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How Gen Y Should Talk To Old People At Work
jfruh writes "A lot of ink has been spilled explaining to Boomers and Gen Xers how they can best manage, motivate, and retain talented members of the Millenial generation on the job. But it's a two-way street, and those born in the '80s and later could also use a lesson on how to best communicate with older co-workers, who after all will determine their promotion and pay raises for the foreseeable future. Advice includes: make actual phone calls, mirror the level of formality your co-workers use in e-mails, and for Pete's sake don't ask them things like 'R U going?' in a non-texting medium."
Howz it shakin?
as possible.
Maybe that would also be a solution
Don't communicate like an idiot. What a good idea!
Complement the onion on their belt. Once you have their trust, take them out Old Yeller style.
You treat them as you want to be treated, and don't worry about if they are younger or older.. They are your coworkers, that is all that matters.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I thought using proper English and a little courtesy and respect in writing was required of *all* generations when dealing with business, especially customers and "the boss." Equally silly, I always thought it was only *courteous* to use the phone or even (*shudder*) walk over to someone's office to talk to them!
But I guess the "kids" think it's funny to use text-slang instead, further exposing their ignorance and lack of respect for others.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
As a Boomer (age 59), I'm finding it more important to embrace the future than ask the young 'uns to adopt the past. I think the last time I used a land line phone at work was over three years ago, and that was an exception; it's all Skype and Hangouts now, and I like it better.
I do miss some of the perqs of the past: private offices, beer at lunch...
That said, now get off my lawn!
This is absolutely ludicrous. This happens in *every* generation. Every generation says to their children: "we were better mannered, we didn't have premarital sex, we didn't have teenage sex, people didn't do drugs, we worked harder...". Apparently, they also had shorter memories (and in those case when they actually did work longer and harder (19th century), they had to because the productivity was lousy).
Also, I've noticed that "work ethic" is a shibboleth of religious wackos. Any other, normal, non-sociopathic person simply values high output per unit of effort without feeling the need to make such a fuss about it. It's simple economy.
Ezekiel 23:20
...to work eighty hours a week for the first three or four years to prove our worth,..
As a Gen X'er, I saw my Dad bust his ass.
Then get laid off when management made cuts to make their numbers. R&D was ALWAYS one of the first cuts. My father told me "Do NOT become an engineer! Become one of the bean counters."
What did I learn? Busting your ass does NOT prove anything. It will NOT be rewarded. Living to work is stupid: you work to live.
That's why all the Baby Boomers are now a BURDEN on our medical system: all that work and no play made them obese, diabetic, and with heart attacks. They ran themselves into the ground with work.
Even though they worked that hard, they are taking more out of the system than they EVER put in.
And now we have a bunch of self entitled ...
... I would fire their ass immediately.
...with an email stating the following:
OMG! WTF R U Doing! y wud u evar!!!! tha client wuz gonna b $$$ n now its ALL FXD! bcuz of that!
U R FIRED!!1
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
AKA Greybeards.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There is a problem, or maybe it was the 'point' of the work hard mindset.
That if you work hard at where you're at, you can be seen as 'you best fit here' so the bosses will pass you over for promotion because they figure your replacement will be worse.
But to be honest, everyone should agree and realize it's not your merits that get you jobs and promotions. It has always been and always will be WHO you manage to befriend, and WHO'S family you were born into.
Acting like a dick never works, and insisting that people with 5x your experience do things "your way" is about as dicky as you get.
Brett
I'm 30 and just at the very edge of the gen x-millennial divide. One thing that has been a major problem for me and most of the gen exers and millennials I know that are somewhat intelligent with regard to the boomers is respecting them as a generation. Sure, there are individuals worthy of respect but in my experience they are, as much as any generation can be, the epitome of what is wrong with and killing America. This is true of them, taken as a whole, regardless of whether or not they are liberal, moderate, conservative, etc.
The fact is that when the generations before the boomers handed over the reigns of power starting in 1992, we saw a precipitous decline in the quality of governance in corporate America, governments and everywhere else you looked. Boomers can squawk "correlation is not causation" until they are all entitled to Medicare paid out of my generation's meager earnings, but you cannot deny the *ahem* "correlation" there. Since the WWII and Silent generations have waned in their influence, our society has gone off a fucking cliff.
And you know what the worst part is? I have "conservative" boomer acquaintances who merely find a conservative angle for their entitled attitude. They'll say "I earned my Social Security, you young fucker" and I say back to them that it's mathematically impossible for most of my generation to even have a shot at that, we're still paying and you motherfucker want to tell me how you are entitled to cut of my paycheck because you didn't vote for anyone who was willing to restore the Social Security trust fund LBJ liquidated to fund Vietnam? Piss off! If they got started in 1992, it would probably be fixed by now.
