The study found that two of the top five places to work were tech companies: Google and Apple. According to DECODE partner Eric Meerkamper, “The brands that were chosen are considered to be authentic and innovate; part of some new and important values emerging in the workplace. All of these organizations are places that resonate as being stable and secure. This is an important variable considering the substantial debt load many students will carry upon graduation given rising tuition costs.”

You could essentially distill this down to “people want to work somewhere cool.” And a lot of what’s cool is admittedly perception more than it is reality. Is that fair? Not particularly. But I’d argue that’s almost unavoidable. Think about this question, and answer honestly — would you rather work at Exxon Mobil or Google? Deloitte or Apple? Ernst & Young or Nintendo?

People tend to gravitate towards the younger, hipper companies, even if there’s really not a huge difference in individual experience at the entry-level. And what makes these companies seem “young” and “hip” are actually small things, which don’t have to impact your bottom line. In fact, employers can make their businesses instantly more Y-friendly through just a few small changes to their corporate culture.

Here’s five to get you started:

1. Cultivate an environment of questions — with answers

Current corporate culture often encourages passive learning. New people are expected to attend meetings, stay quiet, take notes, and learn slowly through osmosis. This doesn’t work in the twenty-first century. Without the expectation of a 25 year job with a gold watch at the end, young workers don’t really feel like we have time to just sit quietly and absorb information.

So we tend to ask questions. Often it gets us in trouble. There’s a comment thread on BrazenCareerist wherein Quarter Lifer Amanda notes she’s been fired for asking too many questions.

This is crazy. In the information age, questions are the foundation of learning. Think of google — each search query is a question, and answers are delivered immediately. This is the kind of information environment your new hires grew up with.

Obviously you can’t spend 8-hours a day answering questions, but don’t discourage people from asking. Set up infrastructure — like a twitter account — where employees can ask senior employees questions. That way, everyone will be able to follow along with the answers.

And, no matter what you do, don’t avoid the tough or “insulting” questions. Confront everything head on. If you can’t answer something, then maybe ask your new employee to come up with alternative solutions — you’ll have instantly made them feel valued.

2. Get away from the boring work environment

You don’t need to rip out all your cubicles or put down new carpet, but small things can quickly take an office from “soul-sucking” to “fun”. If your type of business allows, consider setting up a shared music system, where everyone can contribute mp3s or CDs. Instead of those cloying “Motivational” posters, throw up a bulletin board and let people post funny signs or photos (within reason, of course). Don’t use Group Policy to lock everyone to some bland desktop wallpaper — encourage people to individualize their computers.

And, when the situation calls for it, don’t be afraid to use a little bit of profanity around the office. It boosts morale. Really.

3. Embrace — and try — new technology

Too many businesses are still using sales software that’s straight out of the 1980s. Nothing kills morale faster than knowing that you have to deal with cludgy old technology. Especially when the employee knows that they could accomplish the same task in half-the-time if given better software.

This doesn’t have to cost you. A ton of software these days is open-source and free. If someone has a suggestion involving new technology, give them a chance to pitch it to you and, if it makes sense, give it a week-long trial run. What’s the worst that can happen?

4. Be Open

This doesn’t mean you need to hand out your budgets to all employees, but it’s no secret that closed door meetings are divisive. Inclusiveness is a vital part of retaining your Gen Y employees.

So be open. Invite people involved in other projects to sit in on meetings. They’ll feel more plugged in, and you may end up getting some interesting perspective. If something big has happened to the business — whether good or bad — consider letting the whole staff know about it. If you start crafting an ‘inner circle’ of only your senior staff members, those left out can easily become disgruntled.

If you’re worried about the time this might take, leverage technology. CEOs from all sectors are blogging regularly, to great effect. It lets people know what’s going on at the top-level, and also has the bonus side-effect of making people who can easily seem distant more relatable.

