Well, maybe not all of us. But most of us.

There’s a lot of hullabaloo in Ontario (and other places, I’m sure) these days about the struggling manufacturing sector. The Toronto Star in particular has been all over it:

While Canada’s economy continues to churn out jobs, some cities are getting left behind.

Amid waves of job cuts in the crucial automotive sector, Oshawa’s unemployment rate suddenly ranks among the highest of major Canadian cities, climbing to 7.6 per cent in April from 6.4 per cent the month before, according to Statistics Canada.

The loss of jobs sucks, of course, but I think cries from politicians for government subsidies to the manufacturing sector (a ‘bail out’) are completely misguiding. Saving manufacturing in the United States and Canada (and most of the developed world) isn’t just unlikely: It’s unfeasible.

We are becoming a service economy, which means that a lot of Generation Y is going to end up working in the so-called ‘service sector’. A lot of people balk at this, because they immediately leap to everyone working at McDonalds or whatever, but the truth of it is that the service sector includes a whole whack of occupations and different styles of work, some of which pay minimum wage (ie. The McJob) and some of which pay millions of dollars a year (ie. a consultant).

The only real solution to job loss as a result of manufacturing is an acceptance that those jobs are gone. Governments should involve themselves only as far as providing opportunities to retrain the former manufacturer workers and create opportunities. The alternative is the equivalent of bailing out the water in a sinking ship — the only thing you can buy yourself is a little bit of time.

This puts Generation Y at an important crossroads. We’re going to experience a major economic shift from secondary to tertiary industry, and it’s not going to be without bumps in the road. We need to be prepared to embrace the new model of the service sector, and kick ass at it.

Dan Benjamin¹ writes about Offices and the Creativity Zone and makes about a million good points.

There’s no choice about how or when you’re expected produce, or under what circumstances. Here is your computer, here is your workstation, you have the tools, the florescent lights are turned on, why don’t you go ahead and get to work, thanks, bye.

I’m beginning to think that when you boil things down to their core, the modern day ‘knowledge worker’ has two functions: creation and collaboration. And for the latter, the office environment can be important. I love online collaboration environments as much as the next person, but there’s always something to be said for the face-to-face meeting, where ideas fly over the boardroom table. It’s a proven method, and will always be enough to justify traditional office space.

But the creative element is a whole different matter. For that we are uniquely individual in our needs and practices.

Unfortunately, most people can’t simply step into The [creative] Zone. In the very same way you’d want to find the right time and place to read a book, creative types need to setup the specific conditions they need to enter The Zone. For some people, this might mean listening to a certain kind of music. It might be fueled by caffeine and a dark room late at night. Some people work best in the silence of the early morning. It all depends on the person.

One of the major symptoms of the shift to the information age is that more and more of your employees are doing work that requires creativity. Stuff like answering phones, filling out forms, data entry, tech support, purchase order accounting and so on, is either less important or has been outsourced to another organization halfway around the world. In smaller businesses, especially, it’s important to understand that everyone can be (and should be) a creative worker, but it will only happen if you give them the flexibility, freedom and motivation to find their ‘creative zone’ in relation to the work you’ve asked them to do. And if that zone happens to be outside the wall of your office then, well, who cares?

And definitely don’t do this:

Of course it makes sense why corporations work this way, but that doesn’t mean that this is the right setting for creative people. The corporate world rewards based on perceived productivity rather than accomplishment. People who arrive at work at 8am, take a 30 minute lunch break (at their desk), and leave at 6pm are usually congratulated regardless of their real accomplishments, while those who struggle with corporate schedules but produce brilliant work (delivered on time) are often penalized.

The hour is an irrelevant metric in most work. Smash the clock.

1. Benamin, with John Gruber also regularly appears on the excellent podcast The Talk Show [↩]

Despite all anecdotal evidence, a lot of Gen Yers still tend to worry a lot about their potential in the job market. It’s probably due to the experiences their parents and older siblings may have had entering the workforce decades ago, struggling to find anything but the dreaded McJob. It’s so bad that this trepidation sometimes causes people to turtle themselves in academic institutions, piling on degrees and diplomas in the hopes of guaranteeing career potential right out of the gate.

The truth of the matter is that all that education, while undoubtedly important for other reasons, isn’t entirely necessary. Because, in the end, Generation Y’s secret weapon for career success is simply demographics.

Since the first wave of baby boomers reached the age of 60 in 2006 and have entered retirement, an increasing number of professionals are leaving the job market each year. So it’s not surprising that more than 80% of employers say they are concerned about a looming shortage of qualified workers.

