree that managers do need to lighten up about dress code and hours worked and personal phone calls and just deal with the fact that the line between work and life has been blurred.
But on the happy hour point, I have to disagree with you. I am a Gen Yer, and I like to party, but when it comes to work happy hours, I stick to one or two drinks. I just feel that it is inappropriate to get sloshed with your boss there. It looks unprofessional and is definitely not the image you want to portray to the people who are in charge of your promotions and salary.
@Jennifer
Your point about work/life stems from a false premise. The line between work and life is not currently blurred in most of corporate America.
GenY is trying to blur it now to mold the workplace into what they want it to be, and they are meeting resistance from management in trying to make that happen.
The sad fact is that a large segment of workplaces can’t allow the kind of flexibility GenY desires because the workflow at many employers requires employees to be physically present during a set period of time to get the work done.
I will grant that some technical and creative employers can permit more flexibility. However, you cannot have virtual nursing, virtual manufacturing, or virtual many other fields no matter how “outside the box” you try to reinvent how the work gets done.
You are paid for your time at work to work and nothing else. You have lunch and breaks to pursue personal endeavors while at work, and short of a personal tragedy, I doubt much going on in someone’s personal life that requires constant immediate contact via social network sites or personal telephone calls.
And as I have always said, if the work can be done soon enough to allow you to leave work early, come in late, or take a day off, then you need more work to do to fill the time you are being paid for. And if your boss does not give you more work, you have a moral obligation to ask for more to do. Adopting that philosophy just may open the doors to advancement and recognition this generation so desperately wants.
Bluntly put, nobody gets a free pass on anything, until they can prove to me that they can deliver results that positively affect my goals and bottom line.
In other words, show me you why deserve these exceptions from what everyone else has to adhere to, and then we’ll talk. And it’s still not guaranteed you’re going to get any of them.
Thanks for the comments. I agree with a lot of points here. Not everyone can be trusted to do great work with this kind of freedom. Some people just don’t have the inner drive that’s necessary.
However, I do not agree with proving you can work the “old” way of 9 to 5 in a cubicle, before you can work the “new” way of wherever, whenever you want (within reason).
Instead, let your employees prove they can work the new way by giving them these freedoms at the beginning. If they fail, go ahead and get rid of them, or figure out a system that works better.
Ryan
@Steve
I agree with part of what you say, but not all.
True, there are professions where you do need to be paid for the time you’re there, like nusing, etc. However, that doesn’t mean that every profession is like that. You almost take the argument to the other extreme.
So, looking at the segment where it is possible, why not?
Another point you make:
“And as I have always said, if the work can be done soon enough to allow you to leave work early, come in late, or take a day off, then you need more work to do to fill the time you are being paid for.”
This I think is where there is a shift in perspective in the industries where possible. The shift is slow in happening, but that doesn’t lessen its reality or its validity, but there is a shift to start paying for results not time.
And one final thing, you say the line between work and life is not currently blurred in most of corporate America. To this, I’d respond that the line is most definitely blurred, just in the other direction. Work seems to constantly overflow into life. With cell phones, unpaid overtime, untaken vacation, and BlackBerries, work has encroached on many peoples’ personal lives.
What the battle seems to be now is to blur the line in both directions. If work comes into my personal time, then the personal time can come into work.
And it’s not as simple as merely saying I’ll only do my 8 hours a day with my 30 minutes for lunch and my two 15 minute breaks. I don’t know the last place I’ve worked that had that.
This is hilarious. Maybe it works for a tech worker at a start-up but when you join a real company where you actually have to turn something called a “profit” you quickly learn that you need to grow up. Must be nice living off of VC funding and not having to actually concern yourself with a bottom-line since everyone is just waiting around for a bigger sucker to buy you out.
Gen Y is going to learn some harsh lessons as the years progress. The ones that succeed will be the ones that can handle it without whining about not being able to go on Facebook every ten minutes.
More inflammatory garbage by another GenY blogger who wants to stir the pot and get ppl to post comments on his/her page (and get hits). I guess I am now part of that, nevertheless, hopefully my sacrifice is not in vein and others see how trite and shallow the Yers are in subject matter (maybe because of all that social networking, they aren’t learning anything worth talking about).
Love the article and I have shared it with my community.
I think I have Gen Y tendencies without even been one….is that allowed?
Sarah
Spell check would be nice before going off on a polemic rant, AJ. It’s vain, not vein.
Down with wage slavery!
I believe that Ryan does have some valid points when it comes to flexible hours and results-oriented work (for some professions). However, the happy hour and fashion statement arguments are completely ridiculous. As a Gen Yer at a major corporation, I had to earn the privilege of working at home part time and having flexible hours, and I didn’t do it by partying with my coworkers or dressing like I did in college. While I would agree with Ryan that what you wear doesn’t actually effect the quality of you work, it is important to project a professional image when you are meeting with clients or networking. If you play by the rules and make yourself indespensible to your manager, you are more likely to get perks and the occasional friday afternoon off.
Please forgive all of my spelling transgressions in the above comment.
This guy is totally out to lunch.
Great accuracy on your post. When I came in to the current company, I became a kind of buffer between more traditional kind of management and management that suits gen y (which is what my team is entirely composed of).
Fact is, gen y employees are checking their Facebook all the time anyway. It’s just a matter of you seeing it. I remember when I popped in on my graphic designer who was supposed to be working on a promo flyer that was due that day. When I popped in, he happened to be watching a video on YouTube. When he saw me, I could tell he was recoiling, trying to think of something to say. I asked him what he was watching and it was something I’m interested in. So we watched the full thing together.
As it turned out, the flyer was done when it was supposed to be, and I built more trust with a member of my team and got to know a little more about his interests.
To me, creating that environment, having that trust, and learning those things are worth it. But I’m also a gen y managing gen y.
I still find overall most working environments are still structured with various levels of flexibility given the company and the job. Most people have to earn flexibility even if their position offers the possibility of virtual workplace or flexible time.
Having said that if an employee is a high performer, and the environment can handle flexibility, then a smart manager works with the person. I worked at one small company that had their tech people work at home 2 times a week to have quiet uninterrupted time to work on development of the product.
I hear a lot about gen y spending too much time with their technologies…yet most of the young people I have worked with…work hard. My experience is mainly in technology and creative industries.