So what can you expect from your Gen Y boss?
Well, let’s be honest, we don’t know a lot about Gen Y bosses yet because they are the youngest generation on the workforce playground. We do, however, have some examples to work with. There is Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. Working at this company is probably a good prelude to what we can expect, at least as long as the money holds out. We do have to remember that Facebook is still very young, and as its structure grows, it may look more like a traditional company, but here is what people are saying about working there at the moment:
• It is extremely fun to work with super bright people who have much better ideas than me. I get to talk with people who have similar interests and care about the Riya launch. Working 10–12-hour days seems like nothing and I could definitely stay there much longer if I didn’t have to shower. Actually I hardly shower and we have a shower in the building. I think the idea of looking forward to work every day and missing it when I go home is a nice thought and more people should feel that at their companies.3
• It appears that if you start out where they need you (bottom of the ladder) and then “…within 3 to 6 months you move up the ladder to the position of your interest.”4
• The trouble is that for a long time, Facebook had a reputation in Silicon Valley for being a place that, despite its white-hot user growth, still somehow had a hard time recruiting top talent to join the company. The gossip was Facebookers had to deal with an overly political workplace and amateurish management.
Thanks to a professionalized recruiting team and a fancy new headquarters, there are some signs this reputation has changed. Headcount is now well over 800 employees and impressive hires are finally a regular occurrence.5
• One shared sentiment, though, is that Mark is a very demanding person to work for: if you screw up, one day you are in, the next day out, persona non grata.6
This last one is very interesting, but it isn’t really anything new. Let’s face it, we’ve had demanding CEOs from the dawn of time, and it isn’t going to stop with Gen Y. As for the leadership being “amateurish,” well, duh! The CEO started the company at 21. What else could he possibly be? Now the working 10 to 12 hours and not wanting to leave, that we really must learn more about.
Career coaches have said it for years and apparently it’s true. Happiness in a career is most closely tied to your interests. So, when Facebook allows employees to try on different “roles,” it helps them gravitate toward their area of interest. This is breakthrough stuff. Pay attention older generations. One Gen Yer wrote a great article (online of course) about how he thinks they’ll change the workforce. Now we all know that saying you’ll do it and doing it are two very different things, but we think his article is worth reading, so we’ve printed it here with permission:
10 Ways Generation Y Will Change the Workplace
by Ryan Healey
Co-Founder and COO of Brazen Careerist
There’s no doubt that Generation Y will fundamentally change corporate America. It’s already started. Managing Gen Y is the hot topic among consultants, Human Resource executives, and talent management professionals. For a Gen Yer like me, this is great news.
We have a voice, and we have the ear of the decision makers. Not bad for a group of lazy, entitled, twenty-somethings. We’ve learned the importance of balancing work and life from our overworked parents, and we’ve watched our older siblings and cousins struggle with their boomer bosses who refuse to retire. Now we’re primed to change the workplace for the better. Here’s how we’ll do it.
1. We’ll hold only productive meetings. Meetings are important, sometimes. A good meeting will pull everyone to the same page while motivating them to get the work done. It’s rare when that should take more than 30 minutes. Efficiency is the name of the game with Gen Y. We know that a drawn-out meeting really means “We have no idea what we’re doing,” and these time suckers actually halt productivity and stifle creativity, the qualities that they were supposed to encourage. As soon as Gen Y is running the show, watch wasted meeting time drop dramatically.
2. We’ll shorten the work day. The work day is eight hours. Or so they say. A real work day for most of us, if you include the commute, lunch, breaks, and maybe dinner, is at least 10 hours. But how many hours of the day are actually spent doing real work? I would guess about half. To truly balance work and life, you cannot mess around and waste time at the office. Gen Y knows this. We’re productivity machines; we will figure out how to get as much done in six to seven hours as the average boomer does with his eight.
3. We’ll bring back the administrative assistants. Back in the day, nearly everyone had a secretary. These days, you have to be a CEO or high-level executive for a Fortune 500 company to have an assistant. Sure, this saves the company a ton, but Generation Y won’t stand for it much longer. We recognize the value of time. Two extra hours per day not filing papers and mailing checks adds up to over 500 extra hours per year that we can spend with family and friends. Even if it comes out of our own pocket, Gen Y will cough up the extra dough to get a part-time or virtual assistant.
4. We’ll redefine retirement. Retirement is dead. It’s dead for a number of reasons, including the issues with social security and middle class America’s inability to save any money. But Gen Y will figure out how to save money to retire—we’re already demanding 401(k)s and excellent benefits. However, we will re-invent retirement by taking multiple mini-retirements instead of calling it quits a few years before its time to croak. Maybe in our late twenties we’ll take a few months just to travel the world. Then, as we approach parenthood and our kids grow up, we’ll take a year off to enjoy time with our family. Then we’ll return to work, refreshed and ready to go. When we hit 65, it will be the new 45 and we’ll have a solid 15 to 20 years left before we take our final, very brief, miniretirement.
5. We’ll find real mentors. Gen Y is obsessed with career development. We understand the importance of great mentors and we seek them out. The problem is that many older workers weren’t effectively mentored and they don’t always know how to mentor Gen Y. When it’s Gen Y’s turn to be senior mentors, we’ll know how. As we seek mentors now, we’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. And from the time we enter the workforce until the time we’re senior employees, the smartest Gen Yers will figure out how to mentor up. We will teach our older co-workers about new technologies and the power of online communities, and they will respond kindly by guiding us through the insane office politics that exist everywhere.
6. We’ll restore respect to the HR Department. Ten years ago, human resources got no respect. Today, companies are just beginning to see the importance. Gen Y recognizes that people make the company successful. Maybe it’s not tangible and maybe it’s not easy to see the direct ROI on keeping people happy, but happy people create successful organizations. All you need to do is take a look at Goggle, the company that’s quickly taking over the world, to see that happy people are successful people and successful people make a lot of money for themselves and for the company. HR is not a cost center, it’s vital to the bottom line.
