All the way from the United Kingdom, it seems we’re not very good.

Of course, this kind of thing has been circulating for years now. There’s really only two types of Gen Y article. The ones that say we’re brilliant, and the ones that say we’re awful. And doomed. This is the second kind.

“A particularly striking finding is the definite assessment AGR members make that Generation Y graduates tend to be ‘less loyal to the business’ that employs them,” the study said, with some employers complaining that young recruits are “self-centred”, “fickle” and “greedy”.

I love how businesses can blame their EMPLOYEES for for not being loyal. That’s kind of like an electronics store blaming their customers for not buying enough electronics. Or to put it another way: doesn’t it make sense for the onus to be on the employer to FOSTER loyalty in their employees, rather than just expecting their employees to have the quality of ‘loyalty’ for no real reason?

My own personal experience tells me that it is extremely possible for a Y worker to feel loyal to an organization. You just need to give us a reason first.

I can’t really argue with ’self-centred’, ‘fickle’ and ‘greedy’, though.

Some digging around on the newsfeed today led me to an article by Penelope Trunk, who has written a book and maintains a blog. She’s pretty damn fascinating — and a good writer –, and I imagine I’ll be linking to her stuff a fair bit.

Today, though, I want to focus on her claim that Gen Y is inherently conservative. Penelope isn’t using the word in the political sense, of course, instead speaking of the fact that, when you get right down to it, Gen Y really isn’t asking for that much.

But here’s what else is going on: Gen Y does not admit it, but their top priority is stability. This is a fundamentally conservative generation.

Her point is well-taken, but I still struggle with it a little bit, perhaps because I am Gen Y and refuse to admit things. Stability, it would seem to me, is pretty high on the priority list for everyone, regardless of generation. (And, to be fair, Trunk says as much.) To really get at the heart of the issue, you have to break down the idea of stability into more precise chunks. That is, is it financial stability we crave most? Career stability? Social & personal stability? Intellectual stability?

To get the obvious out of the way: everyone needs financial stability. It’s impossible to disregard that, even if some of the Boomers actually did for a while. (The 60s will never happen again.) But Gen Y tends to approach it a little differently, since we’re not starting our career while simultaneously buying a house and paying for baby food. As such, we’re able to focus more on other types of stability, particularly the intellectual.

This isn’t ‘intellectual’ in the sense of reading a lot of books or doing science experiments, but rather it’s framed around the notion that Gen Y is, generally, unwilling to sit at a desk and be bored out of their mind for their career. That’s not to say we won’t work menial jobs — I’m pretty sure Gen Y is driving the call centre industry in North America — but we’re very reluctant to do so under the banner of ‘career’ simply to achieve financial stability.

Instead, we’ll work the bad jobs to achieve money to put towards those intellectual pursuits I was talking about. Be it seeing the world, or starting a business, or just taking a summer off to write a novel. I’d frame it as emphasizing individual stability over career stability. And I think it might even be that the latter is a concept that no longer even exists.

All that said, something Trunk writes earlier in her post really struck a chord with me:

[These companies] get the best candidates because these companies have been the fastest to react to the new workforce conditions that place young people in the driver’s seat .

The driver’s seat is it. There’s the intellectual stability. There’s the individual stability. There’s that continual movement forward. There’s that meaning that Generation Y needs.

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The Toronto Star website is hosting a pdf document called “A Streetcar Toronto Desires” which offers opinions from TTC Chair Adam Giambrone, Transit Advocate Steve Munro and long-time rider Janet May on the City of Toronto’s currently-in-the-works Transit City plan.

Mass Transit is going to pop up fairly frequently as a topic on this blog, both in Toronto and around the world, as I think it’s a vital piece contributing to the success of Gen Y in the workforce. Our pattern has already proven to be different than previous generations, especially as the suburban dream home is generally no longer thought of as the be-all and end-all. Younger workers are choosing downtown condos over isolated cul-de-sacs in droves, which puts an increased emphasis on urban and regional rail transit.

And, of course, with a changing job market that looks to feature a shortage of talented workers, your Y employees are going to be less likely to tolerate (or even consider) a 2-hour highway commute.

Toronto has, at least a little bit, started to understand the critical importance mass transit has on business, and implemented the Transit City plan, amongst other improvements. Other cities will definitely need to keep up if they want to attract talented workers and drive economic success.

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Apparently that’s what a lot of Ontario employers think according to a recent survey. As part of the last provincial election, my province of Ontario will be getting an extra statutory holiday in February. Rather than accepting this as the good news that it is, a lot of people have decided to get ridiculously worked up about it.

The organization e-mailed its questions to 16,500 human resources professionals in Ontario and more than 3,000 responded.

