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ATTRACTING
THE TWENTYSOMETHING WORKER
The baby-boomers' kids are marching into the workplace,
and look out: This crop of twentysomethings really
is different. Fortune's Nadira Hira presents a
field guide to Generation Y.
By Nadira A. Hira, Fortune writer-reporter,
May 15 2007: 3:10 PM EDT (Fortune Magazine)
Nearly every businessperson
over 30 has done it: sat in his office after a
staff meeting and - reflecting upon the 25-year-old
colleague with two tattoos, a piercing, no watch
and a shameless propensity for chatting up the
boss - wondered, What is with that guy?!
We all know the type: He's
a sartorial Ryan Seacrest, a developmental Ferris
Bueller, a professional Carlton Banks. (Not up
on twentysomethings' media icons? That's the "American
Idol" host, the truant Matthew Broderick
movie hero, and the overeager Will Smith sidekick
in "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.")
At once a hipster and a climber,
he is all nonchalance and expectation. He is new,
he is annoying, and he and his female counterparts
are invading corporate offices across America.
Generation Y: Its members
are different in many respects, from their upbringing
to their politics. But it might be their effect
on the workplace that makes them truly noteworthy
- more so than other generations of twentysomethings
that writers have been collectively profiling
since time immemorial.
They're ambitious, they're
demanding and they question everything, so if
there isn't a good reason for that long commute
or late night, don't expect them to do it. When
it comes to loyalty, the companies they work for
are last on their list - behind their families,
their friends, their communities, their co-workers
and, of course, themselves.
But there are a whole lot
of them. And as the baby-boomers begin to retire,
triggering a ballyhooed worker shortage, businesses
are realizing that they may have no choice but
to accommodate these curious Gen Y creatures.
Especially because if they don't, the creatures
will simply go home to their parents, who in all
likelihood will welcome them back.
5
big mistakes new grads make
Some 64 million skilled workers will be able to
retire by the end of this decade, according to
the Conference Board, and companies will need
to go the extra mile to replace them, even if
it means putting up with some outsized expectations.
There is a precedent for this: In April 1969,
Fortune wrote, "Because the demand for their
services so greatly exceeds the supply, young
graduates are in a strong position to dictate
terms to their prospective employers. Young employees
are demanding that they be given productive tasks
to do from the first day of work, and that the
people they work for notice and react to their
performance."
Those were the early baby-boomers,
and - with their '60s sensibility and navel-gazing
- they left their mark on just about every institution
they passed through. Now come their children,
to confound them. The kids - self-absorbed, gregarious,
multitasking, loud, optimistic, pierced - are
exactly what the boomers raised them to be, and
now they're being themselves all over the business
world.
It's going to be great.
"This is the most high-maintenance
workforce in the history of the world," says
Bruce Tulgan, the founder of leading generational-research
firm RainmakerThinking. "The good news is
they're also going to be the most high-performing
workforce in the history of the world. They walk
in with more information in their heads, more
information at their fingertips - and, sure, they
have high expectations, but they have the highest
expectations first and foremost for themselves."
So just who is this fair bird?
Plumage
The creature in the wild: Joshua Butler, audit
associate, KPMG
With his broad networker's
smile, stiff white collar, and polished onyx cuff
links, Joshua Butler has the accouterments of
an accountant. Even so, he looks a little out
of place in a KPMG conference room. At 22, he's
6-foot-2 and 230 pounds, with a body made for
gladiator movies. A native of suburban Washington,
D.C., Butler chose accounting after graduating
from Howard University because he wanted "transferable
skills."
At KPMG he's getting them
- and more: The firm has let him arrange his schedule
to train for a bodybuilding competition, and he's
on its tennis team. Even before that, KPMG got
his attention when it agreed to move him to New
York, his chosen city. "It made me say, 'You
know what? This firm has shown a commitment to
me. Let me in turn show some commitment to the
firm.'" He pauses, a twinkle in his eye.
"So this is a merger, if you will - Josh
and KPMG."
Boomers, know this: You are
outnumbered. There are 78.5 million of you, according
to Census Bureau figures, and 79.8 million members
of Gen Y (for our purposes, those born between
1977 and 1995). And the new generation shares
more than just an age bracket.
20
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While it may be crass to "define" such
a group, any Times Square tourist could probably
do so with one finger - pointed at the MTV Networks
building. Gen Y sometimes seems to share one overstimulated
brain, and it's often tuned to something featuring
Lindsay Lohan. Add to that the speed with which
Yers can find Lindsay Lohan - day or night, video
or audio - in these technology-rich times, and
it's suddenly not so strange that Gen Y has developed
such a distinct profile.
