The 'Trophy Kids' Go to Work
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
The employment field has changed dramatically. You are VERY unlikely to work at the same job in the same company until you retire. Companies aren't supplying reliable pension plans. Many hot fields aren't unionized (I'm not saying unions in their current US form are good, but it's a big shift from the work my grandparents were doing) so you have much less job protection (this in many ways is actually a good thing, imho). You're also often expected to work in excess of 40 hours per week. Many fields have common 50-60+ hour work weeks, on the same salary. In short, companies are giving less, are less loyal, and are asking for more.
At the same time, in many new job fields, it's been discovered that you can work smarter, not longer. It's been proven that flex-time, working from home, lax dress codes, etc... don't always hurt productivity and success. In many cases it improves it.
It's not that I feel entitled to anything special. It's just that I've made a choice to not spend 60 hours/week wearing a suit in a grey cube under fluorescent lights, filling out TPS reports (I did that for a few months, and quit). Thankfully the employment field has supported my choice.
A lot of the requests make sense:
Waiting 6-12 months to get feedback on how you're doing at your job (as perceived by your boss and coworkers) is silly. Short iterations improve quality.
Having to dress a certain way if you don't interact with clients who are expecting a suit, is a waste of money and makes many people uncomfortable physically or with their appearance.
If listening to music while you work makes you happier and/or more productive, it would be foolish not to. If it (or anything else) makes you less productive then that's something for your boss to deal with you individually on.
"They want to be treated like colleagues rather than subordinates". Really? Who wants to be treated like a subordinate? I mean honestly, who WANTS that? If you don't have mutual respect with people you spend 40+ hours/week with, why would you want to be there?
This.
I'm a millenial I suppose. Born in 1982, and now solidly in the workforce. I watched my parents get screwed over time and time again by companies that demanded loyalty without reciprocation. I learned things like the fact that the best way to get a raise or promotion is to leave for another company, and received the admonition to remember that a company is not your friend. It does not have personal consideration.
I was taught that I have to take care of myself, and that nobody else will do that for me.
Loyalty, like trust, is a two-way street. It is hard to earn and easily lost.
I have to remind them that if their project gets cancelled or postponed, they won't even get two weeks notice from MegaCorp. That they won't let anyone down, MegaCorp has 200 people with your job title.
Some companies show real loyalty to their employees, but most will let you go or lay you off without a second thought and without any sleep lost. So why should you lose sleep over turning in your resignation to them.
I think this is a key thing to notice. Without these benefits (and especially in an at-will employment arrangement) a job becomes more like contract work: a simple trade of time/knowledge for money that can be abandoned by either party at any time.
To the extent that this is true, it might make sense to compare this to other types of work-for-hire. It would be absurd, for example, to require that your auto-mechanic wear certain clothes or demand that they not listen to headphones while working.
I'm not sure how far this analogy extends, but it strikes me that many of the things large companies demand of their employees would be considered onerous in similar contexts.
Why is that so?
It's the officer/laborer distinction. Theory: An auto mechanic performs work and is paid per hour of labor, at a rate proportionate to his competence and efficiency. By contrast, white-collar a professional is an officer. He's not paid for 40 hours per week of work. He's paid to fill a role, which requires attention to image, loyalty, professionalism and commitment that may extend outside of working hours and impinge on his lifestyle. A doctor makes housecalls at 10 pm, a CIA agent refrains from illegal drug use, a CEO refrains from posting offensive material on his non-work-related blog.
That's theory. In practice, most white-collar corporate workers are closer in role and status to laborers than professionals, and the only reason companies expect them to fulfill the extra requirements is because they can. They're exploiting tradition. Of course, corporate employees rarely get the autonomy and independence that are the upside of professional status, but American corporations are geniuses at serving up the worst of two worlds (such as, say, laissez-faire capitalism and bureaucratic socialism).
It's only "entitlement" if you think your employer owes you a job on your terms. It's hardly entitlement if you are simply willing to shop around for a better deal.
Yes, I want a job where I am treated more like a colleague than a subordinate, where I have access to upper management to express my ideas, where I have flexibility in how and where I work, and where I have wide autonomy over my projects. Yep, I'd also like the work to be meaningful.
But do I think my employer owes me this? Nope. I fully accept that absolutely nobody owes me this arrangement. But if one company does offer it, and another doesn't, well duh!