Of those who answered, “40 per cent of Ontario employees will not receive an additional day off for Family Day on February 18 and … 60 per cent of employers anticipate a moderate to significant impact to their business due to the new holiday,” according to a news release.

Unless those 3,000+ HR professionals work for businesses in the manufacturing or service sectors (and they surely do not), then this is an incredibly short-sighted attitude, especially coming on the heels of this article from only a week ago, which claimed exactly the opposite.

Employers may be concerned about lost productivity from Ontario’s new Family Day, but one expert says the Feb. 18 statutory holiday could pay off in the long run.

Roderic Beaujot, a sociology professor at the University of Western Ontario, says employees are working more hours these days and that could lead to burnout and early retirement.

He adds that working fewer hours doesn’t have much effect on productivity or unemployment, but can make a big difference to work-life balance.

It’s baffling that North America has been so slow to adopt what much of the rest of the first world has already come to realize: working a lot does not necessarily translate into increased profits, nor is it the sign of a more committed workforce. Will our employers ever get the message?

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Regardless of how you view the generational breakdown — you can see how this blog breaks down the divide on the about page; you’re Gen Y if you were born after 1980ish — most people tend to agree that this new generation of worker is at the very least significantly different than any that have come before. Some people see those differences as negative — as narcissism, unruly or (and maybe this is just an Australian thing) dangerously violent — while others take a more positive approach. Regardless, change is coming, and employers all over the world need to prepare themselves for this new generation of worker.

What follows is a list a ten changes Gen Y is going to demand of their managers and bosses. They may not do so vocally — many times, they’ll simply voice their displeasure with their feet (by leaving, not by kicking you in the face) — but, over time, the messages below will be heard by anyone who owns or manages a company.
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One of the more pervasive memes about Generation Y is that we’re narcissistic. It goes so far that one of the other names for “Generation Y” (in addition to Millennials and Nexus Generations, both of which makes us sound far too much like robots for my tastes) is the “Me Generation.” This can be seen to various degrees in a lot of writing about our generation. There’s mild stuff, like the article Generation Y: Connectivity & Enjoyment which just sort of oversimplifies the generational issues and sums it all up as this:

Contrary to their parents, for whom “the job” dictated everything, for generation why-ers, enjoyment comes first. They choose where and what kind of lifestyles they want to lead and then choose their careers accordingly.

But then there’s the far more negative slant, such as in this article from the Christian Science Monitor. They write:

A little smug self-absorption might be a time-honored trait of at least some subsets of the under-30 crowd.

But over the past few decades the prevailing disposition among college students – today labeled Generation Y or Millennials – has slid into full-blown narcissism, according to a study released this week.

The “all about me” shift means much more than lots of traffic at self-revelatory websites such as YouTube and Facebook. It points, says the study’s author, to a generation’s lack of empathy, its inability to form relationships – and worse.

I think the they labeled YouTube & Facebook as self-revelatory is fairly telling of their inability to really understand both what those websites and the generational attitudes they refer to really mean. YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and the other Social Networking sites aren’t fueled by egotistical tendencies — they’re driven by social tendencies. It’s not just about logging on and telling the world what you’re doing. It’s also about seeing what everyone else is doing. And for most, that’s the real compelling reason behind being part of a social networking site. If it was just one person sharing their thoughts, activities & photos with the world, you wouldn’t see anywhere near the same level of popularity. (Plus, it’d just be a blog — not that blogs and blog authors are egotistical!)

This worry that Gen Y has too much self-esteem is actually pretty funny when you think about it. I guess the concern is that we’re too confident and have unrealistic expectations. But the subtext seems to be “life sucks, and you should know that already.”

Is too much confidence harmful? I guess so. But a good deal less so that a bunch of people who have no faith at all in their own ability. Nobody with ‘realistic’ or less-than-realistic levels of self esteem has ever created, invented or changed anything. If you want to see a parade of so-called narcissists, look no further than this video.

It’s the optimism — that so many write off as a negative thing — that separates us from Gen X, who were known for their cynicism, amongst other things. And, sure, the optimism can in a lot of cases manifest itself as egotism or narcissism — and I’ll be the first to point out that that can be really really annoying — but even in spite of that it is this generation’s hope and belief in change that has most strongly defined it.

And, yeah, we expect to enjoy the things we do, at work and otherwise. That some people find that difficult to understand seems to indicate a problem with them, and not us, doesn’t it? Not to draw lines in the sand or anything.

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On the newsfeed today is an article all the way from the Kannakee Daily Journal in Illinois titled Twentysomethings expect more than other employees. The article refers to a 2007 CareerBuilder.com survey that found that “employees younger than 29, which it refers to as Generation Y, expect more from their jobs than do older generations.”

