Understanding The Millennial Employee

A new breed of workers is taking over the business landscape—and they come in from every direction. They are younger and faster, but do not quite have as good an image as their earlier predecessors. They are the millennials, and they are a fast-growing part of the workforce. Understanding how to handle them is very important.

Let’s face it, older folks tend to view millennials as impatient, disrespectful, entitled, and just too young to know what they are talking about. Technology is partly to blame for this. The advent of sites like Wikipedia and Google has relieved them of experiencing the hard work that comes with manually researching and poring through dozens of books for a project. Online gaming has made them too lazy to go out and enjoy the sun. And with so many distractions available on the Internet, some have become too indifferent to the complexities of everyday life.

But are millennials really like that? Are they really in the wrong or is my judgment stemming from our generation gap? In this rapidly changing and globalizing environment, a look into these preconceptions of the millennial employee is crucial. Here are some to start you off:

Millennials are impatient. Most of us would probably say that these kids are just too impatient. They want results now—not later, not tomorrow. Regardless of the effort they have exerted, they want to see the results at once. But is it their fault? They grew up in an environment wherein multitudes of data are readily available in a matter of seconds over the Internet. Is that bad? Or are we just sore from the fact that things are not what they used to be? They are impatient—most of them would even admit that—but it is not all that bad. Workplaces need real time information. Will you use a market study finished within a few years knowing that it only takes a week for the market to distort itself?

Millennials are entitled. It is good to be competitive, but not to the point of wanting to immediately achieve something as soon as we hop onto the business. Most of these kids try to apply for higher positions right after graduation and most of them have a competitive amount of skills and achievements in their resume, but simply lack the years of experience. This “entitlement” may just be competitiveness, which is a necessary requirement for entrepreneurs. They have the drive to achieve and get to the top fast. True, things may not work that way, but this sense of entitlement also tells us that they envision themselves on top.

Millennials lack professional focus. I believe that today, there is a need for a lot of generalists in the workplace—people who can do more than one specific task. Gone are the days when an employee would only be given one single function. Take a look at the common job descriptions. You would probably see in the last point something along the lines of, “Any other function that may be related to the position.” Today, we need flexible people, and millennials understand that they need to be jacks-of-all trades if they want to compete globally—not masters of none, but masters of some, if not most.

Every generation would have different values, sets of skills, and attitudes formed by the environment they grew up in, the political landscape during their time, and the technologies available. Millennials may be lacking in some traditional skills, but perhaps their various strengths may more than make up for this.

*Originally published by the Manila Bulletin. C-6, Sunday, February 8, 2015. Written by Ruben Anlacan, Jr. (President, BusinessCoach, Inc.) All rights reserved. May not be reproduced or copied without express written permission of the copyright holders.