It seems to me that the feelings of entitlement here are coming from the managers and corporations employing the Millennials. They seem to think that they "should" get talented employees who are just gushing for an opportunity to accept an unpleasant hierarchical environment with set hours, scheduled breaks and lunchtimes, a lame-o cubicle, limited personal autonomy, and a long, slogging climb up the ladder.
In short - all the patronizing crap without the job security and pensions that used to come along with it. A patronizing environment, but certainly no patron saint to go along with it.
Nobody owes me anything. Ok, I said it first. Now let's hear them say it.
Now, ahem, best of luck with that low, low price outsourcing deal.
I think that the word choice subordinates was unfortunate, in this case. But basically when you work for a person, you are their subordinate.
There's definitely something weird going on with the people I've worked with lately. Despite having only a few years experience they're perfectly willing to commandeer a meeting. The enthusiasm is great. The initiative is excellent. But the content they provide is sub-par. So somewhere there is a gap between "taking initiative" and "knowing what you're talking about and then taking initiative" and that's kind of my problem with the workforce I face.
It's not so much subordinate in the sense of "respect my authority" as it is "please when you're speaking in front of the board and I kick you under the table... SHUT UP"
"They want to be treated like colleagues rather than subordinates"
"They would renege on a job-acceptance commitment if a better offer came along."
"Millennials also expect ... time for their family and personal interests."
None of that sounds like a sense of entitlement to me. This is the third or fourth article I've seen on this meme. Are corporate managers really that outraged that people in their 20s want to be treated like human beings?
I think the idea that young employees can be as valuable as seasoned veterans is really disruptive to people who've had to deal with the system all along. This is really prevalent among doctors (but appears to be trickling down to less prestigious jobs) -- they don't think the hours demanded as residents make sense, but they had to do it, so it only make sense.
"Are corporate managers really that outraged that people in their 20s want to be treated like human beings?"
Exactly!
But startup culture will inevitably do away with a lot of inane bureaucratic megacorp policies. Especially if all the trophy kids stop swallowing the bullshit. Most large organizations would be much more efficient with a different structure for incentives, and they'll start realizing it when they get hammered by others. Outraged news stories like this one is the first indication that something is happening. You aren't outraged unless you fear something.
"They would renege on a job-acceptance commitment if a better offer came along."
"Millennials also expect ... time for their family and personal interests."
Through my mind as I read those quotes:
"[Baby Boomers] want to be treated as superiors rather than colleagues."
"They would rescind an offer if they found something embarrassing on Facebook." (This has happened to people I know.)
"Baby boomers also expect ... others' lifestyles to be arranged for their purposes."
In any case, I'm surprised but not amazed that people are willing to say things like this. The problem is as follows: consider that a money economy is essentially a computer, designed to allocate resources to the most productive individuals and institutions; e.g. those who make the best decisions with them in the past. Of course, this process is filtered through large corporations...
Most people would agree that, unless there was a specific, well-defined goal of high potential value, working at immense sacrifice is unwise. Most higher-level corporate work is not toward a well-defined goal of value; in fact, most of it's so generic and abstract as to be pointless. But large corporations often value sacrifice over productivity, shifting the money and (much more importantly) power over to those who were most willing to sacrifice themselves. What does this mean? Well, becoming a "company man" in a large company, with all the personal sacrifices that entails, is actually often a bad decision. Thus, decision-making power is allocated to those who made bad decisions (about the relative value of their personal existence vs. corporate goals) in the past. In large big-box companies, power shifts to the defective rather than the productive. Hmm. That definitely wasn't supposed to happen.
This article is the voice of Baby Boomers who made bad decisions with their lives and, out of regret and reflective bitterness, have chosen to chide those who wish to explore other options, falling back on a "because I said so" attitude. People veer toward authoritarianism when under psychological stress, and that's exactly what we see in this article.
Having compared many fortune 500 companies, I can tell you that at a company with flex-time in place, it's hard to schedule meetings for a 20 person team. Effectively 2 days out of a 5 day work week were "unavailable" and therefore lost. I love flex time. Love it. But I can also point out the very real reasons why a company would not be able to support it. So there's a lot of trade off and I think it's killing our ability to be competitive.
Power shifting to the defective is more a matter of the Peter Principle than any person's ability to separate personal time from corporate time.
Some of the quotes are questionable, but some of them seemed to sound like they came from larger "employees are people too" interviews. I don't think all of the people interviewed share the opinion of the author.