There’s little reason today for Gen Y to fear the job hunt (though obviously this can’t hold true for all sectors — some are in steep decline) because there are simply more job openings coming down the pipeline than there are workers.

That said, the word ‘qualified’ in the above quote is extremely important. More on that in a later post.

I recently came across a great post at Ian Selvarajah’s blog on the correlation between Generation Y and the management theory called ‘boreout’.

You would think that the “best of the best” would be highly productive and contributing a lot to their organizations right? Wrong. Oddly enough, despite several of us getting very good jobs with prestigious firms in a variety of industries and decent pay, many are unhappy with our jobs, primarily because we’re bored!

I had never heard of ‘Boreout’ before (though it must be a real thing — it has a wikipedia entry) but it’s certainly a familiar concept. It’s the opposite of ‘burnout’, which is when an employee has too much challenging work on his or her plate. With ‘boreout’, the employee has too little.

The truth about most of us Gen Yers who work office jobs is that we often ARE bored. Employers and managers tend to blame the internet (and namely facebook these days) as a sapper of productivity in office environments, but I think that’s putting the cart before the horse. We don’t forsake work to surf, we surf because we’re bored with work. And sometimes because we don’t even have any work to do.

Causes? I can think of a couple.

‘Climbing the Ladder’ Syndrome

The first is the old career-centric dynamic, where big companies hired people (often with WAY less education and experience than entry-level employees have now) and ‘grew’ them inside the company. It’s the old story about starting in the mailroom and working your way up to the corner office. Gen Y knows this is BS, though, and those of us (especially the top of the class types) starting out are going to get bored fast if we’re sitting around doing data entry while other people do the real meaty work.

Gen Y is not patient. Expecting them to ‘wait their turn’ is going to absolutely lead to hardcore burnout.

Exceeding ‘realistic’ time expectations

The second cause may be more anecdotal, but I thought I’d throw it out there and see what sort of response it gets. See if this scenario is familiar:

You’re starting at a new job and are given a few tasks to get your feet wet. They expect that these tasks will take you a week to complete. You finish in two days. So, being a good employee, you report that you’re done to your manager and ask for more tasks. But the cycle continues, as you continuously finish tasks days before you’re expected to. Eventually, the act of continuously having to come up with new things for you to do seems to start to annoy your boss, who is likely burned out with their own work.

The result? You start to wait. Give yourself a buffer. Finish a task, surf for an hour, hang out at the watercooler, and then see if there’s anything else you need to be doing. Short-term it can actually feel like a nice respite from having to do work all day long. Long-term it can easily manifest itself as the dreaded boreout.

The beginnings of a solution

The real solution to both issues is likely exceedingly complicated, requiring a whole new shift in management thinking. But to simplify it, I’d say it just comes down to this: encourage your young employees to be self-directed. Give them tasks, set deadlines, and if they exceed them, then encourage them to focus on more educational endeavors in their newfound ‘free’ time: learn a new computer program, start a company blog, study a new programming language or research new design trends. Google’s 20 percent time is a good model of self-directedness because not only has it led to a lot of awesome google products but it also means that managers don’t have to manage so much.

Gen Y is complicated, requiring you to be hands-off in some ways and hands-on in others, but the self-directedness is at the core of our attitude toward work. Some might characterize it as impatience, but it more has to do with just wanting to get things done without others standing in the way.

Photo by phoenixdailyphoto. Licensed under Creative Commons

BusinessWeek had an article last week full of tips for employers on how to communicate with Gen Y employees. For the most part, it was kind of useless – ValleyWag even called them on it – made up of platitudes like “Don’t manage, mentor” and “Don’t conceal, communicate”, which run the gamut between obvious and oblivious but don’t get anywhere near real value.

I’m not exactly sure why older generations are having trouble communicating with Generation Y. They seem to regard us like they would a foreign language, looking to books and consultants and lists-disguised-as-articles for explanations on how to best learn what makes us tick.

But the dirty little secret behind all of this is that a lot of managers aren’t just looking for information about us — our habits, culture, attitudes, and so on –, they’re also looking for information on how to control. These employers don’t want to adapt. They’d much rather just figure out how to BS their way into the appearance of Gen Y friendliness.

They want to harness this changed workforce without ever really acknowledging our differences.

The only tip employers really need for communicating with Gen Y is this: don’t BS. Be honest. Speak plainly and directly. Don’t lean on hierarchies, memos, policies and procedures. Keep your explanations straightforward. And don’t you ever use the “because I’m your boss” card.

That may seem like a lot, but it’s really not. It all boils down to a simple “No BS” rule. Try that, and all the other ‘tips’ you need will start to fall into place.

Photo by fabblo. Licensed under Creative Commons