Interesting — if slightly familiar-sounding — article from The Guardian this past week: Generation Game. It’s all kind of a cliché at this point (”They are nicknamed the diva generation - high maintenance, out for themselves, lacking in loyalty, thinking only in the short-term and their own place in it.”) but they do touch on a theme I’ve been seeing a lot lately:

Some see the debate as pie in the sky. “The suggestion that Generation Y isn’t just different by degrees, but that this is a disruptive generation, is clearly constructed by someone who doesn’t remember the mods and rockers, the teddy boys, the hippies, the punks and the student revolutions in 1968 Paris,” says Valerie Garrow, associate direct of the Institute for Employment Studies.

I struggle with this idea, because there’s a ring of truth to it. I doubt any young generation in history has conformed easily. What makes Generation Y so different, when every other generation has essentially had to give-in and start playing the same game that’s been going on for years.

The boomers speak loudly about this, because they were quintessentially counter-culture. They were so loud and unwilling to conform that we still make movies about their exploits and adventures in the 60s. But look at them now: they’re Gen Y’s bosses, whining about our lack of ‘work ethic’ and our damned iPods.

Will history, in effect, repeat itself?

I can’t answer that definitively. My time machine is mostly useless. But my gut says it won’t. I think some sectors will see more change than others, but I think overall Gen Y will work as a change effect across the board. Primarily, it’s demographics. We’re in a climate where employees are given little alternative but to look closely at Generation Y when hiring for prime positions. (This goes a long way to explain why we’re so often described as cocky and brash, too.)

More than just demographics, though, I think one of our chief qualitative differences is that we, as a generation, find our nonconformist roots not in anything societal or political but rather (mostly) technological. It’s a little less noble, but more laden with potential.

With the 60s, business didn’t have any real need to change to accommodate younger workers. Because they didn’t really need them. And, well, the changes the then younger generation was asking for seemed so out-of-this-world. The boomers asked for change, but it was not specific — it wasn’t backed up with real, tangible solutions.

Technology is the game changer, because technology is change. For better or for worse, all of business is going through change as a result, and now, as a Generation, younger workers have the opportunity to drive that change.

That’s new. That’s different. That’s powerful.

Generation Y Veneration has some predictions about working from home:

Despite the ability for many people in my industry (and other industries) to work from home everyday if they wanted to, they don’t.

Why?

Because nothing beats a face to face conversation.

I think it’s dangerous to conflate ‘working at home’ to ‘never leaving your house for work-related reasons’. The Generation Y-fueled change is not necessarily a shift towards impersonal business, but rather toward increased fluidity between work and life. Depending on the industry, your office can be a kitchen table, a coffee shop, a hotel lobby or a rented meeting space. Or, when it works, a virtualized online space.

It’s about being flexible and being open to new ways of work. Because, really, is there any real logic to the belief that work needs to be done collectively at a physical location with a water cooler and fluorescent lighting?

The aforementioned post by Ryan Healy sparked off a whole bunch of comments, as posts on Brazen Careerist tend to do. One, in particular, by a poster calling himself ‘jrandom42′ sparked some thinking.

The comment:

Bluntly put, nobody gets a free pass on anything, until they can prove to me that they can deliver results that positively affect my goals and bottom line.

In other words, show me you why deserve these exceptions from what everyone else has to adhere to, and then we’ll talk. And it’s still not guaranteed you’re going to get any of them.

I think this is a dangerous attitude that’s been cropping up a lot as this Generation Y hysteria works its way through businesses. It’s almost as if there are three stages of reaction to Generation Y in the workplace.

It tends to go:

1. Shock & Outrage - “When I was your age, I was damn lucky to get the job I had! I worked sixty hours a week breaking chunks of coal with nothing but my forehead. And at the end of the week, when my boss came by, I said THANK YOU.”
2. Dismissal - “Ha ha, whatever you say, kid. You just wait until you get a little older and see what’s out there in the REAL WORLD. Then you’ll be singing a different tune!”
3. Begrudging Acceptance - “Okay, sure, whatever. If you want to be a lazy jerk unlike EVERYONE ELSE IN THE HISTORY OF WORK than I GUESS you can have some slack. Provided you prove yourself to be a model employee under our current structure first. I’ll do you a FAVOUR.”

I think getting to stage three is enough for a lot of Gen Ys. Even though it comes with some passive aggression, at least your boss or manager is giving you the freedom you need. And, sure, it kind of sucked to have to slog through energy- and morale-sapping months to “prove yourself” but, if you’re creative and talented, you got through it. And then you were able to develop a situation that gave you at least some of the work-life balance and structure you were looking for in the first place.