The "We keep treating them like crap but they keep LEAVING! What is going ON HERE?!?" temper tantrum is pretty bizarre. If you can legitimately hold that opinion and be an HR executive, it certainly implies to me that the problem has existed at least as long as that person has been in the business. Your feeling of entitlement isn't all that different from mine if you stand back a step.
If we're so dispensable give us another week off, what's it going to hurt? This is a pretty green field for any big company that would like to improve retention.
A fun business hack would be structuring a company so you could dial-a-salary: your salary assumes you work 95% of the year (2w PTO + 5 holidays), and you tell HR how much you actually want to work (down to say 80% of the year -- 9wk + 5 holidays, as a lower bound for benefits). I bet your retention would be invincible. Screw the money, I'd probably be at 85%.
That said, you'd think there are some fields where the above isn't an issue, and they would implement it. I don't know any examples.
The problem is that every corporation has some component that is perennially understaffed, wearing its people down to the felt, and the VP representing it realizes that his division cannot tolerate the prospect of employees having a week or two more off. So any time an officer suggests increasing vacation instead of salaries, the VP vetoes it. At and above this VP's level, vacation allotments are irrelevant (they're either high enough that they can take time off whenever they want... or in pressure-cooker companies, high enough that they never get time off), so there's no personal push from above on this issue. Occasionally the VP of R&D will point out that the company's meager vacation allowance is preventing him from getting top talent, especially from overseas; the CEO will quietly pull him aside and tell him that he can make some exceptions to "the policy" and no one will know.
Either that, or the WSJ is trying to retain it's old people readership with some emotional bonding article.
I don't see how it would really help them, but they've got to do something, and this is something, so yay!
I guess it's probably related to the reluctance to let people work from home. It's about keeping up the image. A corporation doesn't want people to let on to the fact that sometimes there isn't as much work to do, or sometimes there is really no need to physically be in an office building.
Its older than Christ, "Times change and men decay." Or at least thats what the old people think. Maybe I should go dig up the last twelve stories submitted here with the same ridiculous premise, and we can be done with this once and for all.
God forbid.
I'm technically a millennial and I don't feel entitled to anything. The points this story brings up are actually things that have been shown to improve productivity if done correctly. Look at Google and numerous other successful high tech companies. People work better when they aren't forced into a suit, get to do non-distracting personal enjoyments at work, have time to sit back and just flat out think and relax during their work day.
What this article shows is that some companies really are full of stiffs who have a superiority complex and are forcibly conformists to their employees. It should be investigated why these companies are tetering on personal rights violations rather than why their employee's don't bow down to their boss's power.
When I left school in 1988 it was very hard to get work - there were waiting lists for jobs at McDonalds for example. The "Gen Xers" I know have similar memories and are generally more cautious about quitting a job without something else to go to. Now that the economy's tanking I think attitudes will change. The article's assertion that "their sense of entitlement is an ingrained trait that will likely resurface in a stronger job market" looks pretty bogus to me.
I know I've probably made a lot of people on this board a little irked, but I'm serious when I say I'm worried about how we'll compete.
The problems left to younger generations are of such magnitude, that, for better or worse, their attitudes towards "superiors" seems natural.
In their view showing up at 7:00 and leaving at 3:30 each day with a 30 minute lunch is the epitome of a model employee. They expect that by putting in time irespective of their actual work product they should be rewarded.
Young people on the other hand expect to be judged and rewarded based on the quality of their work product itself and how much value it contributes to the company. Older workers are many times indignant to this idea because they spent the last 30 years racking up their seniority points.
Good managing isn't about indulging in power trips, it's about being able to ensure that a group of people are working in a way that makes sense in the big picture.
The problem is that people in companies have entirely different motivations from those in armies. In volunteer armies, many people have a strong sense of patriotism or religious devotion and already consider themselves subordinate to their country or ideals, and they are therefore usually willing to respect rank and order. Conscripts and mercenaries, on the other hand, do not have such motivations and are quite often useless, as it is difficult to make them follow orders enthusiastically.
A large corporation doesn't stand for anything, aside from making money for its shareholders (and, in practice, officers). Therefore, it inspires little or no loyalty, much less devotion, and it shouldn't. It's employees are effectively mercenaries, not volunteers. Therefore, people aren't willing to clean the toilets with toothbrushes, and understandably so.