CAUTION: Her transparency might be more than you can handle

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to a Harvard Business Review (HBR) blog post, “Solving Gen Y’s Passion Problem.” I strongly encourage you to take the time to read this in its entirety.

In a nutshell, the HBR blog addresses the fact that members of Generation Y demand a lot from their working life right away and are frequently disappointed about what they experience instead. This has resulted in a “passion” problem in the workplace.

I immediately shared this blog on Facebook, LinkedIn, and sent out a tweet. While a few of my social contacts replied with, “I agree” or “I still don’t get them” a few had more to say about it. One individual completely opened the “door to understanding.”

She is a member of Gen Y and an Apartment Manager—jackpot!  She has some interesting thoughts to share about her generation, our industry, and why she believes this “passion problem” exists. The rest of this blog is dedicated to her, as she responds to “Solving Gen Y’s Passion Problem” in her own words and sheds some light into potential Gen Y retention strategies.

This is the first post in a two-part series on “Straight Talk from a Gen Y Apartment Manager.” 

1.    The Sky Is the Limit

I do agree with the author’s assessment of the “passion problem.”  I, for one, have certainly been fed a TON of “do what you love” and “the sky’s the limit” from my family, schooling and social interactions, and I have noticed that it has affected my perception and expectation of my desired career path. But not necessarily in a bad way, because I also learned about hard work and I think when you balance the two together, you can actually breed a whole new brand of employee that is more engaged than previous generations but in return does expect more opportunities.

2.    Sink or Swim?

I was at a seminar recently and the speaker was laying out the presumed characteristics of Gen Y; one in particular made me chuckle.  “We don’t like to think, we like to do” is how he put it. We don’t like to read instructions and we believe in the sink or swim approach to teaching….just throw us in there and we’ll figure it out…and if we don’t, you can fire us and we’ll just go work somewhere else…because, honestly, we aren’t attached to any one company anyway.

 I was laughing because I think this is why so many of our employees think they should be promoted before they have had enough cross training. They/we feel like we will learn more, and much faster, if we learn while really doing the job. Of course, for the organization, it’s more of a risk…but it makes for happier and more loyal Gen Y employees…which is a tough thing to achieve since our generation is not very loyal to a job.

3.    Bored

“Admittedly, we are far less loyal by nature than previous generations. We don’t stay in one job for as long as our parents did for several reasons. One is because of sheer boredom. My mom has been doing the same job for 35 years and I think she is loony for doing it. I’m always asking her, “don’t you ever want to do something different?” She has worked in the same office, with the same people, doing the same things for 35 years!!!…seemingly happy as a lark. I think I’d be in the corner crying, eating a carton of ice cream and wondering what happened to me.

This leads me to my next point…

4.    Confident

We are not only used to it, but we welcome and look for change and since we were raised in the “you can do it” era, we are extremely confident. The world we grew up in is fast paced, ever-changing and promotes instant gratification.

Everything we want is at the end of our fingertip (and smartphone)…so if the opportunity for more (challenges, change, learning) isn’t available at the company we are currently working for, or at the pace we feel is reasonable, we are more inclined to find it somewhere else rather than wait years (or what can feel like years) for the opportunity to emerge at our current company.

So if we ever decide our job opportunities are lacking, or our supervisors make us feel like those opportunities will take many more years of “experience” to be within our grasp, we will simply find a new job, since we are not afraid of change. AND since we are so good at what we do, it should be easy. Right? Ultimately, after years of doing the same thing, we get restless and feel like we need to challenge ourselves to do more. We believe complacency is a disease and do our best to run from it.” 

Finally, we don’t believe in company loyalty for the purpose of retiring with “good benefits”.  We don’t trust that a company will really “take care of us” like our parent’s generation and we feel like it’s in our hands to build our future. Many in my parent’s generation still subscribe to the idea that the job will take care of you when you retire, which is why they stick around even if they aren’t being “fulfilled”, but that is a foreign notion to Gen Y.

Things that make you go hmmm…