5. Don’t try too hard

The last thing I want is for people to take this list and instantly become the boss that wanders around trying to be everybody’s friend. Don’t be that guy. The kinds of changes outlined in this list shouldn’t be forced. Nor should you implement them then act like you’ve given all your employees a great favour.

This works in tandem with the point above — in addition to being open, you need to be honest. Ultimately, when it comes to managing people, if you’re not happy and motivated in YOUR position, none of the people under you will ever give a damn.

This kind of change needs to be made in the spirit of making your business more efficient and your team more effective. Go forward in that light, and your intergenerational team should hum along just fine. Start making changes because you just want those damned young employees to play nice and stop jerking you around, and you’re not likely to get anywhere at all.

Be open. Be honest. Be real. Be cool. It can be that simple.

Photo by Steve Deger. Licensed under Creative Commons

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.

Bauerlein recently contributed a Boston Globe piece on 8 reasons why this is the dumbest generation that achieves the rare double-feat of being both incredibly out-of-touch and remarkably ironic — it’s a piece that hopes to demonstrate how dumb, vacant and empty-headed Generation Y (and Gen Z, or Generation TBD, or whatever) is made up entirely of stock photos and three-sentence descriptors.

In any case, I think it’s supposed to be pithy and somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but even allowing for that it’s mostly stupid. So, in response, here are eight reasons why this is the smartest generation, presented without stock-photos and not split up across nine different pages.

They’re more politically & socially involved than ever before

Bauerlein writes that this generation is “encased in more immediate realities that shut out conditions beyond — friends, work, clothes, cars, pop music, sitcoms, Facebook.” This immediately brings to light the biggest problem with his arguments: while he claims to be criticizing this generation, he’s really just criticizing teenagers. Do teenagers tend to be egotistical and caught up in the goings-on of their own lives to the point of melodrama? They sure do. Is this a new phenomenon? Not at all.

Hell, the fact that Bauerlein thinks this generation is preoccupied by sitcoms shows how out-of-touch he is.

The big point is this, though: our generation is more politically involved and socially-conscious than ever before. Check out these stats from a USA Today article:

61% of 13- to 25-year-olds feel personally responsible for making a difference in the world, suggests a survey of 1,800 young people to be released today. It says 81% have volunteered in the past year; 69% consider a company’s social and environmental commitment when deciding where to shop, and 83% will trust a company more if it is socially/environmentally responsible. The online study — by two Boston-based companies, Cone Inc. and AMP Insights — suggests these millennials are “the most socially conscious consumers to date.”

They spend way less time watching TV and more time reading

Bauerlein trots out the old “Kids don’t READ any more!” argument, referring specifically to books. And, sure, books don’t sell great — they’re on the decline. But that doesn’t mean Gen Y doesn’t read. In fact, whereas the boomers and Gen X tended to employ television as their major source of media, Gen Y is turning to the internet. And even with advances in video & audio online, you know how the vast majority of the internet is experienced? By reading.

From an article in World News Australia:

The survey, commissioned by social networking website MySpace and conducted by UK-based analyst The Future Laboratory, found a quarter of 18 to 24-year-olds had reduced their television watching in favour of social networking on the web.

They have massive networks to call upon

Bauerlein brings up the abundance of typos, abbreviations and misspellings in IM and Texting communication as a point to prove this is a ‘dumb generation’. I don’t much like that kind of typing either, but it’s hardly a sign of ‘dumbness’. In fact, most of these short-forms emerge because Gen Y is trying to cultivate an absolutely astronomical number of friendships and relationships.

The networking we’re seeing with young people today is unprecedented and of incredible value to business. Whereas in the past people didn’t start building their networks until they were in their late teens or early twenties, this generation is establishing these connections at 12 years old.

They have a worldwide platform for expressing themselves creatively

Bauerlein makes the ridiculous argument that “On MySpace, if you write clearly and compose coherent paragraphs with informed observations on history and current events, ‘buddies’ will make fun of you.” I’m really not sure where he’s getting this, unless he’s hanging out in some really stupid corners of the internet.