7. We’ll promote based on emotional intelligence. For some reason, companies assume that when you pay your dues and you know the business, you can be a manager. They’re wrong. The truth is that seniority does not make a good manager. People skills make a good manager. By the time Gen Y is running the world, we will be smart enough to promote people to managers because they can manage, not because they’ve worked for ten years. For managers, personal work must come a distant second to developing employees both personally and professionally. If you can’t help others, you don’t deserve a promotion to manager and you will be left behind.
8. We’ll continue to value what our parents have to offer. Sure, Gen Xers can laugh about it now, but Gen Yers respect our parents, and our parents are interested in every part of our lives, even when we’re 30. Don’t be surprised to see Gen Y employees giving their parents a tour of the office and calling up mom and dad for a little advice on their lunch break. It’s not about being babied or refusing to grow up, it’s about a level of mutual respect that Gen Y has for our parents and our parents have for us. My mother is coming to visit in a couple of weeks, and guess what our plan for the day is? A tour of the office and a couple hours of work for each of us before we go out and do the tourist thing.
9. We’ll enjoy higher starting salaries. Sure, Gen Y is interested in volunteering, putting a halt to global warming and all that other good stuff, but we’re not our idealist parents. We watched our parents get laid off and we know that companies look out for themselves, so we do the same. Gen Yers will gladly accept a higher starting salary than promises of raises and promotions that we may never see. Additionally, all we have to do is go to Payscale.com or some other site to find out what the average starting salary is. Then we will ask for more, and we’ll probably get it, because we know we can get it elsewhere if your company won’t give it to us.
10. We’ll re-invent the performance review. Semi-annual or annual performance reviews do not work. Gen Y wants constant feedback. If we’re only at a company for two years, we cannot wait for our one-year review to find out how we’re doing. Gen Y will invent the on-the-spot performance review. The smartest companies will train their managers in giving frequent feedback, and the companies that don’t will get a quick reality check when their Gen Y employees demand them. Spot reviews lead to consistent improvement, and consistent improvement is what truly matters to Generation Y.7
We love this! Of course they are sort of saying that we
1. hold unproductive meetings;
2. create long work days;
3. nix our administrative assistants;
4. designed a faulty retirement process;
5. use and are ineffective mentors;
6. disrespect the HR Department;
7. promote based on skill rather than management ability;
8. don’t value our parents;
9. prefer low starting salaries;
10. don’t provide adequate feedback.
Okay, we’ll try not to be offended, especially if some of it rings a little true. But, hey, let’s look at this another way: when Gen Y leads, they can get to work fixing all of these problems we created. Yes, it will be hard, and we have no idea how they are going to fund these changes, but we won’t have to worry about it. Why? Because they will be in charge, and since we don’t really know how to be good mentors, they probably won’t ask us. But we will be available in case they do. We’ll be happy to work together to solve these workplace problems while we sit in very productive meetings with our high salaries and administrative assistants to take the notes. We mean, we’re going to want in on all of these perks. It would be workplace inequality to leave the Boomers and Gen Xers out of the workplace changes. Making these changes looks like a lot of work for the HR Department, but we’re sure they won’t mind because of the new level of respect they will hold. However, if they do mind, we’re sure they’ll let you know with the new constant feedback processes Gen Y puts in place. On the other hand, if it’s before 9:00 a.m. or after 4:00 p.m., they probably won’t let you know because Gen Y isn’t into long work hours. We love it! Where do we sign up?
Yes, we’re having a little fun at the expense of Gen Y, but we don’t mean any harm. Seriously, Gen Y has some great ideas and with their highly educated, techno-savvy masses, we know that they are going to bring a lot of seriously fun and exciting changes to the workforce. Who knows, we may like Gen Y’s ideas so much that we may continue to (we mean start to) finance them.
Notes
1. Clements, Priscilla. “Babyboomers—We’re Broke. We Lost Our Jobs. We Lost Our Houses. Now We’re Loosing Our Hair!” Associated Content. 17 Dec. 2009. Web. 24 July 2010. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/ 2501401/babyboomers_were_broke_we_lost_our.html.
2. Young Frankenstein. Dir. Mel Brooks. Perf. Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle. Gruskoff/Venture Films, 1974. DVD.
3. Kagan, Noah. “Life at Facebook, 3 Weeks at a Startup.” Noah Kagan’s Okdork.com. 1 Dec. 2005. Web. 24 July 2010. http://okdork.com/2005/12/01/life-at-facebook-3-weeks-at-astartup/.
4. Carlson, Nicholas. “Will Working at Facebook Blow like Google Customer Service? No.” Valleywag—Gawker. 4 Mar. 2008. Web. 24 July 2010. http://valleywag.gawker.com/363457/will-working-at- facebook-blow-like-google-customer-service-no.
5. Miller, Alaska, and Nicholas Carlson. “What Is It Like Working at Facebook?” Business Insider, Inc. 14 Dec. 2009. Web. 24 July 2010. http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-it-likeworking-at-facebook-2009-12.
6. Carlson, Nicholas. “Why Top Execs Keep Quitting Facebook.” Business Insider. 13 Mar. 2009. Web. 24 July 2010. http://www.businessinsider.com/why-so-many-top-execs-keepquitting-facebook-2009-3.
7. Healy, Ryan. “Crystal Ball: 10 Ways Generation Y Will Change the Workplace | Brazen Careerist.” Brazen Careerist. 23 May 2008. Web. 24 July 2010. http://www.brazencareerist.com/2008/05/23/crystal-ball-10-ways-generation-y-will-change-theworkplace/.