You Need to Rewire
the COVID Kids
The youngsters now showing up in your office have a wildly different understanding of what being an employee means. This is going to take some work.
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL
MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
The early returns are in and they're not
encouraging. I'm not talking about the midterm elections, which so far
have had some pretty encouraging results as the country overall seems to have
largely regained its senses. There's no longer any upside to talking about
politics in the office or anywhere else where relatively civilized, two-sided,
and factual discussions used to take place. Those days are long gone and the
swift and informal flow of important information within our organizations --
critical to building an effective, inclusive, and collaborative culture -- will
suffer immeasurably from its loss.
Once water cooler chats turn into
confrontations and outright warfare among your people, it's time to tell
them to take those
conversations elsewhere. But, having banished the bluster and
boosterism, it's hard to see how we will fill the crucial communication gaps
that will remain.
While we're worrying about that void, a more
pressing concern is handling the "return" to the office of those
brand-new team members, who are joining your company in person for
the first time. I call them "team members" as opposed to
"workers," not to be politically correct, but to suggest that
we're already seeing some serious issues with the attitudes, aptitudes, and
work ethic of the incoming wave of newbies. One clear concern is that their
view of work may no longer have the same priority and primacy to them as it
does to us old-timers and traditionalists. Some combination of college and
Covid-19 has sorely skewed their vision of work/life balance in a different
direction. And not in a way that's particularly helpful.
Let's just say that there's more than a little
confusion in their minds about why we call it "work" in the first
place rather than something pithier like "fun",
"self-actualization," or "communal therapy." Whether
they're fresh out of college, where they've been fed a steady diet of fiction,
fantasy, and wishful thinking, or they're freed from two years of home
captivity with their noses next to a screen offering cheap stimulation for 16
hours a day, the traditional messages about what it takes to build and sustain
a successful business and about each person's essential contributions to that
effort have somehow been largely lost in transition. Whatever good you can say
about Zoom, there's no way you can build a company culture remotely.
Time-honored virtues and historical values
such as focus, hunkering down, nose to the grindstone, perseverance, learning
before earning, taking direction, accepting rather than deflecting constructive
criticism, and simply following orders rather than debating them all seem to be
somewhat foreign concepts. Far too many of these newbies are just too smart for
their own good.
Some of this is just another residue of the
prime directives of the sleazy Trump years: hard work is for suckers; paying
dues and taxes is for the little people; bogus bone spurs are far better than
serving your country. And, of course, fake it 'til you make it and lie about it
if you don't. The reigning philosophy for too many of these kids seems to be
that the game and the goal is to learn the "tricks" of the trade -
the shortcuts and the cheats - rather than committing to putting in the effort
required to actually learn the business. It's all about Survivor sneakiness
or Big Brother backstabbing and the amoral attitudes that were
the very heart of the Apprentice, where so much of the
unfortunate awfulness began to take hold. While the substantial youthful voting
activity in the midterms suggests that no one under a certain age wants to
deal with the Donald any longer, it's going to take a while to drain all the
poison from their systems.
It still seems that their default
posture, again courtesy of the Orange Monster, is victimization when
things don't work out. The poor dears feel so taken advantage of and
under-appreciated. They're blame shifters par excellence and
especially adept at offering explanations, excuses, and arguments as to why
nothing is ever their fault or responsibility. It's a movie we've seen and
lived with for years - the girl who can't dance says the band can't play.
Now's the time - before the numbers and the
problems scale - to start figuring out how your managers are going to deal with
some of these new employment
realities. I don't think, as business owners and
operators, that we've ever faced such a flood of unprepared, uninterested, and
unwilling young men and women who are also frightfully entitled, skilled in
shifting accountability, and firmly resolute in the belief that they are doing
their employers a big favor just by showing up
for work -- whenever they choose.
It's not entirely their fault that the
pandemic basically screwed most of the recent college grads out of two years of
serious education but still moved them along on time with fewer academic tools,
more modest social and networking skills, and basically high school levels of
maturity. But now we're stuck with making them into productive employees and
remediating their deficiencies. When people talk these days about a gap
year, they're not referring to a period of time off and travel, they're whining
about the year it's gonna take to get their newest employees up to speed on
some embarrassingly basic skills.
And the newbies' cockeyed beliefs are only the
tip of the iceberg in terms of the underlying problems. They're not gonna be
remotely pleased to hear that they're lacking in anything or that, before they
can jump right into the pits, they're going to need some additional basic
training and they're going to have to spend some time watching the grown-ups
from the sidelines. Remember that these are the "trophies for
everyone" kids who were told by their teachers and parents that they could
do anything and everything they set their minds to. All that BS and strident
positivity is now coming home to roost.
You need to tell your team to be on the
lookout for all of the following waffle words and behaviors:
A world of "why?" Everything's up for
discussion and debate. Maybe we should take a vote. If your people aren't ready
to defend and justify their directions, they're in for a rude awakening.
A world of "who says?" Authority,
hierarchy, and directions are things of the past. Everything, in a post-truth
world, is just a matter of opinion and everyone's opinion matters.
A world of "good enough!" Attention to
detail, proofing your work product, dotting the i's and crossing the t's are
all old school ideas and old-fashioned nit picking. Just enough is good enough.
A world of "what's
next?" Everyone's in a hurry to get things done so they can get
on to whatever's next. Meetings need to be a matter of minutes, or you'll lose
your audience. Patience, pride of craft, and perseverance are no longer valued
in a world of onward and elsewhere.
A world of "whatever!" They're surprisingly
thin and thick-skinned at the same time. Easy to trigger or offend, but hard to
really reach because they've mastered the "whatever" defense. Nothing
matters so much that they should pay attention, change their approach, or adjust their
attitude.
A world of "gotta go!" They're gone at
the stroke of five and they're happy to leave their troubles, tasks, and team
members at the office door until tomorrow. There's a world out there of better
and more important places to be and that's where they're headed.
Bottom line: We're all headed into some
extremely challenging times because the "new" normal and the new
workforce aren't like anything we've seen before. We may not see future
decades, but they will and it's our job to help them make something important and
valuable out of it in spite of themselves.