And what a profile it is.
As the rest of the nation agonizes over obesity,
Gen Yers always seem to be at the gym. More than
a third of 18- to 25-year-olds surveyed by the
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press
have a tattoo, and 30 percent have a piercing
somewhere besides their earlobe. But those are
considered stylish, not rebellious.
And speaking of fashion, this
isn't a group you'll catch in flannel. They're
all about quiet kitsch - a funky T-shirt under
a blazer, artsy jewelry, silly socks - small statements
that won't cause trouble. The most important decorations,
though, are electronic - iPods, BlackBerrys, laptops
- and they're like extra limbs. Nothing is more
hilarious than catching a Gen Yer in public without
one of those essentials. Let's just say most wouldn't
have lasted long on Walden Pond.
When it comes to Gen Y's intangible
characteristics, the lexicon is less than flattering.
Try "needy," "entitled." Despite
a consensus that they're not slackers, there is
a suspicion that they've avoided that moniker
only by creating enough commotion to distract
from the fact that they're really not that into
"work."
Never mind that they often
need an entire team - and a couple of cheerleaders
- to do anything. For some of them the concept
"work ethic" needs rethinking. "I
had a conversation with the CFO of a big company
in New York," says Tamara Erickson, co-author
of the 2006 book "Workforce Crisis,"
"and he said, 'I can't find anyone to hire
who's willing to work 60 hours a week. Can you
talk to them?' And I said, 'Why don't I start
by talking to you? What they're really telling
you is that they're sorry it takes you so long
to get your work done.'"
That isn't the only rethinking
Gen Yers have done. Their widespread consumption
of uniform media has had some positive effects.
Girls watch sports and play videogames, and no
one thinks twice about it. And boys can admit
to loving "The Real World" with impunity.
Race is even less of an issue
for Gen Yers, not just because they're generally
accustomed to diversity, but because on any given
night they can watch successful mainstream shows
featuring everyone from the Oscar-winning rap
group Three 6 Mafia to wrestler Hulk Hogan. It
all makes for a universe where anything - such
as, say, being a bodybuilding accountant - seems
possible.
Of course, Gen Yers have been
told since they were toddlers that they can be
anything they can imagine. It's an idea they clung
to as they grew up and as their outlook was shaken
by the Columbine shootings and 9/11. More than
the nuclear threat of their parents' day, those
attacks were immediate, potentially personal,
and completely unpredictable. And each new clip
of Al Gore spreading inconvenient truths or of
polar bears drowning from lack of ice told Gen
Yers they were not promised a healthy, happy tomorrow.
So they're determined to live their best lives
now.
Habitat
The creature in the wild: Sheryl Walker, assurance
associate, PricewaterhouseCoopers
Growing up, Sheryl Walker says, she could do no
wrong. The youngest child of Jamaican immigrants
in New Jersey, she majored in accounting because
she knew it would make her parents happy: "They're
big on saying their children are 'a doctor,' 'a
lawyer' -'a something.'"
And now that the 24-year-old
is "a something," she continues to make
them happy. By living at home. "I don't have
any plans to leave," she says, laughing.
"My father told me if I did, he would be
very upset. And I at least pay a bill, out of
courtesy." The electric bill, that is. Considering
the cost of living in the New York area, that's
quite a bargain. "I think parents want to
feel needed," she says, "and it's like,
because I'm so independent, they get excited when
I ask for a favor."
From the moment Gen Yers were
born, long before technology or world events affected
their lives, they were dealing with a phenomenon
previously unknown to man: the baby-boomer parent.
Raised by "traditionalists" after World
War II, the boomers, once they had children of
their own, did exactly the opposite of what their
parents had done, cooing and coddling like crazy.
Couple all that affection
with the affluence of the '80s and '90s, throw
in working parents' guilt, and boomers' children
not only got what they wanted but also became
the center of their parents' lives. Self-esteem
was in, spanking was out, and coaching - be it
for a soccer team or a kindergarten interview
- was everywhere.
Affirmation continued as they
grew, and when they spoke up, their opinions were
not only entertained but celebrated. Overscheduled
grade-schoolers became overcommitted teens, with
the emphasis on achieving. The goal was to get
into a great college, which would lead to a great
career and a great life.
But there was a hitch. Upon
graduation, it turned out that a lot of Gen Yers
hadn't learned much about struggle or sacrifice.
As the first of them began to graduate from college
in the late 1990s, the average educational debt
soared to over $19,000 for new grads, and many
Yers went to the only place they knew they'd be
safe: home.
