You millennials.
You don’t know how much heartache you’re causing your older employers, what with your expectations of bean bags in the office, a career path that takes weeks rather than years and an absurd claim that hours spent on Facebook is good for business.
We just don’t get it because we were sent to clean chimneys from the age of eight years old. We were lucky to get a piece of coal for lunch and were paid in marbles.
Just who do you think you are, with your high expectation? We’ll soon knock that sense of entitlement out of you.
At least we would, if we could, but we can’t, so we won’t.
That’s because we need you – in many cases more than you need us – to come and work in our companies and fill a huge skills gap in many industries.
We’re under a bit of pressure given millennials will make up 75% of the workforce in the next 10 years.
So companies of all shapes and sizes, not just in the tech world, are falling over themselves to tempt millennials with all the things us oldies (Generation X, if you must know) think appeals to you.
You can’t walk through the modern office these days without falling over the office dog before hitting your head on the office pool table and scalding yourself on the office Nespresso machine.
But are these rather blunt instruments enough to attract the right type of millennial employee? Perhaps we’re guilty of ticking a superficial millennial requirement check list that we think millennials are after rather than actually asking them what they want from a job?
So, in an effort to answer that question, your scribe – that’s me – undertook a survey of some millennials I know and came up with something a wee bit deeper.
They may have been leading me down the garden path, but their answers would give even the most curmudgeonly of us old Xers hope for the future.
While the office which looks a like a youth club may help, really what they’re looking for is company which is driven and has passion in what it does, they told me.
Not necessarily one that produces products or services which are focused on saving the world – although again that would be a plus – but companies which know where they want to get, let their employees and others know where they want to get to and expend all their energies on getting there.
Then there’s work/life balance.
While us Xers grew up in an era when lunch was for wimps and productivity was measured by how long you stayed staring at your humungous screen (as deep as it was wide) millennials have read the research and know that productivity is more about the quality of the time you spend in the office rather than quantity.
They want the ability to work flexible hours and even to work from home, although that latter option is ruled out for many give previous generations have driven house prices out of millennials reach.
Granted this was a completely unscientific survey of a bunch of millennials who are or will be looking for employment in the near future, but it does chime with other research out there which reveals this new generation to be much more rounded than us oldies ever were.
That’s good news, expect perhaps for the bean bag makers who might find they’re not as essential to a millennial office as previously thought.