There is hard evidence to support the claim that the millennials are at ease with technology, although the gap between them and generation X is dwindling in some areas of technology use. A 2010 study by the Pew Research Center concludes:
The internet and mobile phones have been broadly adopted in America in the past 15 years, and millennials have been leading technology enthusiasts.
For them, these innovations provide more than a bottomless source of information and entertainment, and more than a new ecosystem for their social lives. They also are a badge of generational identity. Many millennials say their use of modern technology is what distinguishes them from other generations.
Shared concerns
Lifestyle priorities stated by people from generation Y interviewed in the Pew Research Center report contradicts the “me first” label often attributed to them (see Table 4.1).
Ashridge has also explored the validity of stereotypes about people from generation Y through a survey of 692 respondents aged between 16 and 63. The 2009 study, Generation Y: Inside Out, looked at how older workers perceived individuals from generation Y as well as how these young workers saw themselves. It concluded:
Media hype has produced a largely untrue image of Gen Y, which may be restricting their potential in the workplace and society. Just like any other group of human beings, generation Y is made up of individuals. There are wide variations in their attitudes and behaviours.
TABLE 4.1 Lifestyle priorities of generation Y
%
Being a good parent
52
Having a successful marriage
30
Helping others in need
21
Owning a home
20
Living a religious life
15
Having a high-paying career
15
Having lots of free time
9
Being famous
1
Note: Based on the responses of 830 adults aged between 18 and 29.
Source: Pew Research Center, 2010
All this evidence suggests that some of the praise and criticism surrounding people from generation Y is overblown and that organisations need to think more about them as individuals with their own specific values.
Great expectations
There is, however, compelling evidence to suggest that high-flying employees from generation Y have a set of attitudes and expectations that are not easy for organisations to accommodate.
Employees from generation Y, according to recent research, are ambitious and want challenging or exciting work, but they are not as willing as their parents to sign up for a demanding corporate career which might require long hours or personal sacrifice. Gaining their trust and loyalty also appears to be problematic. They are quick to leave the organisation if their needs (or demands) are not being met.
A study of graduates by Ashridge and the Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) in 2009 certainly paints a picture of a generation with high expectations and a low tolerance level. People from generation Y expect much from work – and vote with their feet if employers fail to deliver. The graduate respondents in the study had a long list of complaints about how their experiences had fallen below their expectations (see Table 4.2)
TABLE 4.2 Unmet expectations of graduates
%
Salary
45
Career advancement
38
Job status
30
Feeling valued and treated with respect
29
Doing work of value to society
29
Achievement in work
28
Challenging and interesting work
22
Note: Based on the responses of 1,222 graduate recruits.
Source: Ashridge and Institute of Leadership and Management, 2009
Nor do people from generation Y expect to be in one job or organisation for long. The study of American workers by the Pew Research Center describes workers from generation Y as “job hoppers” and says that, not surprisingly given the length of their working life, two-thirds of those surveyed expected to move on from their current employer, viewing their job either as a “stepping stone” to a career, or “just a job to help them get by”. The report goes on to say:
Remarkably, nearly six in 10 employed millennials say they already have switched careers at least once, suggesting that many millennials are trying out different careers (or that some respondents equated a job change with a career switch).
The Ashridge/ILM study highlights its findings about graduate career intentions:
One of the most compelling findings [is that] over half (57%) of graduates expect to leave their employer within two years, with 40% expecting to leave in one year. A surprisingly high 16% intend to go as soon as possible – more women (19%) than men (11%).
Of the respondents who intended to leave straight away, some 75% did not feel valued or that they were treated with respect, while 74% were disappointed about their job advancement.
As the study comments:
The figures must be worrying for employers. From a purely financial perspective, high graduate turnover is a waste of resources … Equally concerning, however, is the potential impact on developing long-term strategy, building an organisation’s talent pool and cohort of future leaders and indeed on corporate competitiveness. If organisations wish to staunch this flow of talent, they will need to be proactive in taking steps to prevent such an exodus.
A later report from Ashridge in 2012 developed the theme.
The biggest concern for the worldwide managers we interviewed is the issue of retention of young people. Compared to the past, they see that graduates have little patience with a job and will leave quickly if they feel it doesn’t meet their own personal ideals … Keeping graduates beyond the two-year mark is a key goal.
What do 21st-century workers really want?