Lots haven't left. A survey
of college graduates from 2000 to 2006 by Experience
Inc. found that 58 percent of those polled had
moved home after school and that 32 percent stayed
more than a year. Even among those who've managed
to stay away, Pew found that 73 percent of 18-
to 25-year-olds have received financial assistance
from their parents in the past year, and 64 percent
have even gotten help with errands.
It's what Jeffrey Jensen Arnett
calls "emerging adulthood" in his 2004
book of the same name. "People think very
differently about their 20s now," the Clark
University research professor says. "It's
so volatile and so unfettered and so very unstructured.
Nothing has ever existed like it before."
For example, in 1960 the median age at marriage
was 20 for women and 23 for men. Today it's 26
for women and 28 for men. In sociological terms
that's a revolution.
And though Gen Yers will eventually
have to grow up - like all of us, they'll lose
their parents, face layoffs and suffer insane
bosses - they are stretching the transition to
adulthood well into their 20s. "If we don't
like a job, we quit," says Jason Ryan Dorsey,
the 28-year-old author of 2007's "My Reality
Check Bounced!," "because the worst
thing that can happen is that we move back home.
There's no stigma, and many of us grew up with
both parents working, so our moms would love nothing
more than to cook our favorite meatloaf."
It's a position borne out by the numbers; 73 percent
of Pew's respondents said they see their parents
at least once a week, and half do so daily, a
fact that, however sweet, sort of makes you want
to download "Rebel Without a Cause."
With this level of parental
involvement, it's a miracle that Gen Yers can
do anything on their own. "It's difficult
to start making decisions when you haven't been
making decisions your whole life," says Mitchell
Marks, an organizational psychologist and president
of consulting firm Joining Forces. He points to
one of his recent projects at a software development
company. His client, which had one health-care
plan, was acquired by a bigger firm that offered
five more.
"The twentysomething
software developers were up in arms about having
to choose," Marks says. "That was their
No. 1 issue - not 'Will I lose my job?' or 'Will
there be a culture clash?' but this -because they
were just so put off that they were put in what
they viewed as a very stressful situation."
One can't help but wonder how stressed they'd
be with no health insurance at all.
But even for the Gen Yers
who try in earnest to succeed, Marks says, the
way they've been raised can still be detrimental:
"They've been made to feel so special, and
that is totally counter to the whole concept of
corporations."
Courtship
The creature in the wild: Katie Connolly,
associate attorney, Halleland Lewis Nilan &
Johnson
Unlike most new attorneys, Katie Connolly took
a pay cut for her second job. Why? The 28-year-old
graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School
liked that it wasn't the attorneys but the staff
at Halleland, a 53-attorney firm in Minneapolis,
who had windows (since they were more often at
their desks) and that everyone dressed casually.
Her decision paid off. At her old firm she spent
all her time researching at her desk; at Halleland
she has already tried her first case.
"Lots of firms say, 'Oh,
we're 150 years old,'" she says, "and
they do things like they did 150 years ago. That's
not attractive to me. I want to do good work,
not just slog through for years till I get my
Persian rug and my 50-gallon fish tank."
What, then, is a Fortune
500 company to do?
Gen Yers still respond most
of all to money. There's no fooling them about
it; they're so connected that it's not unusual
for them to know what every major company in a
given field is offering. And they don't want to
be given short shrift - hence the frightening
tales of 22-year-olds making six-figure salary
requests for their first jobs. One could chalk
that up to their materialism and party-people
mentality, but author Erickson has a different
take. "They have to get some money flowing
because they have a lot of debt to pay,"
she says.
To get noticed by Gen Yers,
a company also has to have what they call a "vision."
They aren't impressed by mission statements, but
they are looking for attributes that indicate
shared values: affinity groups, flat hierarchies,
divestment from the more notorious dictatorial
regimes.
At Halleland, which was founded
in 1996 by defectors from a larger firm, offices
are all the same size, new associates are encouraged
to pass work up the chain and senior partners
send out e-mails congratulating junior staffers
on career milestones. In 11 years Halleland has
lost just five associates to other outfits.
It hasn't hurt that the firm
emphasizes work-life balance. While Gen Yers will
work a 60-hour week if they have to - and might
even do so happily if they're paid enough to make
the most of their precious downtime - they don't
want that to be a way of life.
Some firms where long hours
are the norm have found ways to compensate. At
Skadden Arps, new employees are reimbursed up
to $3,000 for home-office equipment and $1,000
every year after. And the firm's gyms are a big
hit with Gen Yers. "You'd be amazed, when
people come by to interview or check out the firm,
what a warm response the fitness center gets,"
says Wallace Schwartz, who leads the firm's New
York office.
