Entitled? Try Empowered: Why Millennials Work Like They Do

What’s the matter with “kids” today…at work?

In enterprises across our great country, many grumpy middle managers, executives, and owners alike are wondering who these fresh-faced Millennials think they are with all their impatience, entitlement, and outsized demands.

I’m here to tell you.

Our young employees and colleagues enter the workplace with an entirely different career context than many of us had years before, upon our own “entry.” At the intersection of evolving generational values and the empowering nature of new technologies resides a new employee, for whom work is not some dank, discrete corridor of their lives where low wages and low expectations combine to create indentured servitude. No, sir. It's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to mean something.

Today’s Millennial salarymen and women are the sons and daughters of cinema’s Peter Gibbons, the protagonist of Mike Judge’s seminal OFFICE SPACE, who put it thusly:

 “Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.”

My GenX brothers and sisters, lest we forget: Peter Gibbons was us. He said out loud what we were all thinking. And now Millennials have simply adopted his clear-eyed vision as their occupational ethos. Should we really be mad at them?

And so, as we seek to recruit, motivate, manage, and retain young workers, here are a few things we might want to accept or even…gasp…embrace. Together, they add up to this: Today's young workforce are not so much entitled as they are empowered.

It’s all about work/life integration. Mad that your twenty-something associate doesn’t alt-tab away from Facebook when you slither up behind her? Okay. But how do you feel when she answers your email in seconds at 10PM?

Unlike GenX icon Allen Iverson, for whom “practice” and “the game” famously were separate, Millennials see work and life as an integrated whole, reflective of an ongoing journey to find meaning and money, together.

It’s like this: If you want to pop up (figuratively) in your employees’ bedrooms after dark (via email), you’re probably going to have to allow them to sneak a peek at social media between their corporate keystrokes. And don’t tell me about how “we” didn’t get to mix business and pleasure. Facts are, we mostly couldn’t.

If we were lucky enough to have a computer, we didn’t have email. And when we got email, we treated it like correspondence rather than conversation. We didn’t know any better. If we had a phone on our desk, it didn’t dial long-distance unless we punched in a code. Many of us even had to log our personal calls!

Let’s face it, when we went in to work, we were stuck in there. Our desks were islands of productivity where we sat, and we worked. (Or at least did a good job faking it.) If we wanted an illicit break, we smoked. God help us.

Today, our young colleagues have more computer firepower in their front jeans pocket than we did in our entire server closet. They want to stand at their desks. Take walking meetings. Visit the nap room!

Why won’t they sit still? Because they can transact more business between the elevator and the espresso machine than we could in our cubicle. They have more connectivity in the coffee shop next door than we did in the executive videoconference suite upstairs.

They know work/life balance is just a euphemism for “we’ll buy you a nice after-dinner drink if you just give us your soul.” What they’re seeking and practicing is work/life integration. “I am who I am, wherever I am.”

In most offices the casual dress code means you can wear virtually the same thing to work that you’re going to wear to the bar afterwards. Gone are the days when we would don some distinct costume and "put on" some professional persona before entering our personal penitentiary of productivity. We have work with us at all times, just as we have ourselves fully rendered at work. The twain done been met. And Millennials are the ones seeing and making it happen, not just in a movie, but in real life.

Parents are on board. Did you ever think these Millennials spend way too much time thinking about and talking about their parents? Shouldn't they just grow up? You're missing the point.

At our company, Spark, we’ve grown from roughly 65 to 400 employees in about three and a half years. The vast majority of that growth has come in the literal form of Millennials, and most of them on the younger side of same. We’re talking tons and tons of twenty-somethings here at Spark. A couple of years ago, as we began to plan for another rousing edition of “Bring Your Kids to Work” day, one Millennial employee joked, “Oh, you mean ‘The Parade of the Bosses’ Kids?’”

