Millenials have a skewed sense of reality.
Millenials are pampered and spoiled.
Millenial employees are holding employers to ransom with their unreasonable demands.
Businesses are at the mercy of staff with poor committment levels and high wage expectations.
These are so many of the observations that are floating around recently. Anytime you have a conversation with a business owner, this is the response most of them have. The general consensus is that it is all the fault of the employees who are 'money-grabbing, lazy and unreasonable'. The generational gap has the younger generations painted as more interested in social media without a solid grasp of reality.
I am of an older generation yet I empathise with both sides of this issue. I understand that the trauma of being the pioneer generation has set most of these 'business owners' down a a spiralling of path of us against them mentality.
What triggered this bout of introspection?
I heard about the absolute disaster situation happening at my penultimate place of work. The company is 12 years old and should be well established by this point. However, the staff are on the whole unhappy, dissatisfied and on the lookout for greener pastures. The owners however, have an almost universal world view that the staff are ungrateful and unreasonable and lazy.
However, I think it is the one of the silver linings of this pandemic. Everyone has had a rude awakening and a shock to their system. People are reevaluating their circumstances. People are learning that there other ways to survive and different perspectives. While everyone understands the importance of money and how necessary it is for survival, the pandemic freed people from the sense of the conventional. We are all more comfortable with uncertainty.
Employers who understand this and adapt to it are the ones who are successfully retaining quality employees. I am not saying that there aren't people out there who are unreasonable and spoilt. In general, employees are no longer willing to put up with terrible working conditions. The pandemic has driven home what exactly it means to have a toxic work environment.
Employers have no choice but to roll with the punches. Currently, the change is cosmetic and reluctant. Employers are insituting stop gap measures out of fear. However, once this measure start showing positive outcomes, these changes will start taking root. It will be for the better. Like all change, it is slow to happen and it is frustrating trying to get the ideas to take root.
Just Me.