Watching public accounting
firms scout for talent is especially instructive,
since they have had to staff up after Sarbanes-Oxley.
At Ernst & Young, recruiters hand out flash
drives instead of brochures, send text messages
to schedule meetings with candidates, and give
interns videocameras to create vlogs for the firm's
Web site. They also launched the first corporate-sponsored
recruiting page on Facebook to meet Gen Yers on
their own turf.
"That was a difficult
sell," says Dan Black, who heads E&Y's
college recruiting for the U.S. and Canada, "to
be in a medium where you don't have control and
people can post some not-so-nice things and you're
going to leave it up there, which we do."
It was so far ahead of its time that even the
kids got thrown off. At one point Black wanted
to quote some vivid comments a junior staffer
had posted on the page. He left him a voicemail
asking for a call back. The next thing Black knew,
the posts had all vanished. "He thought he
was in trouble!" Black says, howling. "So
they're learning how to work with us too."
But as any worthy suitor knows,
in the end the key to courtship lies at home -
in wooing Mom and Dad. For Merrill Lynch (Charts,
Fortune 500), getting young people to commit wasn't
much trouble before. "In the past, if we
gave you an offer, you accepted," says Liz
Wamai, who heads diversity for Merrill's institutional
business.
"It was Merrill Lynch.
Now it's sell, sell, sell." The company holds
a parents' day for interns' families to tour the
trading floor. But it's involving parents in recruiting
that's been a real shift. Subha Barry, global
head of diversity, recalls running into a colleague
having lunch with a potential summer recruit and
someone she didn't know. It turned out to be the
boy's mother.
"If somebody would have
said to me, 'You're interviewing for a job somewhere,
and you're going to bring your mother to the closing,
decision-making lunch,' I would've said, 'You've
got to be crazy,'" she says, wagging a finger.
"But I tell you, his mother was sold. And
that boy will end up at Merrill next summer. I
can guarantee that."
Domestication
The creature in the wild: Johnny Cooper, assistant
designer, J.C. Penney
Johnny Cooper has always wanted to be a fashion
designer. At first that usually means picking
out pins by day and waiting tables by night. So
when an offer of real work came from J.C. Penney
in Plano, Texas, he took it in a heartbeat. "What
23-year-old can say that they affect a quarter-billion-dollar
business on a daily basis?" he asks.
Yes, he actually has affected
it, helping to revamp the company's line of men's
swimwear. Cooper also organized a major fundraiser
for the company after proposing it in an e-mail
to the president. "He responded," Cooper
says, chuckling. "It took him a week, and
it was a one-liner. But it was the most exciting
thing to me."
Succeeding quickly does have
its challenges: "I sometimes feel like if
I'm given so much responsibility and excelling,
why can't I have more and more? I have to say,
'Slow down, Johnny. Sure, you want to be design
director, but you've only been here two years.'"
Post your thoughts on The Gig
No one joins a company hoping to do the same job
forever. But these days even your neighborhood
bartender or barista aspires to own the place
someday. What's more, the ties that have bound
members of this age group to jobs in the past
- spouse, kids, mortgage - are today often little
more than glimmers in their parents' eyes. So
if getting Gen Yers to join a company is a challenge,
getting them to stay is even harder.
The key is the same one their
parents have used their whole lives - loving,
encouraging and rewarding them. What that amounts
to in corporate terms is a support network, work
that challenges more than it bores, and feedback.
"The loyalty of twentysomethings is really
based on the relationships they have with those
directly above them," says Dorsey, the "Reality
Check" author. "There's a perception
among management that those relationships shouldn't
be too personal, but that's how we know they care
about us."
Dorsey - who in true Gen Y
style dropped out of college to write an earlier
book, "Graduate to Your Perfect Job,"
without having either graduated or gotten a job
- recommends starting small. Business cards are
an easy way to make young employees feel valued.
Letting them shadow older employees helps, as
does inviting them to a management meeting now
and then. And marking milestones is major, says
Dorsey. No birthday should go uncelebrated, and
the first day on the job should be unforgettable.
Dorsey recalls the time the
president of an engineering firm called a new
employee's mother and asked her to be there when
her daughter started work Monday morning. "When
her mom walked through the crowd, she was like,
'Oh, my God,' and her mom says to everyone, 'I
took her to kindergarten, and now I'm here for
her first day of work,'" Dorsey says. "The
president took them on a tour of the company and
explained to both of them why what new employees
were doing was so important to the company. And
the mom turns to her daughter and says, 'You are
not allowed to quit this job. Real companies are
not like this.'"