And then they get to tell us how evil we are...
How about having some respect for the knowledge which may be gathered by your elderly counterparts?
Youth have always been indestructible and all-knowing, in their own minds at least. All generations when young. I was in the Air Force before I started college in 1976, so I was ten years older than most of the students by my Junior year.
One class, I don't remember the subject of the class but I do remember an insolent eighteen year old punk saying the instructor, who held a Master's degree and was about 40, was ignorant.
"Kid," the instructor said, "I've forgotten more than you've ever learned."
Free Martian Whores!
I was born in 1959 and this article is shit.
Use the phone
Fuck no. Use email for work - we want a trace for fucks sake.
Return email etiquette: When you receive an email from a Baby Boomer, reply using a similar format. If they begin with “Hi Joe” in every email, then you return every email with “Hello Eric”. If they end every email with a letter-like ending such as “Best wishes”, “Best”, “Thanks”, or another equivalent, return your emails with the same courtesy.
Oh fuck, I bet this guy top-posts.
Discuss technology at an appropriate level: As you read this, note that it’s coming from a life-long techie, former CIO and current CTO of a company I started. It’s easy for Gen X’ers and Gen Y’ers that grew up using technology to technically overpower those who did not grow up on technology. We are digital immigrants and you are digital natives. There is a difference.
WTF? People older than me invented all this shit! I don't have to be worried abot some kid blinding me with anything other than bullshit.
Work hard: Baby Boomers have an extremely strong work ethic.
Is this guy delusional? Work to live, don't live to work.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
First, don't call them "old people". Second, don't call "them" anything as a group.
Nah, we geezers aren't politically correct, most of us think that PC crap is bullshit. I'm old, you don't have to dance around the fact. Now, if you're talking about someone in their 40s, they're not old. You're mischaracterizing them. You're old when you get a discounted bus pass.
It pisses me off when they want ID for beer. I say "do I get a senior discount?" They say "no" and I inform them I'll show ID if a cop pulls me over or for a discount; there's no way I look younger than 21 and I refuse to give stupidly offensive people my money.
Third, use correct written English. No made up words, strange spelling, or text speak.
Indeed, they make one look incompetently uneducated.
Free Martian Whores!
I think it was probably always like that, it's just that people didn't gripe about it.
Personally, I was born during the last bit of the Carter administration in 1980, and it irritates me to be retroactively moved to a generation that has little in common with me. I may be marginally Gen-X, but none of my friends had cell phones in high school, a few of them had beepers. And most of the kids I went to class with didn't have the internet at home.
Not that I have anything against Gen-Y or the millenials, but realistically, I was born when all 5 Beatles were still alive and there was some question that I might require a smallpox vaccination.
Also, I've noticed that "work ethic" is a shibboleth of religious wackos.
Indeed, and the religion that "work ethic" comes from is the worship of money.
Free Martian Whores!
It's always rich when they use "extremely strong work ethic" to explain away the advantages that came to living in the post war years. As if we wouldn't work hard too if we had at least some reasonable prospect of retiring or getting a holiday bonus. We'd be incredibly rich working hard, if we were competing against the 3rd world and a bunch of bombed out 1st and 2nd world nations as well.
Or the fact that they could work a summer job and pay for their college education, assuming they chose to get one in the first place. As recently as the '80s, the government was paying 90% of the cost of attending a public school. Not to mention that they shipped most of the jobs that didn't require a college degree overseas or had so many applicants that a B.A. became a standard screening filter for even the most menial jobs.
Didn't Billy Gates, Steve Jobs and Bezos didn't happen? What about Gogglers?
Even in the City of London, a place where everybody used to wear a neck tie and a suite, that is old advise. I have not worn a suit or necktie for 20 years, and when interviewing people for high tech positions the last thing I, and other hiring personnel, was thinking about was the candidate's attire.
As long as people are clean the topic isn't even talked about (in some localities is even illegal to impose a dress code).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
When I look around my office most colleagues are at least 35, if any group of people has been hit by the economic meltdown that is 20 somethings.
So if you as a 20 something have a job, don't piss of your older colleagues: they are in control of the situation with a vengeance, not only they are the bosses, but they are also getting most of the well paid jobs.
Younger people have an image problem, behaving like over developed teenagers won't endear them with the old timers holding the reigns of power.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Please stop including redundant info in your emails. It wastes everyone's time including yours. The sooner we drop the above formalities the better.
