Finally: My letter to the editor in Harvard Business Review
I submitted this content back in March, and it’s just now making it to the presses. The good people at HBR were extremely good to work with, even when they cut out 1/2 the content of my letter. What can I say? They said keep it under 400 words, and I kept it at 397.
Here’s the text:
Gen Y in the Workforce
Dear Editor:
If you take a step back and analyze the situation objectively, there seems to be something broken in the way companies approach Millennials (see Tamara J. Erickson’s article “Gen Y in the Workforce,” February 2009). What typically starts out as nothing more than a lack of understanding often grows into an opinion that Gen Y is simply a lazy, disrespectful lot.
Gen Xers and Baby Boomers view their jobs the same way: You are what you do. Today’s younger workforce, however, has the exact opposite perspective: Millennials see their jobs as an extension of their lives, not the other way around. And since their lives are fast-paced, communication-saturated, friend-rich, and change-filled, they have high hopes that their jobs will mirror that lifestyle. So why wouldn’t they be disenchanted when they haven’t gotten a promotion after six months on the job and when they get in trouble for Facebooking at work? They expect more from their jobs than a paycheck, but few managers are willing to give it to them. Millennials want to believe in what they are doing and want to know they are being heard.
While coddling is certainly not the answer, flexibility and accountability are. Remember, this is the generation that was force-fed group projects at every level of education, from elementary school through graduate programs, so how could we expect them not to be convinced that vertical collaboration is the best way to solve a problem?
Mark Ervin
Director of Creative
o2ideas
Birmingham, Alabama
