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

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