So what do people from generation Y really want? What do employers need to do to engage this generation and make the most of their talents? Are their needs distinct or do they share some traits with older talented employees or women, who constitute another untapped source of talent in the workplace?
There are four dimensions of work which, although important to any and every employee, appear to be crucial in motivating and retaining people from generation Y and other talented individuals in the workplace: rapid job advancement; money and challenging work; work–life balance; and freedom and autonomy.
Rapid job advancement
Rajeeb Dey is the founder and chief executive of Enternships.com, an online enterprise aimed at connecting entrepreneurial university students to opportunities for internships within small and mediumsized businesses.
Dey is 28 and in 2012 was named a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum. Despite two internships at the Bank of England and Boston Consulting Group, both of which subsequently offered him a job, he opted for self-employment and has never looked back. He explains why he was not lured by these tempting job offers:
I don’t like bureaucracy and I don’t like hierarchy. If I need something done, I want to do it myself and I don’t want permission from a lot of people to make it happen. I think generally in corporate structures, but less so in consulting, you have to go through the rigmarole of being an analyst or an associate and climb your way up to the next stage as part of a very linear career progression that doesn’t work for me. I felt that in my nature I would be frustrated.
Dey is not alone in being frustrated by the prospect of slowly climbing up the corporate ladder. A 2008 study by Robert Half International, an American human resource consulting firm, and Yahoo! Hotjobs, an online job search engine, reveals that 51% of respondents believed they should spend only 1–2 years “paying their dues in entry-level positions” before progressing. A further 16% believed this period should be less than one year. When asked how long they planned
to stay in their current position, 16% said less than one year and 24% between one and two years.
The 2009 Ashridge/ILM study paints a similar picture. Graduates expect rapid career progression, especially into management roles. Despite previous research by the ILM showing that most managers are not appointed until their early 30s, 32% of the graduate respondents are aiming to obtain a management role by at least the end of their second year of working (compared with 23% of managers who think this is realistic). Some 13% think they should reach these roles by the end of their first year at work (compared with 6% of managers who share that view).
As the study comments:
This highlights that graduates’ expectations of a rapid rise to management are ambitious and pose a potential challenge for organisations and their managers.
When considering how long graduates should work before being promoted into their first management role, research by Ashridge in 2012 found there were differing views. Graduates in the UK and the Middle East said “within 2–3 years”; in Malaysia and India 4–5 years was considered reasonable. However, 12% of Malaysian and Indian and 14% of UK graduates indicated a period of less than one year. Across the world about 20% said that it depended on the individual.
Well-designed training schemes can help move promising graduates around the organisation to gain a variety of experiences, but they can sometimes cause even further frustration and disappointment.
As Sandra Schwarzer, director of career services at INSEAD, explains:
Companies are very good at selling their organisation to talented graduates, but then they fall down once these people are on board. Some of our alumni, for example, tell us they initially got great experience through a job rotation programme, great exposure to the company’s operations. But after this, they say they felt like they were on their own. These people are still in need of a career track and want to know where they will stand in three or five years’ time.
However, older managers can feel similar frustrations, according to Claire Lecoq, director of MBA admissions, marketing and careers services at IMD, a business school based in Switzerland. IMD’s MBA programme is typically made up of middle managers with an average age of 31, many of whom quit their organisations to study for an MBA. Lecoq explains:
In our current group of 90 MBA students, 87 quit their former organisation, although pretty much two-thirds of them had the option to return.
Even when their organisations want them back, graduates can end up leaving. As Lecoq concludes:
Organisations are sometimes not organised internally to exploit the potential of that person. They may not support the individual properly when they return by exploring opportunities with them – so they get frustrated and leave.
A 2010 Catalyst report suggests that high-flying MBA graduates are indeed lured away by better career opportunities elsewhere. The study found:
the main reason women and men left their first post-MBA job was for faster career advancement, men more so than women;
more men than women said they left to earn more money or receive better benefits;
men and women left to make a career change at equal rates.
A study in 2010 by the UK’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) looked at the experiences of 310 senior leaders included in their organisation’s talent programme. Asked to rank their reasons for participating, 54% said they hoped that it would help them to progress faster in the organisation. However, looking at their experiences after the programme, only 13% of the senior leaders believed they had achieved a promotion sooner than would have been the case if they had not participated.