But this isn’t how it should be.

Generation Y is not asking for special treatment. We’re not asking that you give us freedoms that other employees don’t have. Absolutely, things need to be broken down based on the type of responsibility of each job — if you’ve been hired to answer phones or paint cars, you probably can’t work from home — but that doesn’t mean things can’t be flexible, equitable and universal. Everyone who works for you should be afforded the same arrangement, within reason.

Quite frankly, this is the only way it can work. If you start letting your 23-year-old employee go home early because that’s the way he works best, your 10-year-veteran sales person who likes to stay a half hour after work hours just to show the bosses how dedicated he is (this is absolutely GROSS behaviour, by the way) is probably going to get upset.

Which tends to be where it gets complicated.

Look, I’d never argue that management is simple. With multiple generations in the workplace, it’s only going to get more complicated. But going the easy route, where you set blanket policies and only give flexibility when your younger employees demand it, is not a viable solution. To truly make the intergenerational office work, Generation Y needs to accelerate change for EVERYONE in the office, not just themselves.

Photo ‘Office Hours’ by shawnblog. Licensed under Creative Commons

An article in IT World about Five ways to make your company Gen Y friendly struck a bit of a chord with me this morning. This point especially:

Narrow the rungs of the corporate ladder. Millennials are willing to work hard, but when it comes to moving up the ranks, they want to do so quickly. According to the study, 51% of Millennials surveyed believe professionals entering the workforce should have to spend only one to two years proving themselves in entry-level positions. That means you aren’t likely to attract or keep talented Gen Y employees by requiring them to spend years “paying their dues.”

First, I was glad to see that most Gen Y employees still believe in spending one or two years working at entry level. While I’m sure there are some that would be content staying at that level longer, I find that there’s a large group who also feel like they shouldn’t have to work entry-level at all. This is a ridiculously dangerous attitude.

Second, I think IT World makes a good point about “climbing the ladder.” I’d add that I don’t think it’s so much about the speed at which one climbs the ladder, but rather that opportunity is given equally, and that any decisions made are based on performance and not how long someone has been with the company.

When someone gets a bonus or a promotion for being with a company for five or ten years, they often call it a “loyalty” thing. But I don’t really agree. I think it’s only a longevity thing. There’s nothing truly loyal about staying in the same place for a long time. And, in fact, true loyalty — the kind that actually can impact a company’s bottom line — doesn’t have a lot to do with accumulated time.

True loyalty is sticking with a project even when things get bad. It’s going the extra mile to fix a mistake that could make the company look bad. It’s using so-called “personal time” to learn, create and promote — to better yourself in ways that better the organization.

Ultimately, it’s the small acts wherein you put your employer before yourself that make one loyal.

Employers: reward that. And if that happens to line up with someone who has been with your company for five, ten or twenty years, even better. But be careful about simply rewarding longevity — there’s nothing really difficult or impressive about sticking with a mid-level position, working in auto-pilot, for decades. And if Gen Y sees that that’s all you really value, you’re not giving them much of an incentive to show you any real loyalty.

Jonathan M Gitlin at Ars Technica has a good bit about the supposed evils of multitasking on your computer at work:

The complaints against multitasking are the usual; you’re not as focused as you could be if you were just doing one thing at once, switching focus repeatedly actually makes you less productive as each time your brain takes a few moments to reprioritize tasks and so on.

I’m the first to admit that there’s a lot be said for shutting down everything else and focusing on a single task when you just need to power through and get something done, but these days talk of ‘multitasking’ seems to take the form of huffy managers cruising through the office, looking over shoulders and trying to catch a glimpse of someone looking at something “non-work-related”.

This, quite frankly, is a lame thing to do.

Gitlin again:

Employers seek ever-greater productivity from their workers, which means getting more work from them for the same amount of pay. Faced with that situation, it’s hardly surprising the cube-dweller responds by spending 15 minutes an hour looking at LOLCATs. Besides, I’m just old enough to remember the days before you used to be able to multitask; people used to sit at their desks reading the newspaper instead.

Technology has definitely exasperated this issue. It seems entirely acceptable for an employee to spend 10 minutes chatting with co-workers about the movie they saw on the weekend or 5 minutes on a personal phone call, but apparently just a glimpse at Facebook is an instant productivity killer. The message, I guess — and this is coming from those generally clueless about everything online — is that you can’t be working if you’re also on some website.

