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There is a lot of information out there about who these Millenials are and why they work differently.  I get it.  They are driven, they want medals, and they want a work-life balance.  Some even EXPECT it.  Regardless of how right (or wrong) these analyses are, I feel the Millenial and GenX/Baby Boomer conversation has become stale and misdirected.

I think we’ve confused the issues at hand with the characterization of the Millenial generation.  There seems to be this “us vs. them” discussion that is often had around the water cooler or in vanilla HBR articles, where we identify the Millenial generation habits, drivers, and differences and compare them to GenX and Baby Boomer mentalities.  Don’t get me wrong – there is high value to the characterization of the Millenial generation with relation to workforce considerations.  Knowing what an entry-level or less-experienced professional may look for with workplace satisfaction and success measures, and understand why they work the way they do, can be incredibly beneficial to experienced and senior leaders.

What is often discussed are the differences between a GenXer and their Millenial team members.  The GenXer worked long hours in the office to get where they are today, why do Millenials show up to work late and have no problem leaving the office before senior managers?  Characterizing and understanding how Millenials know they can leverage the connectivity of today’s workplace – having the ability to plug-into the network late at night, utilize conference calls from home, etc. – to achieve the expected work output explains why your Millenial leaves at 4:30pm to take a yoga class on Wednesday nights.  It’s because the Millenial knows they can push the project forward after yoga and dinner at 8:30pm through firing-up their laptop and accessing the necessary information be it on servers, SharePoints, or cloud-based dropboxes.  Well, either that or you may have a Millenial dud on your team who doesn’t understand workload expectations and just leaves early with no plan of doing any additional work until after their coffee tomorrow at 10am – but I’ll leave that for another blog post.

But I feel we’re positioning the discussion in a less than advantageous light.  We’re taking the discussion to be an “us vs. them” or GenX vs. Millenial debate.  Yes, I’ll say it – it’s the young against the old and vice versa.

What I propose is that we reposition the discussion to identify, triage, and systematically cure the issues that arise with welcoming new members into our workforce.  What I propose is that we talk less about GenX or Millenials and speak more to the top-level and distinct matters contained within the debate.

For example, let’s talk about working hours at the office.  A hot topic I hear about is described above where the Millenial doesn’t practice traditional office hours and GenXers take issue with it.  At the heart of this topic are issues such as (1) change in the workforce, (2) communication of expectations, and (3) open mindedness.

1. Change in the workforce:  The GenXer may be used to driven colleagues showing extra effort by working late hours at the office.  But now the GenXer works with people who each hold different office hours – the young mother who comes in at 8:30am after dropping her toddler off at daycare, the grad student who rolls in at 9:00am because of the paper he had to finish late last night, and the early thirtysomething who likes to come in early at 7:00am so she can leave by 4:30pm to practice yoga or spin.  The issue here is not as narrow as work schedules, however, but is instead about how we deal with change and variance in the workforce.  Change is the only constant, right?  Instead of framing the debate about Millenials and going down the dangerous path of “us vs. them”, perhaps the discussion is about office culture and how much flexibility will be allowed in personal schedules if any.  But the discussion also involves (2) and (3) below…

    

2. Communication of expectations:  The non-traditional work hours of Millenials vs. GenXers is also about the communication of expectations.  This may be best approached as a two-way conversation, with the senior leaders (after deciding on the office schedule policy discussed in (1) above) communicating this policy or informal expectations to their workforce.  And vice versa – if the Millenial likes to leave at 4:30pm to go to yoga three times a week, that discussion should be had with the manager for alignment and understanding of expectations for workload.  The Millenial would be able to express how they often plug-in after work from 8:30-10:30pm to finish the projects, and the senior leaders would be able to understand how the flexible work schedule benefits the employee and still allows for the Millenial to ‘work hard’ like they had to.  What this does is it frames the debate away from Millenial work habits and steers it to the need to directly communicate scheduling expectations with today’s work force – and how this may need to be reevaluated in future cycles to account for constant changes both in employee turnover and company culture.  Let’s abstract the top-level understanding that the overarching need to communicate expectations is where the debate focus may benefit from the most, discussing instead the unintended consequence of not communicating expectations or the misrecognition of understanding the need to do so.

    

3. Open mindedness:  Ah but this also includes the notion of open mindedness.  Going back to change is constant…we all suffer from the challenge of change, but are we recognizing it early and reacting appropriately?  So your Millenial colleagues don’t seem to work hard like you had to – since you’re the only one still in the office at 6pm, right?  But isn’t this a sign of the times – a signal of change – instead of an “us vs. them” debate?  Perhaps the fact that nobody else is there at 6pm is less about others not working hard and more about a GenXer not feeling connected or not getting the resources they need to finish a time sensitive project.  In today’s workplace these matters can be managed out by the GexXer texting or emailing the Millenial colleagues to connect or get resources they need late at night for a hot project.  Maybe they’d find the Millenial colleague is working late too but from the comfort of their couch and in sweatpants as preferred.  The consideration here is how we may benefit from having a periodic, open-mind-check and conducting a hard self-evaluation about if our teams and/or ourselves are remaining open minded to the “how” of achieving the “what” through an expected continuum of change.

Millenial vs. GenX discussions often provide solutions to working across generations in today’s workforce.  What I’ve proposed above, however, is that we focus the terminology on the new needs uncovered by changes in society that filter into the changes to company culture.  Technological advances, connectivity preferences, formality and lingo have experienced varying levels of change throughout the past century, and should be expected, identified, and managed in the current and future workplace.  The failure to recognize change, or prepare for unknown differences coming in tomorrow’s workforce, is the true issue at hand that has seemingly caught some members of yesterday’s workforce off guard.  With hindsight being 20/20, I must ask the obvious but hardnosed truth of why haven’t we prepared for this sooner?  I suggest we turn the next generational story into a story of successful anticipation of changes in the workforce, how we trained others to manage new relationships, and how we artfully identified culture shifts just prior to or as they are happening so we can avoid the need to revisit, yet again, articles about the “minding the gap”.

Let’s close the gap and embrace the inevitable continuum of change by establishing awareness, strategies, and processes to address tomorrow’s workforce today by leveraging yesterday’s experience.