By Sarah Newton
Generation Y employees are always being discussed and yet again, more research has the papers saying yes, they do have a sense of entitlement.
“Gen Y workers get a bad rap in the workplace, with many a geezer complaining that their work ethic is less developed than their sense of entitlement.” But is that really fair?
Yes, according to new research that has yielded actual data to back up that notion.
In a series of studies using surveys that measure psychological entitlement and narcissism, University of New Hampshire management professor Paul Harvey found that Gen Y respondents scored 25 percent higher than respondents ages 40 to 60 and a whopping 50 percent higher than those over 61.
In addition, Gen Y’s were twice as likely to rank in the top 20 percent in their level of entitlement – the “highly entitled range” – as someone between 40 and 60, and four times more likely than a golden-ager.
And if you think the Gen Yers in your workplace are oversensitive as well as entitled, Harvey’s findings back that up, too. Today’s 20-somethings have an “automatic, knee-jerk reaction to criticism,” he says, and tend to dismiss it. ”
I do think however that the entitled label can send a very negative vibe to potential employees. I like to think of them as expecting the best and wanting more, which I think is a good thing for business and organisations, who so often get away with treating graduates very badly. I was talking to my Dad the other day, who used to train graduates at a top US company and the stories of how they used to make their youth work all the hours that God sent were painful to the ears!
I don’t think Gen Y are entitled, I just think they care about their free time and value themselves, which cannot be a bad thing.
However I think that what can seem an entitled attitude can be a challenge for most employees.
So how do you handle it? Well first, as I have mentioned before, I think you need youth-friendly places but I also think handling this problem can be as simple as using their strengths, for example, their spirit of collaboration.
If you present something as a problem that you need to solve as a team and ask them the best way to meet the objective, you are more likely to get their buy-in. So a “Right, this project needs to be completed for tomorrow, so we are all in for an all-nighter!” would become, “Right, we have an extremely tight deadline on this one, tomorrow morning. How can we work together to sort this out?”
If we focus on what is bad about Gen Y, then that is what we will get, but if we focus on their strengths of collaboration, innovation and creativity, we may just get the very best out of them.