The real issue I have with this is one of trust. By constantly monitoring your employees’ screens, by installing filters and blocks, by blanket policies forbidding access at work, you’re essentially saying to your employees that you can’t trust them. “Why would you do this stupid work I’ve assigned you when you have fun internet things to look at?”

Could spending a lot of time on Facebook at work cause an employee to miss deadlines or produce sub-quality work? Absolutely. And those employees should face hell because of that. But you’re always smarter to criticize and (if necessary) discipline based on outputs, not process. The process is entirely subjective and unique to each person, whereas the outputs can be objective.

If the work is getting done, does it really matter if the worker is ‘multitasking’ all day, bouncing between windows and tasks like — as Gitlin puts it — a crack-smoking housefly?

Technology has led to a diversification of work styles.¹ There is no ‘right’ way to get things done in the computer age. Trying to establish one-size-fits-all processes, policies or rules — even for something as seemingly frivolous as ‘banning Facebook’ — is a losing battle.

Thanks to Ari Najarian for pointing me to the article.

Photo by Vedlia. Licensed under Creative Commons

1. I’m thinking of things like keyboard users vs. mouse; command line versus GUI; maximized versus juggled windows; open source versus Microsoft, etc etc. [↩]

We’ve hit a bunch of controversy in Toronto lately over tabled plans to tear down a small section the Gardiner Expressway. It’s brought to my city a debate over existing highway infrastructure that has raged or is still raging all over these days — from New York to Seoul to Oklahoma City. It can be characterized as new urbanists versus conservative planners, the city versus the suburbs, and livability versus big business. Mostly, though, it’s all about the car.

For those not familiar with the city, the Gardiner is the main east-west highway through the city, and it was built — rather foolishly — right across the waterfront at Lake Ontario. As a result, the city proper essentially comes to an end a few kilometers from the lake’s shore, with mostly industrial and (lately) hastily constructed condo towers filling the space.

Despite the crappy planning that plunked this highway in a prime urban location, it has become a very heavily used backbone to the city’s business infrastructure. If you’re a commuter, you’re likely to use the Gardiner. From the West, especially, it’s the fastest way into downtown.

They’re not talking about tearing down the whole thing — it’s been discussed in the past, but we don’t really have the political will to do that — but rather just a section on the eastern side that is the most lightly used of the whole stretch.

The protests against the plan have been predictable. One of the loudest voices in opposition has been talk radio mainstay David Menzies, who wrote a rather scathing editorial in The National Post, concluding:

Bottom line: tearing down any section of the Gardiner would be akin to dropping a nuke on the thousands of commuters (a. k. a. taxpayers) who depend on it daily. The time is now for all reasonable Torontonians to denounce such ideological madness before it’s too late.

He also sounds the horn for the continuing importance of commuter infrastructure like the city’s expressways on a level I’ve rarely seen. Check this out:

With the GTA’s population continuing to increase, one would think expressway construction, not demolition, would be the order of the day. Instead of tearing down sections of the Gardiner, the city should seriously think about adding a second deck. However, the powers-that-be at City Hall have no desire for projects that improve traffic-flow. Their cure-all advice for beleaguered commuters seems to be this: A. move downtown; B. trade car for bicycle.

Making all highways double decker is a hilarious solution to traffic congestion, isn’t it? Let’s go even bigger with the highways! Sixteen lanes wide! Two stories tall! Let’s demolish buildings to make room! Instead of actually going to an office building, people can just drive around all day, talking on their cellphones, marveling at the spaciousness of the road. Badass.

I’m a commuter. I’ve been a commuter for almost a year now. I rely on that very section of the Gardiner expressway the powers-that-be are proposing taking down. If it comes to fruition, I’d have to drastically change the way in which I do my job.

But still I support the plan. Tear it down.

What people like Menzies and other opponents seem to miss is that we have not, by a long shot, established a ‘finalized’ mode of work. The suburban-to-urban commuter model has become the ‘norm’ only in the last 40 years because of a unique situation with regards to cars, gas prices and a business world based on handshakes, typewriters and the suit-and-tie.

We have changed much over the last decade, and we’ll continue to change. Generation Y is a huge factor, as is the computer and other networked technologies. And the biggest factor may end up being gas prices, as they’re already making people deeply consider their living and working situation in a way they never would have when gas was 60 cents a litre. (That’s $2.30 a gallon, for the Americans.)

