Generations in Conversation

Generation Y in Workplace Cultural Clashes

Danielle Sacks has put her finger and the fingers of several others on the emerging culture clash with the employment of Generation Y in the United States. Her article, “Scenes from the Culture Clash” was published in Fast Company, Issue 102, January 2006, page 72.

Sacks explains how companies are just now waking up to the havoc that the newest generation of workers is causing in their offices. Her article begins the scenario in which parents turn up in the office to complain about the way their Millennial kids are being treated.

The latest generation to join the mix is disruptive not only because of its size but because of its attitudes. Speak to enough intergenerational experts who study such things (and we spoke to more than a dozen of them), and you begin to get the picture: Millennials aren’t interested in the financial success that drove the boomers or the independence that has marked the gen-Xers, but in careers that are personalized. They want educational opportunities in China and a chance to work in their companies’ R&D departments for six months.

“They have no expectation that the first place they work will at all be related to their career, so they’re willing to move around until they find a place that suits them,” says Dan Rasmus, who runs a workplace think tank for Microsoft.

Thanks to their overinvolved boomer parents, this cohort has been coddled and pumped up to believe they can achieve anything. Immersion in PCs, video games, email, the Internet, and cell phones for most of their lives has changed their thought patterns and may also have actually changed how their brains developed physiologically. These folks want feedback daily, not annually. And in case it’s not obvious, millennials are fearless and blunt. If they think they know a better way, they’ll tell you, regardless of your title.

The article is written for Baby Boomer and GenX employers, beginning with recognition of the stresses involved in cultural clashes. However Sacks, herself a Gen Xer, lays out a few ways through the conflict. She refers to the lessons learnt by 50, 40 and 30 something executives at seminars led by Lynne Lancaster of BridgeWorks.
Womble Carlyle, a legal firm, realised that young lawyers were walking out of traditional heavy work loads in search of work-life balance, flexible schedules, and philanthropic work. Womble formalized a part-time track, in which attorneys can work with supervisors to shape personalised schedules.

Deloitte & Touche USA, a large USA accounting and consulting firm, heard from its Gen Y workers that brutal audit schedules, in which teams had to camp out at client companies for weeks or months at a time, seemed superfluous in an age when client records are digitized. They felt they could get the same work done remotely. Deloitte’s clients told the firm that they didn’t care whether auditors were on-site or not, as long as the quality of the work didn’t suffer. After a successful test in its New York office in which employees had the choice to work off-site.

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Tourism Australia TV advertising campaign aimed at Baby Boomers

MzzD posted this week at Australia and Melting Pot Politics on the Tourism Australia advertising campaign, “Where the Bloody Hell Are You?“, suggesting that it’s working on the nostalgic yearnings of Baby Boomers.

“So retro-ozculture here we come. Just when the lucky country was almost escaped its ocker image,. The latest television advertising campaign to entice Australians to come to Australia features the final line of a young gorgeous girl on the beach asking Where the bloody hell are ya?. Sounds like a comment Shazza the stoned Ocker from local SBS comedy Pizza fame might be screaming at her equally ockerfied stoner boyfriend . It just doesn’t sound credible coming from the sweet young thing circa 1990s dispensing the line probably unbeknownst to most Yanks. It is more of a line to cheer the heart of the baby-boomer Aussie remembering the good old days when Australia was full of real Aussies, you know the type Tony Abbot likes, ones who don’t have foreign names or accents. Peter Costello, Tony Abbot and their like all seem to be suffering form of identity crisis and need to return to an outdated , outmoded era. Where are the these old antipodeans heading for, what are they trying to achieve?

This retrospective ockerism has recently been invading television advertising and is making a return to Australian popular culture it seems. It takes me back to the simpler life we led as kids in the seventies north of Brisbane or even further back to my sixty something mother’s youth. I am happy to leave the past where it belongs in the past. Women were still relatively powerless; a house quarter acre block was affordable in most parts of Australia; the dollar was stable; protectionism isolated Australia from the vagaries of the world economy; the white Australia policy had not long been dismantled; education had become accessible to all; multi-culturalism just rumour in federal parliament and Skippy ruled. It was an ideal time if that is what you are used to.”

There is something disturbing about the advertising campaign. The scene featuring the Aboriginal dancers features a spokeswoman who looks more Italian/Greek than Aborigine.

I’d be curious to see how other Gen Xers and younger are responding to the ad. MzzD’s cynicism is tied up with a disillusionment with a swing to conservative values in Australian politics. Surely there are Baby Boomers who are likewise disturbed by such trends.

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