Guac is extra, and so is the millennial stereotype

Beyond’s People Director, Kate Rand, explains why it’s time to stop talking about millennials and start looking to the future.

Millennials. According to the media, they’re the entitled 20-somethings buying avocados instead of houses, while complaining about getting up to go into an office where, having been there for three weeks so far, they’ve yet to be promoted, even once.

I have news for you. Some of those millennials are almost forty. We have grey hair, and we’re running your companies. Hell, some of us have by this point started our own businesses, watched them collapse, rebuilt them and now work for your companies.

We’ve been around the block enough times to have what could be referred to as “emotional baggage”. This is no longer our first rodeo, where we rock up to your office wide-eyed, taking selfies in front of your logo.

A millennial, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma

Reluctant to use the term age discrimination for fear of being pigeonholed as an entitled millennial who doesn’t know how good she’s got it, I’ll focus more on the misconception that millennials in the workplace are still the enigma organizations need to solve, despite the fact they’ve been in the workplace for almost twenty years at this point.

I regularly hear from HR professionals and C-suites that they need to address the “millennial effect” as they join the workforce, and try to attract and retain them in their offices. I often hear people say, “oh, they’re just being a millennial” in response to why someone isn’t performing or is pushing back on a proposal. There are even millennials in these conversations, saying these things. Conversations like this should be a red flag to any future-focused team. Millennials aren’t your problem. We’ve been working our way up through your companies for years, we’ve infiltrated your senior teams and boards, apparently without you knowing, and so far, we haven’t descended into chaos.

If someone is under performing, or pushing back, it’s probably less to do with the year they were born and more to do with the work.

“Why are you so obsessed with me?”

The fixation on millennials means we’re not doing enough to understand the behaviours and psychology of the younger generations entering the workforce. There is still not enough data on Gen Z, and we haven’t even begun to consider how Gen Alpha will impact the world of work. Technology has accelerated the speed of change to such an extent that the generations are becoming shorter in span and those at either end are very loosely aligned with the generalisation of the generation. Millennials are being used as shorthand for the changes that need to happen to organisations, which means organisations aren’t addressing the real issues and challenges they face, using millennials as a way to discount this.

Yes, it is always a good idea to understand your demographic, but in a world where we are seeing multi-generational workforces, we should be encouraging leaders to look holistically at the organisation, treating it as an open system as opposed to one “under attack” from millennials coming in and forcing them to shake up things that don’t need changing.

In this way, we can build organisations that will be sustainable and successful. We should not be looking at prescriptive ways to make our places better for a particular generation, but building places that will be able to adapt with the changes. This is done through future proofing. Some of the key elements to this are:

• Learning to learn and filling the educational lag

We’ve all heard the sound bite about how the jobs of tomorrow don’t even exist yet, and schools will be unable to support the course correction in skills required due to the lag. Organisations will need to pick up the slack, and McKinsey recently identified a set of skills that companies should be nurturing in their teams to help them prepare for change. Learning to learn quickly and consistently is paramount to staying ahead of the curve. These skills include critical thinking, problem-solving, advanced technology skills (not just the basics), communication and emotional intelligence. You can read more about this here.

• Agile working practices

For the uninitiated, agile working is the term used to define the team member’s ability to work from multiple locations. They are neither an office worker, or a mobile worker, and sometimes they do not even have set hours. Normally there are some parameters set by the organisation in the form of principles to reduce the chances of absolute chaos breaking out. Not that it ever does, but some leaders get very skittish if there isn’t at least some paperwork to wave at people.

This is not news, but the people you employ want to take their lives back in to their own hands. Gone is the idolisation of silicon valley burn out — we can see that in the backlash Elon Musk has received. With the rise in high tech video conferencing software and social tech platforms, there really is no excuse for organisations not to get a little more flexible with their approach. And it works both ways. If you implement agile working practices you’ll be able to save on your operating costs. And before you say, “this can only happen in an office,” check out Morning Star, a tomato farm who have adopted more than just agile working practices; they have self managing teams on the factory floor.

• The shape of your workforce

Contractors are people too, and they’re not just for Christmas anymore. The Taylor Review states that by 2020, 30% of the workforce will be self employed. McKinsey has highlighted the impact of the gig economy, IR35 (in the UK) and the rising interest in freelancing will have on organisations, and are urging companies to plan ahead and work with the contractor population rather than against it. Companies need to be clear about which skills are freelanced or kept in the professional core, and what development the professional core receives compared to these freelancers. You can read more about this topic here.

• Using guiding principles over prescriptive policies

As an ex-Compliance Officer, I’ve earned my stripes in writing and auditing policies, compliance frameworks and box-ticking in general. I had the title of ‘Fun Police’ and I ran with it. The two lessons I came away with were: if it doesn’t need to be prescriptive, don’t force it, and if people aren’t following your policies it’s because the compliance is broken. That usually starts when you hand them a 25 page policy document to read.

Let’s be honest with each other here. When was the last time you read a policy someone handed to you? Like really read it. If you did read it, you were probably sat there trying to work out where the loopholes were or what they’d missed. By which point you would then have to go to speak to HR anyway, as the policy didn’t really make any sense, and you were starting to wonder if it was really written to trick you. The reality is that by the time the policy was written, it was probably out of date, and every time it had an addendum inserted it become less and less translatable. Having a beautifully formatted policy document doesn’t mean anything if people can’t work out how to use it. Guiding principles are a much more progressive way to give your teams direction on the areas that don’t need completely pinning down. They are able to flex with your business, and the changes in the environment, and allow the adults you employ to be treated as, well, just that: adults.

• Reverse mentoring

As the speed of change accelerates, it is key for leaders across the board to stay up to date. This can be done through reverse mentoring and helps to remove bias and assumptions that can creep in across the generational divides. The workforce of tomorrow does not look like the one we’re in now, and we need to make sure we do the groundwork to create an inclusive platform for success.

Millennials: we’re a twenty-year-old problem

I’ll end this by saying, the next time you find yourselves referring to “millennials” or reading a listicle promising “ten ways to encourage millennials into your workplace” stop, take a breath. Think about the bigger picture, because if you’re still focusing on a twenty-year-old problem, you have bigger issues than us.