One of the benefits to social networks, blogs and other online platforms is that young people can and do share their thoughts and ideas on everything from TV to video games to politics. The opportunity to make yourself visible at a young age leads to career and portfolio opportunities that were roadblocked before. Just look at the legion of bloggers who have found book deals.

They seek entertainment that’s active, not passive

Bauerlein points to the blockbuster sales of Grand Theft Auto 4 as a reason for this generation’s ‘dumbness’, but he doesn’t offer much in the way of argument. I’d make the argument that Gen Y’s appetite for video games as opposed to television or movies is a sign of intelligence, not anti-intellectualism.

Gen Y demands interactivity with their media. TV shows like Lost have derived popularity from the fact that fans love to come online and talk about them — develop theories and look for clues. Even American Idol, a show that takes a lot of crap for lacking substance, succeeds with youth because they feel like they can be a part of it.

Involvement, in a lot of respects, IS intelligence. There’s a lot more to be derived from playing Grand Theft Auto 4 than, say, watching an episode of Miami Vice.

They have quick access to an astounding amount of information

Bauerlein, again, makes a confusing argument: “Digital natives, however, go to the Internet not to store knowledge in their minds, but to retrieve material and pass it along. The Internet is just a delivery system.”

I don’t really know what he’s getting at, but that may be because I’m not storing enough knowledge in my mind. I just keep giving all my knowledge away to my online buddies!

One of my favourite archetypical Gen Y traits is their ability to quickly settle an argument. A group of people will be sitting around a table wondering, say, who Bob Dole’s Vice Presidential candidate was and suddenly, within seconds, someone will have pulled the answer from their laptop or cellphone. This tends to mystify the hell out of a lot of baby boomers.

If Gen Y memorizes less information, it’s because we know how to wield the enormous repository of information that is the internet.

They’re forcing huge changes in education

Education is a topic I’m passionate about, and there’s no doubt that a lot needs to change in the way teachers approach their Gen Y, and younger, students, but Bauerlein’s argument that we’re in an “era of child-centered classrooms and self-esteem grading” is just tired. Especially since nobody is really able to prove that today’s students are really lacking in the smarts department globally:

According to Reena Nadler, program director of LifeCourse Associates, a marketing and human resources consultancy in Great Falls, Virginia, founded by generational experts Neil Howe and William Strauss, the millennial generation is turning the clichés on their heads. “Student achievement is rising,” says Nadler, a millennial herself. Today’s youth dedicate more hours to their studies and extracurricular activities than previous generations did.

I think there’s very real issues that arise when the students are digital natives and the teachers barely know how to turn a computer on, and we’re seeing the fruits of that, but that doesn’t imply there’s anything inherently wrong with this generation. That they’re forcing change in the way education happens is actually a testament to their abilities.

Because we’re young

It looks like Bauerlein just plain runs out of arguments with his eighth point. He probably should have just gone with seven reasons. Seven is lucky. His eighth argument is simply “because they’re young.” And young people are… stupid.

He’s sort of right, actually. Young people lack experience and, indeed, tend to be egocentric and melodramatic and prone to screwing up (all part of learning). But youth also brings with it, by its very nature, an incredibly wellspring of potential, which is what a lot of companies are just starting to realize:

“We have the best qualified generation since history,” says Patricia Vendramin, a sociologist at the Work & Technology Research Centre of the Fondation Travail-Université in Namur, Belgium. Millennials get work experience early, they’re flexible, they’re willing to relocate, and they’re open-minded, she adds. Also, “they are very skilled at using technology” and they’re true team players, Redmond says.

So much left to say

It’s unfortunate that authors like Bauerlein are able to draw booksales by treading on the same old “kids are stupid” ground so many others have walked for decades. I bet when he was younger there were older people saying he was dumb, too. You would think that experience would have taught him better than trotting out this the-kids-aren’t-alright nonsense. But, then, maybe those calling him dumb back then just happened to be right.

Thanks to the Brazeen Careerist Forum for the link to this article.