I don't care if someone has a salutation or signature on their email -- I can usually skip the bookends without too much trouble -- as much as I detest it when I get mails with subjects including the words: "message, memo, note, about, re:, from, email, etc." as in, "subject: a note from Bob Smith re: inventory". Really? It's from Bob Smith? How would I have known? It's a note? So, not a box of chocolate or a flaming bag of dog poop contained digitally therein? That's good, I suppose. "From"? "Re"? Don't get me started. The only necessary, non-redundant word in the entire subject: "inventory". And if I'm reading it on some tiny smartphone screen, it probably got cut off! Arg.
On the other hand, I have vowed to myself that no one will ever get a positive review, recommendation or reference from me if they repeatedly write "noone" or other similarly annoying and readily detectable misspellings. Don't they ever wonder what the squiggly line is all about? I think the lack of curiosity implied here is what really hurts my wiener the most. Same goes for anyone using txt-speak in a medium without a 160 (or fewer) character limit. And punctuation, caps and paragraphs exist for a reason. If it takes me twice as long as it should to figure out what someone means, I'll be spending that extra time thinking how much I hate them. And if it's cc'd to a whole department, that time loss and irritation multiplier gets . . . multiplied.
Whole companies aren't immune from the plague, either. I worked at a firm where the annual employee evaluation form had checkboxes in the "reason for salary increase" section that included the option: "Merrit". I think everyone would agree with me that that's a bit of a red flag.
And for the sake of disclosure, in case you hadn't already guessed it, the most frequent criticism of my communication style is "long-winded". Followed by "pompous jackass".
I am not a crackpot.
I hate phones. Phones are stupid. I can see using them as a last resort or if something is really important. But if you're just doing day to day communications they're a giant waste of time. Texts are faster, less disruptive, and frequently more productive.
In a text, people get to the point immediately. They don't spend five minutes with rambling irrelevancies and they don't spend another five minutes after the main point with more rambling irrelevancies.
Sometimes you need to get through those rambling irrelevancies just so people can say them and we can move beyond them. But being burdened with them in every single conversation is annoying.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Who is this "they" that shipped the jobs overseas. The unemployed older workers deemed too old to "fit" into what companies have become?
The biggest problem there wasn't generational, it was cultural in a perverted sense. MBAitis took over the corporate suite. Simultaneously, open trade was also promoted by the government through trade agreements, mind you the economy would have stagnated without it. The result though was that jobs moved to the least cost producer...that is if you counted cost like yer basic dickless MBA, i.e., cost is the means of production NOW. It didn't account for experience, the ability of the company to be a company 5 years from now, happy workers willing to go above and beyond the call because the company was willing to go above and beyond the call, etc.
In short, MBAitis means getting yours now because you are more important than any cogs in the wheel, your company means nothing to you because you'll find another, your company's product means nothing to you, pride of workmanship means nothing to you, you are merely a cost-benefit analysis abstracted into a shell of a person with a depth of near nothing.
After working with youngins and oldins for nearly 40 years, there isn't a generational problem (in general), but there is a management problem.
It also has an added bonus that you now have a written proof of the conversions in the email trail. So they cannot deny that they never said this or that. It is important in some sectors of the corporate world.
My parents were married at 18. I was born 7 months after the marriage.
bloody irresponsable I call it.
My relatives always said that the second and later kids take 9 months, but the first one can pop out any old time. :)
YOU YOUNG HOOLIGANS, WITH YOUR JUNGLE MUSIC!
(Yes, Mr. Filter, I know that using too many caps is like yelling.)
Baby Boomers are just fine, in fact I know several of their parents, even they can use Linux! I call them The Lucky Few". Gnome has mouse "drag and drop" threshold that keeps them from accidentally copying folders and files with their shaky hands...
I've volunteered to teach Computer Literacy for years at Community Centers -- since I was a teen. So, I've got quite a bit of experience as a Gen X'er to hand down to the Gen Y folks, and it's this:
Baby Boomers are the least of your worries. As Gen Y, you must be prepared to deal with Generation Z.
So, get your Z-Day kit in order -- It's like a hurricane kit, but with more shotguns.
Do what you know you have to do. Malls are not safe-houses. The freeways will be tasty flesh bottlenecks.
Check your friends and loved ones for bite marks. Remember, if she's got teeth marks, she's not your grandmother anymore.
Whatever you like - but if you wanted promotion by a boss in that generation . . .
Promotion?
