One of the departments I mange is our (customer-facing, 24X7) support desk. I’ve had a lot of turnover, mainly due to the staffing model I inherited (too few people working way too many hours). I changed the staffing model to have a bunch of part-time college-aged people working all the night and weekend hours. For the most part, it’s working out pretty well. My full-timers are working a normal, 40-hour work week, don’t have to work nights or weekends, and aren’t being subjected to the stress and burnout-inducing nightmare of 60-80 hours per week like my predecessor had them doing.
The trouble is, managing Millennials is kind of a pain in the ass, at least for this Gen-X’er. They’re really high maintenance, they all seem to have a deplorable work ethic, think nothing of rolling in late and leaving early, they do as little actual work as possible, and waste even more time on the internet than I do (which is a lot). So, I’m reading up on how to manage Millennials, and a lot of what I’m reading is that my experience is typical, that Millennials tend to be narcissistic and lazy, and that I need to creatively work around that in order to manage them.
I’ve never been a manager, but my first thought is “These are your hours, these are your duties. If you can’t comply with either, good bye.” That doesn’t work?
You are likely their first employer. That means they need to learn to be employees. You can either let them sink or swim on their own or teach them to be employees.
I don’t know. You tell me. When I was a college student, I worked my ass off. And despite my self-deprecating comments about wasting time on the internet, I still work my ass off.
Pretty much yes, but there are noticeable differences between generations. What I notice about the millennial grads is that they think their college degree is a golden ticket to an easy career. They don’t realize that once they get that high paying job after graduation that they have to actually work, and work harder then they did in college. The fun part is a few years out when they have to deal with the new grads themselves. I think that’s the point where they finally mature and realize how green they once were also.
Anyway, despite an occasional urge to tell them to get off my lawn, they aren’t all that different from my generation or any other. They’re young, some of them will continue to learn, improve, work hard, and be very productive people. Other won’t, and that all has been the same for every generation.
So did I. But I’ve allways outworked 95% of the people I’ve ever worked with. In almost every job I’ve ever had the majority of the people were lazy and incompetent.
I’m a Generation Xer too, and I remember people saying much the same things as unarguable truths about our generation when I was in my 20s. From the Wikipedia article on Generation X:
So, basically, every generation thinks the next set of college-age kids is lazy, self-centred, spoiled, etc etc etc. Then the kids grow up and turn out just fine.
Forget when they were born. Don’t manage them like they’re a separate species. Just tell them what the job expectations are, and what the penalties are for not fulfilling those expectations. Then follow through. The basically sensible ones will do fine, and you’ll get rid of the basically useless ones.
More like people in their first job, in any generation and location, since the first time someone actually got a job.
I’ve heard the same descriptions applied to people moving from day laborer or self-employed (cabbie, farmer…) to factory or office jobs, for example. Many of them had a strong work ethic, but not one which included such concepts as “being in the same place at the same hour every day for five days a week”.
Are they working separately or in bunches? Because you seem to be going on the assumption that the shitty work ethic is uniform. If they all got hired at the same time and they’re working in a group, a few of them are going to be setting the tone for everyone. If there are a few who make it clear straight off that the point of this job is to goof off on the internet and talk to each other, rather than getting the work done, it’s very easy for the rest of the group to slip into that mode. If you can nip that in the bud, get rid of the real wasters and make it clear that that mindset isn’t going to fly, the rest may well shape up.