This suggests a degree of disappointment among those leaders. In follow-up interviews with a small number of them, the CIPD notes that some gave “frank warning” of the danger of developing senior leaders “only for them to discover that the opportunities they had hoped for within their own organisations were not available”.
Companies are also struggling to make sure that the career progression of high-potential women keeps pace with that of their male counterparts. Research by McKinsey in 2012 reveals that “young women, just like young men, start out with high ambitions” but that, for a variety of reasons, “the end result is that the odds are consistently stacked against women climbing higher at every step of the career ladder – not just at the top”.
The McKinsey report says that women lose out at every level of the organisation. Although many more companies now recruit a significant proportion of women, they become increasingly underrepresented as they move higher up the organisation (see Table 4.3).
TABLE 4.3 Representation of women in management
Average % of women
Whole company
37
Middle management
22
Senior management
14
Executive committee
9
Chief executive
2
Note: Based on 130 European companies with more than 10,000 employees.
Source: McKinsey & Company, 2012
Many of the same questions are asked about women’s hunger for top jobs as are asked of people from generation Y; indeed, at a Society for Human Resource Management conference in 2009, Jack Welch, former chief executive of General Electric, provoked a storm of protest when he said:
There’s no such thing as work–life balance … we would love to have more women moving up faster. But they have got to make the tough choices and know the consequences of each one.
Welch provoked further controversy at a World Street Journal conference in 2012 when he reiterated his view, adding that women should avoid joining support networks, which are like “victim’s units”, and get ahead by being more willing to raise their hands for line jobs and tough, risky assignments. He was accused of making the assumption that women are not as ambitious as men for the top jobs. An assortment of senior women executives waded in to talk about their own experiences of overcoming stereotype and unconscious bias to make it to the top of some of the largest American corporations.
The Catalyst report, however, provides quantitative evidence that even when women are as ambitious as men for the top jobs, they still lose out in career advancement and compensation. For example, when considering only men and women who aspired to become chief executives and senior executives, and only considering childless men and women, the research revealed glaring discrepancies:
women had lower starting salaries in their first post-MBA job than men (even after taking account of number of years of prior experience, time since MBA, first post-MBA job level, global region and industry);
regardless of differences in women’s and men’s starting salary, men experienced higher salary growth post-MBA;
men were more likely to take a first assignment at a higher rank with greater levels of responsibilities than women, from first-level manager to chief executive/senior manager;
men outpaced women most when they both started at the bottom of the company; men moved up the career ladder faster even if they had the same number of years’ experience and received their MBA in the first year.
McKinsey’s research in both the United States and Europe highlights how unconscious bias in selection and promotion decisions can unintentionally prevent women from gaining vital career experiences, especially early on in their careers. This causes them to be excluded from talent pools for senior roles. Emily Lawson explains:
A lot of decisions are made that rule women out of [senior] roles because of assumptions about what they would and would not do. For example, “we cannot offer her that job now because she has a family and she is not going to want to work internationally”, or situations where a company does not give a woman the most demanding clients because it assumes there are men there who will not interact well with her.
Lots of these assumptions may be well-intentioned but they are weeding women out of the talent pool without proper discussion.
Women th
emselves sometimes step to the side, and McKinsey points to a lack of confidence in women and also the problem of internal politics. In a 2012 study, “Unlocking the full potential of women at work”, the women who said they did not aspire to senior executive posts cited politics as the main reason. McKinsey advised that more women would go the full distance if executive committees were more attractive, displaying greater “openness, honesty, authenticity and teamwork”.
Based on the McKinsey research, Lawson comments more positively:
The companies that are really pushing the boat out … have firstly promotion targets and secondly unconscious bias training, which forces men and women to uncover what assumptions are informing their decisions about the world around them and the kind of jobs they are recruiting for.
Unlike employees from generation Y, women are often reluctant to voice their ambitions and less likely to apply for promotion or opt for stretching assignments. Maggie Wilderotter, chairman and chief executive of Frontier Communications, an American telephone company, says that women tend to wait to get noticed.
For a lot of women, they think the myth is true, that if they do a good job and work hard, they’ll get recognised. That’s not the case.
Lawson comments:
We run training sessions for high-ranking women in the UK. One of the issues raised is that if you don’t ask, you don’t get. This does not just relate to money, it also relates to promotions and increased responsibilities.
Managing Talent Page 10
