Gen Y is Seen as a Joke for Good Reason
And honestly, it breaks my heart a little bit each day to read stories like the one I am posting below. I know that it really doesn’t affect me or my abilities to be successful but it still makes me sad that people cannot see why others have problems with Gen Y
Obama Supporters Take His Name As Their Own (NY Times)
Just a couple choice quotes:
Emily Nordling has never met a Muslim, at least not to her knowledge. But this spring, Ms. Nordling, a 19-year-old student from Fort Thomas, Ky., gave herself a new middle name on Facebook.com, mimicking her boyfriend and shocking her father.
“Emily Hussein Nordling,” her entry now reads.
Ooh, not Facebook!
Jeff Strabone of Brooklyn now signs credit card receipts with his newly assumed middle name, while Dan O’Maley of Washington, D.C., jiggered his e-mail account so his name would appear as “D. Hussein O’Maley.” Alex Enderle made the switch online along with several other Obama volunteers from Columbus, Ohio, and now friends greet him that way in person, too.
Credit card receipts, e-mail signatures and online profiles too? Revolutionary!
“My name is such a vanilla, white-girl American name,” said Ashley Holmes of Indianapolis, who changed her name online “to show how little meaning ‘Hussein’ really has.”
Wait, so because you have a vanilla, white-girl name, you are going to piss on the Hussein name because you think it has no meaning? Who cares if millions of people around the world embrace the name as part of their heritage, ancestry or anything else? I want to make a lame political point!
The movement is hardly a mass one, and it has taken place mostly online, the digital equivalent of wearing a button with a clever, attention-getting message. A search revealed hundreds of participants across the country, along with a YouTube video and bumper stickers promoting the idea. Legally changing names is too much hassle, participants say, so they use “Hussein” on Facebook and in blog posts and comments on sites like nytimes.com, dailykos.com and mybarackobama.com, the campaign’s networking site.
And there we get to the real issue: Gen Y’ers (at least in this case) are too lazy and care too little about it to actually follow through and make a real impact on the debate at hand. It is too much of a hassle but I can change my Facebook profile, e-mail signature and give my buddies high fives for doing something incredibly insignificant. It really makes me long for the days where boomers were, you know, getting arrested and actually standing up for causes they believed in to elicit real change.
What Gen Y truly lacks is execution. They don’t think it is important. They’d rather have clever ideas and not have to work too hard in actually making it happen. While the idea may have been solid (even if it is a little to cult of personality for me), nobody was willing to do the difficult thing and turn the idea into a real social commentary on race and religious bias. By being unwilling to step up to the plate, this phenomenon is laughed at by other generations because it confirms many of the stereotypes about Gen Y.
And you know what? They are right. Bummer.
Four Great Resources for HR and Recruiting Professionals
While you are enjoying your patriotism fueled short week (at least in the US and Canada), here are a few networking resources to make your life easier. I am just a *tiny* bit biased about these but you’re just going to have to deal with it!
- RecruitingBlogs.com - With almost 10,000 members, it has been great to see people use this resource so well. Jason Davis has done an outstanding job developing a community of cooperative, friendly people in an industry that is often seen as hypercompetitive and cut-throat.
- HR Bloggers - A growing group of current and aspiring HR bloggers. Laurie Ruettimann of PunkRockHR put this group together and it is quickly expanding. HR is tough enough, we shouldn’t have to blog alone too, right?
- HR Professionals - Put together by Gautam Ghosh, I just found this group of over 200 HR professionals. Not surprisingly, this group has a nice international flair but I’d love to see it grow a la RecruitingBlogs as well.
- HRM Today - I am not hawking this because it is my website! Okay, I lie. Still, we’ve had a great response to our initial request for bloggers to participate. We are consistently getting two to three really great posts a day (and growing) from some really great bloggers including Alexandra Levit, Samrah Jamil, HR Minion, HR Wench, Mark Stelzner, James Morrissey, Laurie Ruettimann, Breanne Potter, Susanna Cesar Morton and (coming soon) Dan McCarthy. Great and aspiring to be great bloggers are always welcome (e-mail for more info: lance (at) hrmtoday (dot) com)
So if you are going to slack this week, slack on something that actually helps you and your career!
Generation Envy
How petulant Generation Y haters can be worse than the “Gen Y is Better” crowd.
It is a sunny day and I am inside. While I long for the outdoors, I am reminded that the flexibility to let me go outside and play is embedded in my GDNA (that’s short for Generational DNA). Ah, the life of Generation “Why can’t I go out and play? I’ll work on my homework later.” My ultimate plea doesn’t work and I sit here, occasionally looking out my window ready to go.
Scenes like these flash through my head every nice day here in the Pacific Northwest. While it is easy to come in and work when the days are five hours long and the rain never ends, it becomes impossibly difficult to convince me I should be wearing something other than my shorts and sandals. While generations before me may have been used to waiting for the work day to come to an end, my generational based desire to be out there now and work at night is undeniable.
I have been writing on this blog for over two years and in that time I have discussed Gen Y in both positive and negative ways. I feel like my negativity about Gen Y overshadows the fact that I don’t like absolutely loath knee jerk Gen Y haters.
Yes, I do think generational issues are overstated. I think there is a lot of hype about them and I am lucky enough to have become self-aware before the hype took hold of us all. Sometimes I feel surrounded by zombies and question my own membership to the very group that I belong to (by birth, not by virtue). That being said, it is unfair to castigate the entire generation based on the (often times overstated) actions of the entitled whiners with helicopter parents that have come to represent Gen Y.
