Spunto di riflessione...

[ACS]

Mi spiace che sia in inglese, ma non ho proprio tempo di tradurlo.

Y’s and wherefores of a multi-generational workplace

By Stefan Stern

Published: April 14 2008 21:34 | Last updated: April 14 2008 21:34

Matthew was one of my favourite colleagues. In the slightly drab office where I used to work, the arrival of young Matt at the corner of my desk usually meant the chance to relax for a moment with a frivolous comment or laconic quip.

Matt didn’t really care, you see, and there was no obvious reason why he should have. A graduate, he spent a large part of the day fetching packages from the post room and filing papers. He was underemployed. We should have seen it coming, I suppose, but one day he wasn’t there any more. Finished at 23, gone to find something better to do.

This will be a familiar story to grown-up managers everywhere. You may feel that the twenty-somethings in your midst are an unprofessional, work-shy bunch. You may see them, on the other hand, as the potential saviours of your business. Doubtless, your organisation worries about graduate recruitment, the “talent pipeline”, and how to make yourself “an employer of choice”. Whatever you think about them, the members of Generation Y are commanding a lot of management attention right now.

Who are these guys, and girls? Y begins where X ends – round about 1982. (Baby boomers, Gen X’s predecessors, were born between 1945 and 1963). In some ways Generation Y must be seen as one lucky cohort. They have never had to wrestle with a slide-rule or a manual typewriter. They do not know what it is like to work in an economic downturn. They have grown to maturity, or something approaching maturity, with an always-on, multimedia cornucopia surrounding them.

In some ways Generation Y are dead unlucky. The apparent certainties of the cold war era have been replaced by the permanent “war on terror”. They are inheriting a planet whose future viability is in doubt. Boomers had a summer of love, Generation X saw the Berlin Wall come down, but the defining moment for Generation Y took place in New York City on September 11 2001.

Today’s workplace is a meeting point for these three postwar generations. And, truth be told, relations between them all can be a bit tricky. The “age diverse” workforce has many potential attractions and strengths, but it takes a lot of managing.

Let me make a bold stab here and presume that most readers of this column are either grown-up Gen X-ers or flourishing Boomers. What do you need to know to navigate your way through this multi-generational world?

One pitfall is “to look at Generation Y through a Boomer lens”, as Helena Clayton, a director at the Roffey Park management institute in the UK, puts it. To a middle-aged manager, the impatience of the twenty-something colleague can be irritating. The idea that it might be necessary to “serve your time” is not one that Generation Y finds at all persuasive.

While some more seasoned professionals have struggled to come to terms with the high-tech, “faster, faster” world, Generation Y hit the ground running. They don’t do slow. Bureaucracy and “process” hold little appeal. Meetings take too long to set up and last too long. To Generation Y, e-mail is a clunky and laborious way of communicating compared with instant messaging, texting, and dynamic social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace or Bebo.

Members of Generation Y are demanding. They want “enjoyable and meaningful work from day one”, as Tammy Erickson, the writer and consultant, explains in a recent Harvard Business Review podcast. But this does not mean they are after your job. “They are not sure they want the hours, the pressure, the incremental pay increases,” Ms Erickson says. For this reason, she adds, it could be hard to coax them into middle management roles.

The ageing hippie contingent that has read this far will by now be beginning to feel that Generation Y sounds familiar. It sounds, in fact, a lot like the embodiment of many classic baby boomer aspirations. And, of course, there is nothing new about young people at work displaying a “bad attitude”, and older people at work being unimpressed by their more inexperienced colleagues.

Generation Y wants what anybody else has always wanted out of a job: work that is interesting and that plays to their strengths, regular feedback and support from managers who understand them, and a chance to learn and develop new skills.

The difference, according to Simon Walker, co-founder of the recruitment consultancy Talent Smoothie, is that Boomers and Generation X were conditioned not to expect these things. We got used to moving at a slower pace. But while you sometimes detect a certain affinity between original soixante-huitards and today’s young online addicts, Generation X can find itself stuck in the middle, lacking the (faded?) idealism of the Boomers and the edgy modernity of Generation Y.

Those detached, “uncommunicative”, unimpressed twenty-somethings are not the feckless rabble you might think they are. They are, however, high maintenance. And here’s a scary thought: what is the point of a two-year graduate training scheme that lasts about 18 months longer than any self-respecting Gen Y-er is prepared to wait before getting on to the good stuff?

But then, what do I know? I’m just a sagging, in-betweenie Gen X-er who hasn’t even got an iPod.

Fonte: Financial Times

[Matteo B.]

ma guarda........"tutto il mondo è paese...."......

Happy:roll:

[MeneS]

A me sembrano i soliti discorsi (con i dovuti affinamenti) che la generazione precedente fa a quella successiva.

Mi sono accorto che le persone diventano "vecchie" o "adulte" quando cominciano a lamentarsi delle generazioni successive

E si lamentano sempre sulle stesse cose