Skeptics would say Mom had
a point. But the idea is simply to make big companies
feel small, and even major corporations can do
much of that work through mentoring. This no longer
means creating a spreadsheet, matching people
by gender, race or a shared love of baseball,
and hoping for the best. At KPMG, says Jesal Asher,
a director in the advisory practice, every junior
staffer is expected to have a mentor, every manager
a protégé, and those in the middle
often have both. There's a Web site to facilitate
the formal process, and social activities - happy
hours, softball games, group lunches - are organized
to encourage informal networking.
With the resources that companies
like KPMG have, though, ice-cream socials are
just the beginning. This summer KPMG will send
100 new hires to Madrid to train alongside new
hires from other countries. The firm also gives
employees time off to do community service. Steps
like those have helped bring turnover down from
25 percent in 2002 to 18 percent last year, says
KPMG's head of campus recruiting, Manny Fernandez.
"Gen Yers are able to
do and learn so much more than I could at that
stage," he says, "and they're not looking
to have a career like I have, with just one company.
So we've got to build tools that are not just
about retention but about having people develop
skills faster, so that they can take on larger
opportunities."
While development is a long-term
goal, it begins in the short term with harnessing
Gen Yers' energy. "They're so vocal that
you can almost take an associate to a meeting
with the CEO," says Asher, "because
something that comes out of her mouth is going
to be actually outside the box, something that
none of us have ever thought about."
And twentysomethings can thrive
when given real responsibility. Mark Meussner,
a former Ford manager, remembers one instance
when, faced with a serious manufacturing problem
and two young engineers begging for the chance
to solve it, he took a chance on them. He gave
them one more-experienced person as a counselor,
and they made what he estimates was a $25 million
impact by solving a problem that had proved intractable
for a decade. The success spawned a slate of company-sponsored
initiatives led by more-junior staffers. Says
Meussner: "We need to use 100 percent of
an employee - not just their backs and minds,
but their innovation, enthusiasm, energy and fresh
perspective."
It's 12:45 A.M., this story
is due next week, and I'm hard at work. By that
I mean I am sitting at a desk. In my house. Wearing
yellow ducky slippers, track pants, and the royal-blue
Tommy Hilfiger pullover that has been my thinking
cap since I started writing papers in high school.
Pondering my bookshelf - some Faulkner, Irving,
Naipaul, Kerouac, Franzen and, of course, Dr.
Seuss and A.A. Milne - for inspiration.
With "The Cosby Show"
playing in the background, Google chats going
with two friends, and text messages coming from
my boyfriend, who's on assignment in Africa. When
things really get going, I'll put on "Lord
of the Rings: The Two Towers," which has
kept me company through every major story of my
writing career. In short, I'm ridiculous.
I know this will be alarming
to read, particularly for my mother, who cares
so much about my image that she began blow-drying
my hair when I was 4. But it had to be written,
because I've come to realize that the most significant
characteristic of the Gen Y bird is that we are
unapologetic. From how we look, to how spoiled
we are, to what we want - even demand - of work,
we do think we are special. And what ultimately
makes us different is our willingness to talk
about it, without much shame and with the expectation
that somebody - our parents, our friends, our
managers - will help us figure it all out.
That's why, in retrospect,
when I started at Fortune in 2004, I asked then-editorial
director John Huey what he thought the magazine
needed and how I might contribute to that end.
"I don't think you need to worry about that,"
he said, fixing me with an ever-so-slightly amused
gaze. It seemed like a perfectly valid question
at the time, but with all the hindsight that three
years can offer, thinking about it makes me giddy
- with embarrassment, but also a fair amount of
awe. Who did I think I was? At 23, I had already
had three jobs - one at a startup magazine that
folded, a contract gig at the prestigious MTV
News and a stint recruiting for Time Inc., which
is why I was sitting with Huey in the first place.
And Huey was just an office away from becoming
top editor of the world's largest publishing empire.
Unwise of me, to say the least.
But that's the beauty of Gen
Y. Despite the initial smirk, Huey did go on to
talk to me about the magazine, his own career,
and what he expected of and hoped for me. And
that 20-minute conversation set a tone of learning,
self-evaluation and growth that I'm glad of now,
especially as I've struggled to turn years of
Gen Y news, research and hearsay - ranging from
the worshipful to the condescending - into some
sort of cohesive narrative.
It speaks to a confidence
that's been building since our parents clapped
at our first steps, right through the moment when
- as so many new college graduates are doing now
- we walked across the stage at universities throughout
the country, straight into America's finest corporate
foyers. If that makes us a bit cocky at times,
it's forgivable, because I'm willing to bet that
in coming years, all that questioning will lead
us to some important answers. And in the meantime
- sorry, Mom - I'll be out getting a tattoo.
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