Anyway, in the interview Allen says this:

One of the problems that’s endemic with the younger generation people who have grown up with computers and with email they make the assumption that email is a fine medium for communicating anything and everything.

Which, for some reason, provoked a really strong emotional reaction in me as I read it. “He’s wrong!” I thought, imaginary daggers in my eyes. “He’s wrong wrong wrong.”

Thankfully, commenter Joost laid it down before I had to:

Please. One of the problems that’s endemic with the older generation is that they make the assumption that email is only appropriate for communicating a small narrowly defined subset of human communication.

Why do we have e-mail?

When I first started work, I’d write long, detail-heavy e-mails to my co-workers. My rationale was that it was better to cover all the bases all at once than risk the finer points being missed. My e-mails were (at least in my opinion) well-written, friendly and easy to understand.

Unfortunately, nobody read them.

A lot of my issue was just that I overestimated the amount of time people have for reading e-mail. A lot of older people regard it primarily as a nuisance, and like to spend as little time reading (skimming, really) e-mail as possible. And that’s okay. That much makes sense to me.

What NEVER made sense to me was the people who picked up the phone or waited until they saw me to communicate a message. Or, instead of sending a response, booked a meeting to discuss what I had e-mailed. If that’s how work is going to get done, I thought, why even HAVE e-mail?

Trusting technology

One of the really impressive things Generation Y does is communicate widespread messages effortlessly. If you’ve ever watched an event come together on facebook (or through another evite app) you know what I’m talking about. It’s simple: five minutes of work and a few clicks can result in a packed house the next night.

We trust that the app — the technology — is going to work. It’s going to effectively communicate the message.

The older generation seems to have trouble with this.

Image by m-c. Licensed under Creative Commons

There’s a lot of stupid conclusions people are making about why less people are watching the Oscars. For example:

Some of these movies are just too difficult for a mass audience, frankly. And if we have moved into an era where there’s this dichotomy between big popular studio movies and smaller pictures for more specialized audiences, we may just have to get used to smaller audiences [for the Oscar telecast.]

I don’t buy it. Most people have never tuned into the Oscars to watch their favourite movies win awards, rooting for the ones they feel close to like they would their favourite football team. Instead, they’ve traditionally tuned in because it’s a spectacle: a long, star-studded, gala event with jokes, dancing, montages, shadow puppets, etc.

And the reason the ratings are declining is, I’d argue, due to a very Gen Y shift from passive viewing to active on-demand acquisition of content.

The thing about this year’s Oscar’s ceremony is that, even if I missed the entire show, I can still easy view all the best moments. As early as the next morning, youtube was full of them. I can spend a half hour, see all the best stuff, and not feel like I wasted four hours of a Sunday night sitting through the award for Sound Editing.

It’s a smarter way of accessing entertainment, and the Y generation is doing it in incredible numbers. From downloading a show via iTunes to skip commercials, to using Tivo to record events and allow us to skip around, the motivation is to be entertained on our terms.

This is an attitude that will extend to your workplace, too. Your Gen Y employees will be likely to grumble about that all-day meeting you have planned: why can’t you just e-mail out some notes that they can view on their own time? Why sit in a room together and create that proposal document when it can be broken up and tackled in smaller, more valuable pieces?

Asking Generation Y to sit in one place for a long time will always be a challenge, and it doesn’t have (that much) to do with shorter attention spans and trumped up ADD diagnoses. Instead, it’s more a quest of defiance of tradition, always asking this question: why do it that way when we can do it this way, faster, and get the same result?

Photo by NMCIL ortiz domney. Licensed under Creative Commons

The above (taken from the absolutely awesome web comic xkcd — visit or you’re a fool) pretty well sums up my feelings toward wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. It’s both an amazing resource and a fabulous time waster, and has become my quick go-to source for quick information about any subject, from actors and actresses to vacation destinations.

Yes, there’s the very real possibility of information being incorrect or (much more commonly) badly written, but the mountains of information more than make up for it.

