Segregating Gen Y Employees Is Not The Answer
Posted by anastasia on 01-05-2009There is a cottage industry of consultants and firms that specialize in helping companies manage and retain Gen Y employees – and it appears the financial downturn may actually be good for these businesses. According to this recent Economist article:
Because of the downturn, Net Geners are finding it harder to hop to new jobs. At the same time, their dissatisfaction is growing as crisis-hit firms adopt more of a command-and-control approach to management—the antithesis of the open, collaborative style that young workers prefer. Less autonomy and more directives have sparked complaints among Net Geners that offices and factories have become “pressure cookers” and "boiler rooms."
What actually caught my eye in this article was how Estée Lauder was trying to address this issue:
Estée Lauder, a cosmetics firm, is also encouraging Net Geners to help it innovate. It has launched an initiative called iForce which brings together young staff to dream up ways of marketing products using emerging technologies.
We’ve seen this approach before with Porter Novelli’s pop-up agency, and I’m sure there are other examples of this. This intentions behind these efforts are well meaning, and the outcomes may even be beneficial to the bottom line, but I started wondering about the practice of segregating younger employees as a way to foster innovation.
Part of the discussion around what younger employees want at work speaks to what we all want at work – openness, collaboration, recognition, etc. Just because older generations were socialized to suck it up, doesn’t mean we all wouldn’t benefit from a reinvented workplace (if you believe companies will still exist to work for in the future….)
Why not create these incubator groups or teams but make them inter-generational? You can make sure that leaders are selected from different age ranges and that all ideas are heard. By creating an intrapreneurial environment for employees (across generations) who are interested in innovating, you could also foster mentoring – and reverse mentoring – along with re-energizing older workers who may have been going through the motions and collecting paychecks. Thoughts?
Categorized under: Campus
January 5th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Certainly, I think this makes a lot of sense. But it's also one of the hardest things to do. People like people like themselves, and putting Gen Y in groups where they can see there are others like them isn't all entirely bad.
January 5th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
I think the reason for creating incubator groups is fundamentally different than for reinventing the workplace altogether. I'm not saying the workplace couldn't stand to be reinvented, I'm just saying that creating incubator groups for Gen Y seems to largely be a response to companies being told "you already have all the resources you need to be doing youth marketing correctly, you're just not using them." In other words, its the difference between solving the problem of the youth voice getting lost in a big company and motivating people stuck in middle management to innovate.
I think the reason we're seeing the one and not the other is because there's a clearer path to the financial upside in recapturing the marketing ideas of your young employees than in making it easier for all of your employees to be intrapreneurial (which, honestly, would require much more systemic change for an unknown possible benefit).
January 5th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
I think Kristen is on to something: whether incubator groups are "good" depends on what problem you are trying to solve.
If you're trying to create an environment specifically aimed at making your GenY members feel better, that's one issue. Creating a more collaborative environment for all your employees is another.
One issue I hardly see brought up and often wonder about is whether the innovation is specifically tied to age or to other factors.
In my own line of work (military public affairs) I often see that the lack of innovation isn't really because of a true lack of ideas — even across generations. It's not even — believe it or not — mostly due to our hierarchical structure in the military.
It's mainly because of our lack of resources. We have the ideas; we just don't have the time, people or money to implement them. And because we are not a "for-profit" organization, we find it especially difficult to "prove" a new idea works.
I completely agree with Kristen's last point — that if we are seeing an increase in Gen Y incubator groups, then it's more likely that the problem companies are trying to solve is "how do we keep our Gen Y turnover to a minimum" and not "how do we truly make all our employees entrepreneurial?"
Mike
January 11th, 2009 at 9:54 am
[...] Segregating Gen Y Employees Is Not The Answer [...]
February 2nd, 2009 at 10:41 pm
I see it as one of the greatest failures of our capitalistic system that we cannot figure out a way to integrate both the old and new workers. Too often, older workers see younger ones as annoyances and sometimes even threats. That is why I think an inter-generational incubator could be an interesting place to start, but my only worry is that older workers would not accept the exercise as productive.
Gen Ys have an incredible amount to offer in this new world where information flows so freely, and I think effective organization like Estee Lauder will figure out ways to harness this energy. Gen Ys, in general, are on the technological cusp, and have the ability to report the real time pulse of the marketplace right to their boss. Too often Gen Ys are singled out as lazy or not loyal, and I think that these incubator projects with multiple generations could be a perfect place to start to bring down these barriers.
The competition out there is fierce, and it will be the companies that can leverage the strengths of all the generations (using the older workers as mentors, coaches, and guides with Gen Ys as 'think tanks') who will be the most successful.