In a changing landscape, you don’t just build that which worked before. We need to look beyond what we’ve done in the past and build structures that support new models for working and living — for Gen Y, for the environment, for our cities, and for the lasting success of businesses who will depend on all of those things.

Photo by Reza Vaziri. Licensed under Creative Commons

I’ve been seeing a lot of the Best Practices Guy lately. If you’ve been in the work world long enough, you’re probably familiar with this person: he or she is the one at any and every meeting whose only real contribution to the discussion is to harp on the need to look at “best practices.” Before we can do anything, Best Practices Guy argues, we need to determine what everyone else is doing.

And then, presumably, we’ll just copy them. Because that’s how profits are made.

There’s nothing wrong with keeping your eyes open and making sure you’re up on the latest trends, conventions and breakthroughs, but the problem with Best Practices People is that they’re usually the one who isn’t at all. If they knew what the “best practices” were, they’d probably mention it. Instead, they just continuously request that someone else do the research and report back.

I keep putting “best practices” in quotes because it’s really one of those empty-headed phrases that sounds like it means more than it actually does. If I were to tell you the best way to make scrambled eggs, I’d sound informal, casual and cool. If I were to say I had with me the “best practices for scrambled eggs” I’d come off sounding not unlike a corporate wannabe tool.

Best Practices Guy isn’t always a tool. Usually the intentions are good, but in a roundabout way. The problem with the type of person I’m describing is that he or she is often motivated almost entirely by fear. It’s not so much research they crave, but safety. If we just do what someone else has done (and succeeded with) we thus have no risk of failure.

That’s boring. Maybe it’s a good strategy in a fiscally conservative kind of way. But it’s BORING. And boredom is not a desirable trait for a company. Boring companies already have trouble attracting talent, and, in the information age and with Generation Y being kind of difficult to work with (I hear), they’re likely not going to have much time for boredom either.

Innovation can’t happen when you limit yourself to ‘best practices’. The companies who have recently seen success have been the ones who have been willing to brazenly eschew established practices. Look at Apple with the mp3 player, Nintendo with the Wii, Google with Internet Advertising and even smaller companies like Moleskine with notebooks or Threadless with T-shirts. While these companies undoubtedly understand the marketplace, I guarantee that the top brass don’t sit around worrying about ‘best practices’.

Innovation can’t happen if you’re always looking to adhere to ‘best practices’. Let’s shut that Best Practices Guy up.

Being a giant Apple fanboy, I was pretty excited with all the iPhone news announced at Monday’s Worldwide Development Conference (WWDC). In addition to a wealth of new features — and availability in Canada, which I’m ridiculously happy about — the new iPhone also boasts GPS.

This isn’t a new feature for smart phones. Blackberry has it, as do some of the Windows Mobile models. But with the iPhone and Apple’s focus on entering the business market in a big way, I think we’re posed to see a real explosion of GPS-enabled employee smart phones across large businesses.

This is cool, of course, but it’s also kind of alarming for one big reason. Something that Steve Jobs himself mentioned in his keynote introduction of the GPS abilities: tracking.

Here’s Steve talking GPS:

The Big Brother Effect

Forgive me for getting a bit paranoid here. I’m not railing against the feature itself. It’s definitely not going to keep me from embracing the technology. But given that:

• The iPhone is being heavily marketed to large corporate users
• The iPhone has GPS that can do ‘live tracking’
• Companies can write proprietary applications and ‘push’ them out to their employee’s iPhones
• Those proprietary applications can use the iPhone SDK’s location services to access real-time GPS data

…doesn’t it seem possible that a company could rather easily create something that would allow them to see where all their employees are at any given time, assuming the employee had their phone on and was within satellite range?

Is this necessarily a bad thing?

If I were a person obsessed with privacy, this might bother me. But I tend to take a more open view on privacy matters in this age of facebook and social networking. Still, though, it has to be said that a situation where it would be rather trivial to create a real-time ‘employee’ tracker has far-reaching implications for how we model ‘work’ in the twenty-first century. Suddenly the boss can know if, say, Bob went directly to the meeting or — god forbid! — stopped for a long lunch, or if Joanne, who was supposedly ’stuck in traffic’, actually just overslept.

Technology brings with it changes, some obvious and some more surprising. The iPhone and other smartphones are likely to bring with them a lot of positives, but there are some potential negatives. After all, how would you feel about your employer literally being able to ‘track’ you during work hours? Is that something you, as an employee, could feel comfortable with?