Turned out the vast majority of our young workforce wasn’t in the kid business yet. What did they want, instead? “Parents’ Day!” came the chorus. Before you roll your eyes and launch into some rant about how these young employees need to learn to stand on their own two feet, all the while pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, consider this: We did it. And it was awesome.

We invited our workforce to invite their parents to join us for an afternoon. More than 100 moms and dads took us up on the offer in year one, and more than 150 in year two. Coming to Chicago from as far away as New York and San Francisco, these engaged “olds” (many of whom are, sadly, about my age) joined their kids for a half-day program comprising a presentation of media agency basics, a parenting panel, a job shadowing segment, and one of the most rip-roaring happy hours in recent memory.

If you want to engage and retain your Millennial employees, why not try wooing their parents?

LinkedIn is the scoreboard. And the switchboard. Here’s another path to engaged Millennial employees: Show them how their current job responsibilities translate into a more robust LinkedIn profile. (Full disclosure: LinkedIn is a client of the media agency I work for.) That’s right, help them write their digital resume by clearly spelling out the skills they’re gaining by working for you. Show them how much more marketable they’re going to become if they just stick around your shop a while longer.

Wait, what? We’re supposed to help our Millennial employees advertise themselves to other prospective employers?

Indeed. Because, like I’ve been saying, the world is different now. Whereas those of us over 30 likely spent the first five years of our careers buried in cubicles, laboring to gain intel and contacts across our broader categories, Millennials are plugging into the LinkedIn matrix on Day One (or before), thereby gaining an active window on the market.

This is a genie whose bottle is broken folks. LinkedIn offers our young colleagues and charges a kind of career scoreboard that they love to light up. And by helping them do so, we’re also burnishing our own reputations as managers and employers. It’s possible we’re moving into a future where a company’s website might be overshadowed in import by the collective luster of its employees' LinkedIn profiles. And don’t forget: LinkedIn works both ways. Are you keeping a virtual eye on rising stars across the street? Because you should be.

They don’t know the rules. Forget everything else I’ve written (which is easy to do if you’re as old as I am) and remember this: If you want your Millennial employees to act, work, or dress a certain way…you need to tell them explicitly.

The unwritten rules of the workplace are gone. Jos. A. Bank and Brooks Brothers are no longer the unofficial haberdashers of the first job. Desktop telephones are no longer tethered in place or locked from the inside out. Headphones are the new fedoras. And the mass of Millennials don’t head home to change before they head “out for the night.” Add or subtract a jacket, ditch (or switch into) sensible shoes, and you’re well on your way from work to play these days.

Contrast that with when I landed my first “real” job in 1989. I quickly learned how I was expected to dress: just like my father did. Suit. Tie. Muted shirt. There were no hats worn inside. There were no headphones over my ears as I walked to the copier. There were no vintage high-tops or uncommonly cool Stance socks adorning my lower legs and feet. The rules were the rules, and they had been that way for generations. Maybe you remember…

We did not make personal calls during work time. We did not edit our fantasy football newsletters on our company-issued computers, nor did we manage our daily fantasy sports games during work hours. We did not eat fragrant sushi or lasagna or Indian food or enchiladas at our desks. These things weren’t done. Hell, in many cases, they didn’t exist!

Today’s young employees likely enter the workplace without a monolithic notion of how things are supposed to be. Dress codes are many and varied, if not nonexistent. Rules around social media and personal phone calls aren’t ironclad; they vary from company to company and job to job. And the slow death of the business lunch and the rise of on-the-go eating means most desks and cubicles have become dining rooms, too.

Which is to say: Everything is different now. Millennials don’t march into your office with native notions of how things are done. They’re neither dumb nor rebellious. They’re new, just like the rules. So if you expect things to be done a certain way, be explicit. Don’t assume they know. They don’t.

Granted, given their desire for work/life integration, they're likely to resent rules that are too constricting. Which might lead them to call their parents to complain. Or to update their LinkedIn profile...

Scott Hess is the EVP/Human Intelligence at Publicis media agency Spark. Follow him on Twitter at @scotthess