I keep seeing articles like this one (featuring quotes from the talented Penelope Trunk) saying that Generation Y isn’t all about the money. The conclusion, often, is this:

•Work is not about the money. Young people watched their baby boomer parents work hard and get laid off, Trunk said. “Consequently, they really do believe life is about relationships,” she said. “It’s insulting if you offer to pay them to work the weekend.”

I tend to agree with this, as it’s certainly true in my case. I seriously wonder about my friends going to lawschool - I know they’re after the high-paying salary, but do they really want to end up working so much?

I worry, though, that the stigma that Gen Y is after more than a salary will translate into some employers think they can pay us nothing as long as they let everyone leave the office early on Friday. It is not, as some might think, that we’re willing to sacrifice a high salary for increased flexibility — rather it’s that we’re not willing to let a high salary dupe us into devoting our whole lives to work.

And then there’s the fact that we tend to be savvier when it comes to money, and how it works. Since we get married later, have fewer kids later in life and tend not to have the same kind of giant-house-in-the-suburbs dream as our forebears, we’re not as likely to end up in the same need-a-giant-steady-paycheck-above-all-else situation. (That’s not to say Gen Ys don’t have their own issues with debt — it’s just a different kind, what with credit cards and all.)

And, finally, there’s charts like this — from this article — , showing that the relationship between your job, the hours you work, and the money you make isn’t as clear cut as you might think:

Interesting stuff, isn’t it?

Some interesting Y-related stories from the past week:

Toronto Police Welcome Generation Y

From Toronto Police Services Chair Dr. Alok Mukherjee:

So – what do “Yers” want?
An interesting job with many changes and challenges
Work-life balance
Superior training
Access to cutting-edge technology

Where can they find all that? The Toronto Police Service.

Generation Y demands Instant Messaging at Work

From Computer Business Review:

77% of the Generation Y respondents believed that a webcam and access to instant messaging in the office (73%) would help them offer clients and suppliers a faster and more personal response.

Make the workplace fun to retain Gen Y

From The Nashville Business Journal:

Employers who recognize Gen X and Y’s needs will retain them longer and get more and better work from them. Create a “fun” work environment. Employers who embrace a fun, rather than conventional company culture create a higher rate of job satisfaction with younger employees.

What does fun mean? It means converting the breakroom to a game room with video games. It means periodically bringing in a massage therapist for chair massages, an ice cream cart for sundaes or a rolling barista for onsite lattes.

Job Hopping an Option for Gen Y

From Penelope Trunk in the Boston Globe:

So there’s lots of chatter about how people can recession-proof their careers. But what should young people do, when their golden demographics make them recession proof already? Job hop, of course.

The best thing you can do early in your career is move around a lot so you can figure out what you’re good at and what you like. If you compare people who job hop with people who don’t, people who job hop build their network faster, build their skill set faster, and are more engaged in their work.

I don’t take notes during meetings at work. I’ve taken some flack for this in the past, as usually I am the ONLY person in the room not taking notes. I also never really took notes during school classes. Not even in university. I’ll jot down REALLY important items (phone numbers, deadline dates, really critical items) but, by and large, when you look over at me during a meeting, I’m not going to be writing anything down.

I’ve always thought of myself as a mental note taker.

But this post over at Penelope Trunk’s blog has got me questioning this practice. According to Penelope, mental note taking is bad practice.

I tell Ryan Paugh that mental notes is a joke. No one takes a mental note taker seriously. It looks like they don’t care. “Even if you’re a genius,” I tell him, “you have to take notes to show you are engaged.”

It used to be that note taking was for secretaries. When hotshots didn’t type, hotshots didn’t take notes. But now we know that people actually learn more when they write as they listen, and people learn more when they translate what they are hearing into their own idea nuggets, so it makes sense that writing notes is a hot-shot job now. Everyone takes notes.

As much as I hate to admit it, this does make sense. My rationale for not taking notes has always been that, even when I do take notes, I never end up looking at them again anyway. I have no organizational system for my notes. I have no organizational systems in general.

I just assume I’ll be able to remember it all. And, up until now, that hasn’t really been a problem. But I guess the question I need to ask myself is this: will that ALWAYS be the case?

I tend to tout the virtues of Gen Y a lot, but I think, in this case, I’ve come across something that truly is a flaw. While it IS possible to be TOO organized — and I’d definitely argue that a lot of ‘traditional’ paper-based organizational systems are a waste of time (and space!) — Gen Y’s hubris when it comes to things like “mental note taking” is a real flaw.

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.

Photo by Ozyman. Licensed under Creative Commons