They Are Jealous, But Not For Those Reasons
There is this common perception that other generations are jealous of Gen Y. While that may be true, it isn’t because “we are so ambitious”, “we do better at our jobs”, or “we ask for things in the workplace that they had to work for”. That may make some members of Gen Y feel better about the jealousy but it doesn’t make sense. The boomers started and led employee friendly companies like Southwest and Starbucks, Gen X had huge entrepreneurial surges and workplace improvements typically benefit everyone.
In talking with other generations, it seems like the greatest amount of envy comes from the amount of opportunity many generation y’ers give up to act like complete babies about workplace issues. Looking at the numbers, it is hard to argue that our generation is the best educated and the most politically, socially and economically prosperous of any of our previous generations. We have technology at our finger tips that just blow everything from the past 20 years out of the water. I went from playing Oregon Trail on Apple IIe’s to creating web pages on the internet in the span of seven years of education. The environment for innovation has never been stronger. The small business environment is as good as it has been. With all of this going for us, we can’t even figure out how to get along while working or when interacting with other generations without coming off as complete pricks. Demanding that workplace rules secede to our needs is just a cherry on top.
The problem with that view is that many in Generation Y aren’t like that, never will be like that or don’t do it in the disgustingly offensive way many outside of our generation portray it. I think it is amazing the opportunities I have and because of that genuine appreciation, I make the best of it every day. I know many in Gen Y who do the same. And while it is understandable that Generation Y has this rose tinted view of the world (we are young and dumb), what isn’t understandable or excusable is the blanket that Gen Y haters have often thrown over our fire. Honestly, you’re older and should know better. These actions only help to further alienate people in my generation who also seek to bring generation y back to reality. Using grandfather colloquialisms like “When I was your age…” doesn’t help you either. These sorts of actions make people feel like you’re the one entitled to make people go through the same steps in life you have gone through. That isn’t any more right thansaying that Gen Y is entitled to skip past you and go straight to CEO.
The Individual, Not The Generation
When it comes down to it, we are all generations of different people. While it is easy to look at statistics about generations and say “This generation believes this, this generation believes that,” but that doesn’t mean anything when considering a person individually. I work in a place that is 5% Gen Y (I’ve run the age analysis) and I do really like (many of) my co-workers. We have a lot of shared values and a shared course for success. Knee jerk Gen Y haters are as unwelcome here as knee jerk haters of any other group. We all need each other to be successful.
That whole part about me wanting to go outside and finding a flexible work arrangement has nothing to do with my generation. It has to do with me and my utter inability to stay focused when I see sunshine (reasons why I can’t move to places with nicer weather until I can be a bigger slacker). I love being outdoors. That’s me. That’s my Dad. That’s my uncle and my Gen X cousin. And I just bought my first iPod. That flies in the face of the generational stereotype.
The message for me is clear: in almost all instances, the individual is more important than the generation. The labels are meant to elicit a certain response (that I understand, as I’ve just abused the hell out of them). But that’s all it is, a label. It is a statement of fact based on when you were born not onwho you are or what you can accomplish or where you can get hired or how you get things done.
Supervisors Need All of the Help They Can Get
I know you may be tired of me hawking this supervisor handbook software from Gradience but you have to understand: this software seriously saved me about a weeks worth of time (40 hours) working on something that I absolutely loath. The problem is, I can put it off more and more but that only creates more work for me as the supervisors don’t know what’s going on.
So this is my review of the software as I plunked out the manual. Here a screenshot from the final product in Microsoft Word:
So here it is, the moment you’ve all been waiting for.
Pros:
- Great interface. It is very intuitive and needs little instruction.
- Includes almost everything you can think of (and more). The only thing it doesn’t include are those specific company policies
- Industry and state customizable. It is preloaded with all 50 states, a couple handfuls of industries and a wizard interface to determine whether you qualify for FMLA coverage or Affirmative Action.
- Exports into Word or PDF format. Exporting into Word is especially helpful.
- Lots of little things you don’t think of. Like inserting the HR manager’s name, phone number and e-mail address in every instance if you want it.
- Save a ton of time trying to get information from a bunch of places into one tidy manual
- Written in an easy to read format. Less legalese for our supervisors to interpret.
Cons:
- Difficulty adding company specific policies outside of the pre-selected areas. The software is robust in its coverage but I did have some company specific sections I wanted to add. I know the software is capable but it was easier to just add it to the exported product
- Formatting of the final product is basic and plain
- For multi-state companies, you have to make complete handbooks specific for each state
The cons were pretty much fixed by the fact that you can export it to Word and add and format to your heart’s content. For the multi-state issue, I made a non-state specific supervisor’s handbook and took the necessary elements from each state and added it to a state supplement that would go along side of the supervisor manual.
Overall, the software is a great time saver. The content is generic (though customizable based on industry/state) and the formating basic but this is obviously to appeal to their wider audience. In my case, I was just happy to save myself 40+ hours of content creation in favor of a half to full day of editing and adding bits and formatting it to my heart’s content. In the HR software world, there are a lot of applications for employee handbook creation but one for supervisors is hard to find.
So now that I have saved myself from the nights and weekends of working to complete this, I can blog at you more often. Lucky you!
What do you call a buncha HR nerds in one place?
If you are interested in following the SHRM conference, check out PunkRockHR (on Twitter as well) and Cheezhead. It is almost as good as being there.
Strike that, nothing is better than being there but it is going to be as close as you will be if you are in the office like me.
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About
Your HR Guy is a Human Resources Generalist practicing in the field. But don't let that fool you, this isn't a boring blog. I seek relevance and humor in a place we will spend much of our lives. Everything from workplace issues, job seeking and terrible bosses. Read more...
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