That would imply not being laid off as soon as the chief executive's bonus isn't as big is it wanted.
That would imply being permanently employed, rather than a zero-hours temp who is motiviated to work by the "promise" of a permanent job.
It would also imply that the old farts are retiring, so people can move up.
Take a look at what's happening to employment-population ratios by age group. Employment of the over 60s is skyrocketing (i.e.: they're not retiring), the 50-plus group is holding its own, and as for the twenty- and thirty-somethings... it's not a happy story.
Promotion? Delusion. Promotion happens by getting a job somewhere else, if at all.
“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
Socrates
Yes, but most of the regulatory changes happened during the '80s and early '90s. A period during which the young folks didn't have a say.
If folks your age were too stupid to realize that free trade agreements were a bad idea or that the government has to actually tax people in order to pay for services, that's not really our fault. You guys will get to retire with most of the Social Security you were promised. And chances are substantially better that you'll have some sort of pension to go with it.
These days, pensions are rare, I can't remember the last time I even saw a job posting that even promised something more than a 401k match.
The whole, I got mine, now to hell with you attitude of older voters has done an incredible amount of damage to the ability of the young folks to make a decent living. We work harder than you folks did for less. And we get less and less each year as inflation continually outpaces wage improvements. And folks on social security get COLA even when the inflation is negative.
The problem with maximizing shareholder value is that it's typically done in such a superficial way. It's usually done based purely on market cap and share price. Which is to say, it rewards executives that can con a lot of people and punishes those that actually invest in the future of the company more than 6 months out.
Theoretically maximizing shareholder value should require focus on the other constituencies as well. It's just that dividend policies tend to not reward people for holding onto share for the long haul. And most investors don't hold onto their holdings long enough to get taxed as a capital gain rather than as ordinary income.
The thing is, none of the advice offered really means anything. It's all common fucking sense. If you have made it through some formal education system and entered the professional world, you sure as fuck better comprehend and understand these basic common sense things or you're going to fail. I mean, this is not rocket science. Understanding to write and communicate like a professional and to work hard and to stop being self-absorbed whiny social-networking bitches and get down to doing actual work is not on par with, say, learning how to conduct business with Japanese companies or something else, where there is an actual cultural difference that stretches well-beyond the common sense of one society or another.
I know plenty of people in their 20s who understand this. I know people in their late teens that understand this. If you're in either of those age groups and you don't "get it", then the right thing for you to do is go flip burgers and let these other young people take the jobs you were just going to be a warm-body in.
As an example, when we graduated college, our rite of passage into the accounting, law, consulting, engineering, and other similar professions was to work eighty hours a week
I'm a contractor. If you want me to work eighty hours a week, you will be paying me for eighty hours a week.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
You're old enough to be my dad, but I agree - I hate using the phone. For several reasons. The first is that in a highly technical environment, it is easier to follow along in an email. It is more precise. Second, in the technical world, you may have to deal with people who have very strong accents more than half of your time. I know it is a personal failure, but I have a very difficult time with exceedingly heavy accents of all kinds. Not to mention, a long of the clients I work with are in departments overseas, so I am trying to decipher what is being said through both a very heavy accent *and* an awful phone connection.
As for the email stuff... "mimic the other person's behavior" has less to do with "how to deal with the elderly people at least 30 or years old" and more to do with "how to be a slick salesman snake type person" or "how to be a sociopath". People care more about the content and efficacy of your email than fucking salutations (though, for fuck's sake, can we get back to inline quoting and commenting?!).
Most importantly of all is that Gen x/y are not "digital natives". This is an idiotic parroted line of bullshit that needs to die. This is no different than idiots who talk about how technologically inclined children are, because they can use an iPad by the age of three. Simply watching netflix on ten different devices doesn't make you a technological-fucking-anything. This goes not just for five year olds today, but also millennials, gen x/y and baby boomers. There are highly technical people in all groups (the most used elements of today's technology was developed by the oldest among us -- many so old that they're not even alive any more!) and highly ignorant people in all of the groups. I mean, shit, I know far more gen x'ers and gen y'ers who don't know a lick of code, couldn't build their own computer, couldn't avoid a virus on their machine for the life of them . . . than I know who *can* do those things.
Of course, I guess I'm not part of this discussion, anyway, because I was born in 1977 -- so I am too old for GEN Y (1980+) and too young for GEN X (up to 1975).