Education has struggled with wikipedia since it hit the scene. Almost immediately after hearing wikipedia described to them, educators decided it was a menace — the academic equivalent of speculative hearsay. The rules fell into place very quickly: never cite wikipedia in a formal essay. You might as well source the National Enquirer.

Hearing their teachers continuously hammer home the message that wikpedia is unreliable has apparently had an effect on students, as evidenced by this report from a Generation Y workshop.

Interesting discussion during Dave Brown’s Generation Y workshop at LIFT08. It seems asking a few teenagers how they use the Internet is always going to produce a few findings like these:

Wikipedia is not seen as a very good/valuable source in school when it comes to usage in school work.

(emphasis mine)

And, sure, wikipedia probably shouldn’t become an automatically accepted authoritative source for academic essays. But you know what? Neither should anything else. The underlying message to all this “wikipedia is so unreliable!” chest-besting (which isn’t even really true) is that sources should be judged based on the medium in which they appear, and not on the quality of the source itself. For the most part, kids aren’t being told to look at their sources carefully before they quote them in an academic paper — they’re being told that the internet is bad, and print is good.

There is a way to make wikipedia a part of education, and it starts with teaching students the difference between a well-researched article on wikipedia versus a poorly-researched one. It could include instruction on examining footnotes, looking at the history and discussion pages and the way the article is presented. In short, teaching kids how to research instead of just blindly hunting for sources that their teacher has deemed as ‘acceptable’.

Wikipedia does have a place in academia. To argue otherwise is to ignore the massive growth and mindshare the site as claimed over the last few years. And there’s a way to make wikipedia fit with good, qualified research — it just requires a different approach to teaching.

And while I love to rail on business for being backwards technologically, I’d be really hard-pressed to argue that e-mail wasn’t adopted quickly enough. Because it exploded onto the scene and became incredibly pervasive very quickly.

That said, there’s a whole lot about e-mail — and, more accurately, the way people use e-mail — that drives me crazy. Having spent many of my years in the office in a mostly unofficial ‘tech support’ role (something I’m sure a lot of Gen Y workers can relate to), I’ve seen absolutely mind-bending practices from co-workers when it comes to their e-mail programs.

I think a lot of the odd behaviour stems from the fact that e-mail did come into offices so quickly. If you think about it, nobody was ever really trained on e-mail, at least not like they were trained on how to use the copier (or whatever). Habits that may have made sense for composing, sending or filing ‘real’ mail were transferred over to the electronic Inbox, despite the fact that those habits make almost no sense when dealing with electronic media.

In that light, I don’t blame anyone for adopting these bizzare practices. But I’m still going to make fun of them.

What follows is five non-sensical things people do with e-mail.

Creating hundreds of subfolders, many of which are redundant

One of the most common thing I see when troubleshooting an older person’s e-mail is the giant list of subfolders under their Inbox. Inevitably, these subfolders are based on one or both of the following criteria:

• The person who sent the messsage
• The date the message was received

So you get people who manually move all the e-mails they get in March to their “March” folder. Or all the e-mails they get from Bob to their ‘Bob’ folder. Or, and this is truly staring into a dark abyss, all the e-mails they get from Bob in March to a “Bob – March” folder.

This is CRAZY.

Some subfolder organization I can understand. Personally, I keep it simple: I have “Inbox” and I have “Old”. But I could understand folders like “Policies”, “Reports”, “Harassment Claims” or the like. But subfolders based on person and/or date are undoubtedly stupid and a HUGE waste of time for the people ‘organizing’ their e-mail.

Any e-mail program EVER automatically lets you sort by date and by person. Newer programs even let you set up Search or Smart folders that let you see those items without wasting twenty minutes every day playing a useless drag-and-drop game with Outlook 2003.

Calling to make sure you got their e-mail

I could understand this one when people were new to e-mail and still using dial-up connections. Back then, sending a 200 kilobyte message was dicey. If it was of particular importance, it made sense to call and confirm everything made it to the other end intact.

