By Ines Schinazi
Ines: What do you think the workplace will look like in 5 years? Many generational experts seem to think that we are moving away from traditional corporate structures and into a world of freelancers…Do you think this is the case?
Bruce: I’m not a futurist. I’d say that work is likely to be increasingly free of boundaries when it comes to where and when people work. I’d say work relationships are likely to become more and more short-term and transactional. I’d say that on-site, uninterrupted, long-term, exclusive employment relationships will be less and less common.
Ines: There’s a lot of talk about Gen Y having the highest self-esteem of any Generation so far. Have you encountered this in your research?
Bruce: Why are Gen Yers so confident and self-possessed, even in the face of all this uncertainty? One reason is surely that they grew up in the Decade of the Child. Gen Xers were the great unsupervised generation (we made the latchkey into a metaphor). But Generation Y was the great oversupervised generation. In the short time between the childhood of Generation X and that of Generation Y, making children feel great about themselves and building up their self-esteem became the dominant theme in parenting, teaching, and counseling. Throughout their childhood, Gen Yers were told over and over, “Whatever you think, say or do, that’s okay. Your feelings are true. Don’t worry about how the other kids play. That’s their style. You have your style.” This is what child psychologists called “positive tolerance,” and it was only one small step to the damaging cultural lies that somehow “we are all winners” and “everyone gets a trophy.”
Gen Yers have been respected, nurtured, scheduled, measured, discussed, diagnosed, medicated, programmed, and rewarded as long as they can remember. Their parents, determined to create a generation of super-children, perhaps accelerated their childhood. On one hand, kids grow up so fast today (I often say that twelve is the new nineteen); on the other, they seem to stay tightly moored to their parents throughout their twenties. Their early precociousness,in fact, turns into a long-lasting sophomorism. Many psychologists have observed that Gen Yers act like highly precocious late adolescents well into adulthood. (I often say that thirty is the new twenty.)
Ines: Your work reveals an interesting feature about Gen Y. On one hand, they’ve grown up with the hyper-connectivity and flexibility of the Internet and digital age, thriving on customization and diversity. Yet from your research they obviously need a great deal of structure in the workplace. What’s the key to reconciling these two Gen Y characteristics in the workplace?
Bruce: Gen Yers want freedom to maneuver at work. They want some latitude when it comes to their schedule, where they do their work, whom they work with, what they do, and how they do it. The problem is that every task, responsibility, and project has parameters that constrain every employee’s freedom.
But as much as they love freedom, Gen Yers also gravitate to structure and boundaries. For one thing, they don’t want to waste their time. Don’t forget, since they were kids, Gen Yers have been hyper-scheduled by overbearing adults. Whether they were being subjected to metal detectors, locker searches and lockdowns in school, or their own “individual learning plans”—and everything in between—Gen Yers are well accustomed to programs and procedures. One Gen Yer describes it this way: “The last thing I’m looking for is somebody telling me, ‘Yeah, do it how you think it should be done,’ but then it turns out she already knows exactly how she wants it done. I don’t want to beat my head against the wall trying to figure something out if you’ve already got it figured out. I definitely am interested in putting my personal stamp on things, but if that’s not going to happen, tell me up front.”
If you want to give Gen Yers more freedom at work, the biggest favor you can do for them is establish clear boundaries and give them a structure within which they can function with some autonomy. It is true that some jobs require employees to take risks and make mistakes. Even in those cases, it is the manager’s job to help Gen Yers avoid taking unnecessary risks and repeating mistakes that others have already made. Creativity and innovation do not require recklessness. You tell the advertising copywriter to “think outside the box,” but you must also help him avoid libel, slander, and obscenity. You need the nuclear scientist to be innovative, but you must help her avoid a nuclear explosion. It’s great if your food preparation workers are creative, but you don’t want them changing the recipes on regular menu items. As a leader, you have to create a structure and clear boundaries in order to create a space in which risk taking and mistakes are truly safe in the context of a job.
Often a good way to allow Gen Yers to express creativity is to give them assignments that are truly matters of first impression. Maybe you, as the manager, don’t yet have a clear goal in mind; you don’t know exactly what you are looking for yet. This is a great opportunity to ask a young employee to “take a crack at it” and “do it however you think it should be done” and really mean what you say. It’s perfectly fine to use this Gen Yer to help you work out the early stages of your own creative process. But make sure you are clear from the start about the structure and boundaries. Explain that you are delegating only the initial stage of the creative process and you intend to take the project back.
In fact, whenever you have a new task, responsibility, or project for one of your very capable young employees, always start by spelling out expectations. Make absolutely sure that person understands exactly what he is expected to do and how he is expected to do it. That’s the only way to get employees to adopt your organization’s best practices and turn them into standard operating procedures.
Ines: Ines: And how should be the performance appraisal or the follow-up after gen Y´s tasks?
Bruce: As long as the assignment lasts, you should follow up regularly with one-on-one check-in conversations to review the employee’s progress. In those conversations, you should ask, “What have you already done? What steps did you follow? What step are you going to do next?” Listen carefully to their answers. Make it a habit to wrap up these conversations by deciding on a specific place and time for your next meeting to follow up.
Every assignment, no matter how much freedom and creativity is required, must have clear goals and specific deadlines with measurable benchmarks along the way. Boundaries and structure, however loose, are actually the keys to making freedom and creativity in the real world possible.
You might think a generation raised on mantras like “we’re all winners” and “everyone gets a trophy” wouldn’t be particularly competitive. But that is not the case. While the self-esteem movement was chipping away at Generation Y ers’ competitiveness, the testing movement was building it back up. Still, testing breeds a different kind of competitiveness: competition against standards and benchmarks, against averages and means, and against one’s own past performance.
Think about a video game that a Gen Yer might practice and practice, beating one high score after another, set by himself. He wins every time, and nobody has a reason to feel bad. That’s the kind of competition Gen Yers are looking for: they want to compete against themselves in a safe environment where they can try over and over again to improve on their own performance benchmarks. When it comes to competitiveness at work, this is what one Gen Yer had to say: “I’ll do whatever they want me to do. Just tell me someone is keeping track of all this stuff I’m doing. Tell me I’m getting credit for it, that I’ve been racking up points here like mad. Tell me someone is keeping score.”
When Gen Yers know you are keeping track of their day-to-day performance, their measuring instinct is sparked and their competitive spirit ignited.
If you can think of easy ways to convert the performance you need from your young employees into a point system, then maybe you should consider it. I promise you, a point system will get Gen Yers focused like a laser beam. If you want them to start showing up earlier for work, attach points for every minute they arrive early, and take away points for every minute they come in late. If you want Gen Yers to meet quality standards, give them checklists of every detail and specification, and give points for every detail and specification completed—and take away points for every one missed. If you want Gen Yers to speed up, set a realistic quota of tasks per hour and give points for every task done over the quota—and take away points for every task under the quota. And so on.
Another approach is to help Gen Yers keep track of their own work by using self-monitoring tools. Activity logs are diaries that Gen Yers can keep, noting contemporaneously exactly what they do all day. Each time he or she moves on to a new activity, the Gen Yer might note the time and the new activity. By using these tools, Gen Yers can document their own hard work every step of the way and build their own track record of success.
My advice to managers is to plug into Gen Yers’ transactional mind-set. Stop paying them and start buying their results, one by one. The more you trade results for rewards, the more reliable their performance will be. The smaller the increments you buy in, the more effective it will be.
The key to your success will be defining those measurable pieces of work and setting a price per piece.
