Teaching Millennials and Baby Boomers That They Can Work Together
Get a millennial and a baby boomer together and have them
discuss work life balance.
It’s a truly entertaining experience.
The millennial has a well-developed argument about why his
personal time is valuable and why he is unable to exist in a work place that
infringes on his “me-time”. He is quite convinced that he DESERVES 20 hours a week to go rock climbing. The baby boomer is unsure and wary of the whole
work-life balance concept. He is aware that it exists but is pretty sure it’s
something that has been developed by lazy young people.
A “crazy” week at work for the millennial means that had to
stay one evening late and couldn’t leave early on Friday. The baby boomer never
even realized that the evening they “stayed late” was out of normal, and he
worked all day Saturday as well. What made his week “crazy” was the fact that
too many people complained about how “crazy” a week it was and they stopped
producing at the rate they normally do.
Obviously these two generations have a very different work
ethic. (Keep in mind this is being written by a Gen-Xer so I naturally think
you are both crazy. Can’t we all stop arguing and just go volunteer at a
shelter together something?) The natural
tendency is for us to automatically agree that working longer and harder hours
is the better answer. Heck, even some millennials see the flaws they have
desiring too much personal time. However each generation usually has a valuable
message to offer the others. With that in mind, here are 3 tensions that need
to be managed as millennials and boomers share a work place.
1) Millennials Aren’t Lazy, They Just Have Different Priorities.
Millennials who were born and raised in Canada are a
generation that grew up wanting for very little. They have both a cell phone and a lap top.
The played on a travel sports team, and they have travelled the world for
leisure. They have reached adulthood with an expectation that they will continue
this lifestyle of plenty (which is another problem altogether). But they have
also reached adulthood with the understanding that family and social
experiences are more important than career. Their Gen-X parents, who reacted
strongly to the absentee boomer-parent style, became both helicopter and snowplow style parents. They focused so much on their kids it became a fault.
However they are the first generation to reach the workplace to never
experience a world that said that their job might be more important or at they
very least, just as important as their home. Millennials have been told to set
boundaries lest the evil corporate empire try to infringe upon the home life.
So when you tell them that their core work hours are 9-5 Monday to Friday, you
will get those hours. Ask for more, and it becomes a struggle. To ask a
generation that values relationship over anything else to sacrifice relational
time to achieve something more in a workplace violates a principle for them.
They are not lazy, they are simply relationally driven.
2) Millennials are
Waiting For The Feedback
Millennials have understood that life is a continual learning
process, as have baby boomers. Baby boomers worked hard and experienced success
or failure. If they succeeded, they did that same thing again. If they failed,
they adjusted and made another attempted. Millennials operate differently. They
believe that success and failure looks very different for different people.
They would like you to take the time
to inform them whether or not they
have successful or have been failing rather than define it for themselves. This
feedback will help you mutually create a paradigm of what success looks like in
your organization. This is a generation
that grew up in a culture of school that encouraged group decisions and
collaborative goals. They feel that if everyone is in on the conversation,
things will not fail (or will fail less frequently). The boomer expecting that the millennial will
change his or her ways simply on their own experience will be waiting a very
long time.
3) Millennials Need
To Be Influenced By Boomers.
I don’t think anyone would argue that Gen-X got many things
right. So we shouldn’t assume that the kids we raised will have everything
right either. The millennial generation is entering the workforce and starting
to take positions away from their less-motivated elder Gen-Xer, and as they
take these positions they need to learn the lessons of the past. This is a
group that has swung the pendulum too far to the “me-centric” side of the coin.
Gen-Xers at least understood that the Baby boomers were better suited to lead
corporations because they were willing to put the corporation first. While we
don’t want to go back to these days in total, there are times when work has to
become a priority, or our workplaces will suffer. This new group of workers and
leaders desperately need to hear the constant message that life is not always
to be centered on what they need or how they feel. They have created technology
and social setting where everything is personalized and customized to make them
feel better, and life cannot always be that way. The people best suited to help
teach the Millenials these lessons are the boomers. Boomers can’t abdicate this
responsibility and write off young people are egotistic. They just need to get
more creative in finding a way to pass on the lessons they have in a way that
the Millennials can hear it. Maybe take them to Starbucks for a personalized
drink while you are trying to teach them. :)
Boomers and Millennials have so much to offer each other.
They are each others grandparents/grandchildren, but they are also (in some
cases) coworkers. Learning to understand each other goes a long way in in
helping everyone function together in a more positive way (and if that isn’t
the most Gen-X thing I've ever written...
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