The New Generation Doesn’t Mind Wearing Zit Patches in Public

Alternative title: Why Mandatory Return to Office Fulltime Will Push Away Talent.   

The new generation doesn’t mind wearing pimple patches to work.  They are a different breed.  When I started work, we were trained to blend in as much as possible – we were there to learn and be trained and do what we were told.  This new generation is different; they didn’t grow up being forced into the same professional norms as us.  They have a different view to work and their approach is different.  This doesn’t make them bad, or us right and them wrong, or vice versa.  We can sit here and debate how or why, but it doesn’t really matter.  We just need to recognize that it’s a fact and stop managing them how we used to manage – at least if we want them to be successful (and us, and our companies).    

It’s not 2010 anymore.  So stop managing people like it’s 2010.  Stop performance metrics evaluating them like it’s 2010.  We need to meet them where they are, and that means supporting them warts (pimples?) and all. 

Start with your work from home/office policy.  After COVID, we all changed the way we worked and as much as the older generation would like you to believe it was a failed experiment (culture not aligned, training not properly delivered, collaboration less effective), it’s simply not the case. 

The undercurrent of, “that’s what I did in my day, and it worked fine so no need to change things up”, is a weak argument.  On one hand we’re telling employees that our next best co-worker is going to be AI, but on the other we’re telling them they need to be at the office.  Why does one need to sit in an office to speak online to an autonomous agent?  If we are changing the ways of working, we need to do it holistically, not just in the ways that suit us because it’s easier to tell people they need to be in the office where we can see them.  If we can’t deliver cross-training online properly, that’s on us.  If we can’t evaluate their performance online properly, that’s on us.  If they don’t have a good sense of the corporate culture, that’s on us.  In one of my roles, I managed people I had never met in person because they were based in different countries.  Do you think I could turn to my manager and say, “well I can’t manage them b/c they aren’t showing up to the same office as me”?  Or “it’s not my fault they aren’t drinking the company Kool-Aid because I don’t ever get to see them in person”? Certainly not. 

We all have different expectations now, so rather than continuing to force old/antiquated habits and ways of working on the younger generations, it’s your turn to learn from them and find out how to get the best from them.  How we’ve viewed commitment and loyalty in the past has changed.  It’s up to us to change if we want them to be successful, not force them to bend to our will.  If you’re a people manager and you don’t think it’s in your best interest to see your employees succeed, or you think you can be successful without them being successful, I hope I never work for you. 

Plus, when I first entered the professional workforce, I don’t even think pimple patches were a thing.  Back then the adage was to put toothpaste on the zit to dry it out and certainly no one was going to work with a white dollop of minty-fresh on their face.  We’ve since learnt that was terrible advice, so let that be an analogy to help you realize that it’s good to embrace new things. 

Thoughts and opinions are purely my own, no ChatGPT here.  The above is just a brief conceptual summary, for more specific details, feel free to use ChatGPT.  I’d suggest a prompt along the lines of:

I am trying to get better at how I manage my younger work force.  Can you provide me with some tips and tricks which generally work for understanding their motivation and then getting the best out of them?  What do I need to look out for and how can I manage them best?