I’ve read a lot of research about the hyper-collaborative behaviors of GenY and Millennial employees. And there is certainly something here to talk about. Young people are just a bit different than older people. Surprise! Check out this photo and count the devices.
There are at least 6 visible mobile phones, a couple of laptops, cameras, and about 10 iPods. Empirically and statistically we can observe that behavior and consumer patterns have demographic predictors. But some of the research I’ve read seems awfully shoddy. So I wanted to share some thoughts about this in a way that will help you decipher what you read and how to determine if it is useful.
I first got interested in GenY research a few years ago, but I started to read the research very carefully last year. I was preparing for a session that I co-lead in London earlier this year at the FSA (the British counterpart of the SEC). I was there to discuss the implications of workforce technology and population to the CTO of the SEC and the CIO of the FSA along with other business and technology leaders across law firms and pharma companies in Europe. At that time I had the opportunity to pour over lots of data from many sources that was supposed to clarify fact from fiction. I don’t have access to some of the data anymore, and I’m not in a position to be very explicit about my conclusions, so I’ll only share some tips that will help you read and understand research about the collaborative behaviors of younger people.
Fear factors. A lot of the research is worded with a healthy dose of urgency. The typical message was “millions of boomers will retire, will there be enough GenXer’s to take over?” or “how will you capture their knowledge and transfer it to the next generation?” These messages used a healthy amount of demographic data to paint the brain-drain picture. But what’s the real message?
For some industries, these fears are substantiated. It takes many years to become a highly skilled air traffic controller, so it’s very important to ensure there is a good pipeline of younger talent to grow into the job. For many industries, it’s actually better to have some dated behaviors retire. But the research rarely differentiates this. So read and think — apply the general research to your situation. Fostering urgency is a typical consulting trick to get you to buy stuff.
I consulted with a Canadian government agency who told me they needed a more collaborative intranet environment because they wanted to attract young people to fill the roles that were being vacated by retirees. I found out that the collaboration software vendor suggested this. I wonder what if they took the money they were going to spend (on a very expensive portal solution) and simply put it into salary — would that be a more direct way to attract job applicants? Don’t get me wrong — I think the world of highly collaborative intranet environments. Given the past year’s economy I suspect that my client did not roll out the expensive portal solution, and did not have a difficult time finding young people who wanted jobs. How ironic.
Shifting categories. The best way to enable the fear game is to create inconsistent categories of data. It’s amazing what you can do by shifting the definition of terms like GenY, GenX, Boomers, and Seniors. I decided to look for population statistics to validate the brain-drain-claim.
I found the most popular were graphs like this one:
Where the gist of the chart was that there are many Boomers, fewer GenXers, and many GenYers. But then I saw other charts like this one:
Read carefully and take out a calculator. You’ll find that researchers will create different endpoints for the categories. Some will use watershed events (e.g. end of a war) to demarcate one group from another, some will use consistent time lines (e.g. decades), and some will use uneven bands which will artificially make the numbers of one group look larger than others.
Sorting out youth from culture. The biggest problem I have with some of the research was that there was no way to tease out behaviors that were indicative of the different generational culture vs. behaviors that are a natural part of age. Let me explain:
Most research will tell you that young GenYers / Millennials / digital natives (whatever the particular researcher calls them, since there are inconsistencies) and by this, let me just focus on the narrow band of ages 18 and 28 — these people love to form groups and interact in clusters. But when you look at the population of people in their 30s and 40s, they don’t socialize in groups as much. And that’s a fact.
The implication of this fact is that young workers will be more collaborative than older workers. This is due to the data that shows that younger people socialize in groups. And this is attributed to some magic genetic mutation that occurred to humanity in the mid 1980s when the Internet was born. This is a myth.
The obvious omission in the story is that most people in their 20s socialize in groups because they are not married, or don’t have kids yet. Many people in their mid 30s do. And this was the case 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and 40 years ago too. Sure, the averages ages when people start has shifted a bit, but fundamentally there are life transitions that inform social behaviors. So when GenXers were single, they also socialized in groups. When Boomers were single, they did too. They just didn’t text each other.
Some elements of youth behavior is simply a result of youth, whereas others is a result of this particular generation of youth. Teasing that apart would be far more valuable research than lumping them together.
Bottom line: There is good research to be done on the workforce behaviors of different generations. But watch out for the appeal to fear, shifty categories that make the data tell a better story, and conflation of factors that blur distinctions.
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Interesting piece, thanks for sharing.
Gil,
Great post. I have always found generational research both frustrating, becuase of its tendency towards mass generalization of people, and fascinating, becasue it is well interesting. In the end, the research is only as good as who is reporting it to you. And as everyone know there will always be snake oil saleman in the world. Thanks, Brian
Help me out here because I’m not following you on how the charts show different scenarios playing out. Both point to the same problem – the number of retirees as a percentage of the working population is going to increase significantly in the future. I guess if your analysis stopped after a half-second glance at the charts you might come to a different conclusion but does anyone really do this?
Thanks for asking Jackson. The question is how far into the future will this problem occur. I’m not going to point to some specific research reports. But indeed one of the challenges I faced was squaring the numbers when it came to popular statements such as “As these 77 million Baby Boomers retire, only 46 million Gen X’ers will replace them.” I looked at census data and discovered that the way you create the ratio of 77M to 46M is by playing with the definitions of who is a boomer and who is a GenX.
If you are in your mid to late 40s – are you in GenX or are you a Boomer? it depends who you ask and which research report you read. But the categorization is important, since you can sway the 77M:46M story to make a much less dramatic number. In fact, if you use strict 10 year age bands, then the story is much less compelling. My point is to read the data carefully, since some people will use uneven categories to create sensational headlines.
BTW, I just came across this article (after I wrote the blog post above), which deals with a similar question – a link I found off the Wikipedia page on Generations .
Thanks very much for posting this article. I have been annoyed ongoing by the fact that so much of the discussion and usage of data around generational behaviors is not taking into account that people change as they go through their lifespan. Clearly, while the Baby Boomers have some differences in behaviors ongoing from the prior generation and the next, by the same token we can clearly see that they did not grow up maintaining all of the “hippie” ways of their youth. The sociological lifecycle and work lifecycle each clearly influence behavior as well. Now, this said, as we’ve seen with each generational wave of knowledge workers, the urge to collaborate and the use of technology for socially-related purposes definitely grows, so the notion of trend here makes sense. But we should not assume that GenYers will be behaving in their 30s and 40s the same way as tehy were in their 20s.
Good work, Gil.
Thanks for (beginning to) demystify some of the sound-bite like stuff that’s been flying around.
Some great thinking and very solid research about how tomorrow’s workers will use technology (particularly social media) can be found in danah boyd’s work, which I would bet you’ve seen and highly recommend to you and your readers. For example: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/youth_culture/
Mike, thanks. I have not seen his work. My research focus was actually more on workplace behaviors and the implications to workplace technology support. I looked at consumer spending patterns as well — and in particular European consumer data (since I was addressing a European audience). And I spoke to other researchers and HR leaders in some well-known companies. What plagued me was that I started to notice these three problems I described when trying to make sense of conflicting stories. So whereas I believe this is an important area to study, and believe there is good research out there, I also found some shoddy research. So I want to help my readers think critically about the research they read – test it, challenge it, take out the calculator. The good stuff will pass all the tests.