But now, over a decade later, it’s still commonplace for your phone to ring simultaneously with the e-mail hitting your inbox. And so you end up picking up your phone as you read the message, and the first question is always “Did you get my e-mail?”

I understand not trusting technology. Especially for people who were around in the Windows 95/98 era when everything pretty well sucked and attempting to send a simple two-line message to a co-worker could lead to four blue screen error messages, a bunch of crap about IRQ settings and then, weirdly, a viewing of Weezer’s video for “Buddy Holly”, but we’ve passed the threshold. Either call me or e-mail me. Don’t do both.

And don’t even get me started on ‘read receipts’. If people judged my e-mail reading habits based on my response to read receipts, they’d assume I never check my e-mail ever.

Taking spam really personally

I.T. workers will understand this one better than anyone else. The co-worker who knows that you’re “into your computers” and always wants to talk about one thing: all the spam they get. They turn their computers on in the morning and make remarks like “20 messages? Bet most of it is SPAM!” while chuckling to themselves. They read off spam subject lines and messages to no one in particular. They’re constantly on the look-out for ways to fight spam. They’re inevitably the ones who end up getting their identities stolen through phishing scams.

I hate spam too, of course. Everyone hates spam. But acting like it’s some sort of epidemic that’s landed squarely in your e-mail box is more than a little non-sensical. And also a major waste of time. The best way to ‘fight’ spam? Turn on your e-mail client’s filter. And ignore the stuff that slips through the cracks. Honestly, do you get this worked up about the junk mail flyers you get in your mailbox at home, too?

Forwarding EVERYTHING

If real life were exactly like e-mail, every time anyone said anything remotely witty in a gathering of people, all of the people in attendance would immediately contact all of their friends, known relatives, acquaintances and vague undefinable relationships and share the witty comment with them.

E-mail forwarding is an epidemic worse than spam. At least with spam there’s the chance that someone, somewhere might find it slightly useful. Some people really want cheap black-market viagra or diet pills. But nobody wants a poorly-researched treatise on how aspartame is bad for you that was written in 1996. Or an appeal to forward this message so some little orphan girl can buy shoes to be a ballerina. Because she will get $5 per forward through the transitive technological property of magic faerie computery gizmos.

If you do this, please stop.

Refusing to upgrade

People were generally willing to adopt e-mail as part of their day-to-day business, but, for a lot of people, that’s where they stopped. Try to upgrade a person still using Outlook Express 6 to a more current e-mail client and be ready for them to freak the hell out. What happened to all their FOLDERS? This address book doesn’t work the same way! All of the emoticons I had readily available through a handy toolbar are GONE!

For some reason I can’t quite fathom, people somehow got stuck in a rut, even standing on the cusp of the new internet wave. I’ve even had issues getting people to switch from pop3 to imap/exchange, despite the obvious benefits, as trying to get people to understand archiving old messages — versus keeping a phalanx of subfolders — is damn near impossible.

I’m convinced that a big reason e-mail viruses are still an issue is because of these people. Microsoft, for all their faults, has done a fairly good job locking down recent versions of Outlook to casual e-mail viruses — you can’t really get infected through the preview pane anymore, for example — but the people still deeply devoted to their OE6 install are ruining it for everyone.

Bonus: Using Comic Sans

I don’t think I need to say any more about that one.

There are lots more, of course. Things like privacy policies, having no conception of what a reasonable attachment size is, trying to do html newsletters via e-mail, using proprietary Microsoft stuff (I had someone trying to ‘recall’ a message they sent me the other day; it was weird) and using txtspeak in business e-mail all drive me just as crazy. But I think that’s enough to start with.

Generation Y, by the way, is by no means immune to any of this. In fact, in some cases we’re the worst offenders. For a supposedly ‘tech savvy’ generation, we’re often very… not. I think in a lot of cases that has to do with our education system, which still treats computers & technology like an irrelevant lark. More on that in a later post.

For now, though: what about e-mail drives you crazy?