That’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? I do kind of wonder if this isn’t just a constant feeling amongst newer workers, though. Did young workers in the 60s, 70s and 80s really walk into their first real career-style job expecting nothing but hardship and strife? Are we really the first generation that expects better than that?

The article does touch on what I think is the real reason behind this supposed phenomenon: “There is more job availability today, so this generation isn’t afraid to change jobs, and it’s used to adapting.”

So, really, maybe it isn’t that Gen Y is unique in expecting better, but rather that we’re the first to actually get it?

I spent a lot of time debating before deciding to launch this blog. One of the key articles that pushed me towards it I read almost a year ago. Business Week’s Smashing the Clock: No schedules. No mandatory meetings. Inside Best Buy’s radical reshaping of the workplace is a fascinating story that reveals a lot about the changing nature of work.

The official policy for this post-face-time, location-agnostic way of working is that people are free to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as they get their work done. “This is like TiVo (TIVO ) for your work,” says the program’s co-founder, Jody Thompson.

The comparison to TiVO is particularly apt, because it underlines one of the less obvious connections between new technologies and our working lives: that technology brings choice. For some reason, a lot of people tend to assume technology is all about efficiency, but that’s not really the case. It’s always been about choice. The choice to send a quick e-mail as opposed to writing and mailing a letter. The choice to edit those photos in-house with the click of a button instead of sending them off to a third-party with an X-acto knife and a darkroom. And, now, the choice to work a schedule that isn’t rigidly defined by your daily access to some largely irrelevant building.

It seems to be working. Since the program’s implementation, average voluntary turnover has fallen drastically, CultureRx says. Meanwhile, Best Buy notes that productivity is up an average 35% in departments that have switched to ROWE. Employee engagement, which measures employee satisfaction and is often a barometer for retention, is way up too, according to the Gallup Organization, which audits corporate cultures.

This is an old article, so I’d be interested in any kind of a follow-up on how it’s going now, but I suspect it’s largely the same. People, when not told exactly when they need to work, will tend to work more, not less. I think the big barrier management needs to get over when it comes to policy’s like Best Buy’s ROWE has nothing to do with any valid concerns of productivity, but rather losing control.

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It’s more than a little clichéd for people to make sweeping generalizations about generations of people. I fully understand that. And embrace it. This blog is not about individuals. This site is about trends and culture. It’s about movements, both global and local. It’s about crowds and collaborations, not the work of lone persons. Simply: It’s not about you. It’s not about me. It’s about us.

And that approach to blogging is, in itself, demonstrative of the overarching nature of Generation Y. Our approach to living and working is irrevocably tied to the idea that everything we do is tangled up in other people. One of the biggest fundamental shifts in thinking that Y workers bring is that we find it extremely difficult — sometimes impossible — to accept artificial structural restraints. Compartmentalization, departmentalization, and rigid hierarchies are, for us, linked to an old-fashioned way of doing things, wherein everyone erected silos over top their work and held on to whatever it is they’re doing forever tightly, longing to control not only the original creation of that work — whatever it may be — but also the distribution, consumption and even perception of it out there in the world.

That doesn’t work.

We are experiencing now, every day, a shrinking — and, sure,flattening — world. We long ago tore down most of our artificial barriers — whether they’re office walls, foreign languages, fax machines or any kind of ‘protocol’ — to create a new kind of information-based Wild West, where knowledge and talent zips around like spastic insects and we are compelled to work together to capture it. You can use all the buzzwords you want: crowdsourcing, wikinomics, Web 2.0, but the unifying, plain truth of it all is simply this: the future of business is bigger than individuals, it’s bigger than individual businesses, even (though I say that with some cynicism), it’s bigger than individual countries — our new frontier is typified by the global whole.

So, yes, this blog is not about ‘you’ in the strictest sense. As tends to be the case with generalizations, you’ll read things about your generation that make you want to stand up and declare “That’s not me!” And that’s awesome. That’s something to be commended. But there will also be times when you read a generation generalization on this site and are struck by how much that emotion or tendency does apply to the way you live & work. And there’s nothing wrong with that, either.

And so…

We need to see things through a wider lens if we’re to even attempt to understand this new kind of world we’re living in. This blog, of course, isn’t really the best way to do that. I’m not an expert on the issues I’m writing about — I’m not really an expert on anything. What I do hope can happen, though, is that we’ll be about to use this platform as a catalyst to real conversation and analysis. That by providing a spotlight to these issues — and, sure, occasionally mix in my own opinion — we can better understand what it that we, as a generation, are bringing, and how we fit into this larger, and yet smaller, world we continue to live in.

We. Us. Not me. Not you. Thanks for reading.

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