I have seen many many organizations when I was consulting. Some were startups filled with people generally of a narrow age range (that of the founders) and old organizations where the bulk of the upper management were boomers. But nearly every organization that I worked with had the same thing happening. They were confronting a wave of technology that was changing everything. The boomers were having serious problems with this; at best they might latch onto a BlackBerry and think that they were leaping into the 21st century. A typical example though was the 20 something salesman who could make technology sing. The result was that he could outsell a 60 something by a significant multiple. The 20 something would pull over to a cafe and copy and paste his way to a great proposal that was sitting on the client's desk 40 minutes after they had met. He might return to the office with a marked up proposal and conclude the deal by the end of the week. The boomer on the otherhand would be lucky to have the proposal ready by the end of the week. So after a few rounds of this the boomer would start to get antsy about the 20 something; so he would play the "Seniority" card. Start trying to change the rules saying that the 20 something can't be flinging proposals all over the place without giving him time to "review" them.
I can give a specific example where a single fresh out of university salesman outsold the other 11 salesman combined. He had been put in a crap area where they thought his average sale would be around $10,000-$30,000. So they put him on a small base salary with a 30% commission. His average sale(he made many) was actually around $500,000 and they refused to pay out the commission. They said it wouldn't be fair to the other salesmen and that he would get the same 6% that they did. Oddly enough he took this for a few years but left in the end.
So what I have seen over and over is a pattern of boomers who seem to think that highly qualified 20 somethings are arrogant whereas their mistreatment of them is not. The beauty of this is that the qualified 20 somethings usually figure out that they are being mistreated and move into organizations filled with other non-boomers who want talent not arrogance.
But the most amusing situation is when the reverse happens. When a young company filled with young people accidentally hires a boomer. Often the boomer has left something like the telephone company or a Nortel and immediately sets to work trying to make the dynamic young company into a remake of their old stodgy company. One of the first symptoms is the previously unused words "Org-chart".
But I have seen a few examples of where young and old worked together extremely well. The typical situation was that you have a boomer who has zero interest in the day to day running of the company and all they care about is money. So they go out and raise the money from their fellow (well capitalized) boomers and let the young people do what ever the hell it is that they do.
But this last if very little different in perception but entirely different in outcome when you have a well capitalized boomer try to run a company of 20 somethings. The usual symptom here is that the boomer is completely incapable of learning the nuances of what is going on. So you have a technology company that should be releasing a new product every 2 months but instead is bogged down by the boomer grinding development to a halt while he deals with another boomer marketing company that will debate for months which shade of blue the background should be.
Now the above experience covers technology. In non technology companies this is where the boomers' capital trumps all. This would be the boomer coffee shop owner trying to be hip and cool, hiring a bunch of hipsters, paying them minimum wage, and driving to wine parties in his brand new leased BMW. No communication problems their, you kiss his ass you find another job.
As someone in their thirties, my advice to those in their twenties would be to put the fucking phone down, log out of facebook, and try doing some work. It goes a fuck of a long way toward, you know, staying fucking employed.
The whole generation thing is BS anyways. I was born in 1959. I don't fit that generation or the one after it very well at all. I like computers, am quite computer literate, I play computer games (mostly MMOs), I read SF and Fantasy. I have a smart phone, I use the web in a variety of ways on a daily basis.
I get very tired of being lumped into a generation that somehow doesn't get it or something just because of my age.
Now, I don't sk8, I don't use text speech abbreviations, I can usually spell, I have owned various game systems but got rid of them because I don't like playing them as much as computer games, but I get tired of being treated like I am from the Middle Ages too :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Indeed. Anime will get you branded as a pedophile creep.
Keep it professional and put up soft core furry porn instead.
I thought such animal cruelty was banned :)
Like, you know, these articles always like to lay out GenY (and GenX) as like you know some horrible types of people. But dude/bro remember, unlike yo baby boomer ass self and your gramps. Companies don't show loyalty. They shouldn't expect it either.
And when baby boomer bro and grampa dude be using incomplete sentences and acting like dicks. But not providing any perks like they got (ie: 30 hours, no benefits, or 60 hour contract worker let go at any moment). Don't expect these younger generations to have loyalty back.
***
Sorry... I am not a part of Generation Y. But most people I know who are Generation Y work hard, with little complaint. They've gotten a bum ride. Bad economy, flipping burgers with a bachelors, and are being left with three generations of debt. Few ask for handouts. But many dislike infringement into their personal life. We made it all about the dollar. So their attitude is basically, "I don't trust you. I work. You pay. That's the end of it." And that's not their fault. That's the fault of baby boomers, and gramps.
And if they seem to not care about sending you a decent message. It might be because you're not paying them a decent wage.