Gen C – Don’t live for work

Everyone likes to call them Gen Y – Why? as Y stands for nothing much – whereas GenC stands for the Community Generation. Anyway nitpicking over…

Teenagers and young adults – the so-called Generation Y – have watched with horror as their parents worked punishing hours in their scramble for money and status. Now, as this group go in search of jobs, they have different priorities. They care less about salaries, and more about flexible working, time to travel and a better work-life balance. And employers are having to meet their demands.

Is the opening para in They don’t live for work … they work to live

The previous generation saw work as a primary part of life,’ said Madalyn Brooks, HR director at Procter and Gamble. ‘When they left education, work was a dominant part of what they did and they were not looking for time out. Now we are seeing the growth of a different profile of candidate. They have grown up in relatively affluent families. They want to be sure that they can strike a balance between work and their personal life, and so the opportunity to take time off, to travel, to work for a company with a strong social responsibility record, these are all concerns that we increasingly hear when recruiting talent.’

A study in 2004 carried out by Common Purpose , an organisation that offers training for leaders and managers, found that those who were not getting satisfaction at work were hitting a ‘quarter-life crisis’. Searching for Something concluded that employers had to accommodate young workers’ wider ambitions or risk losing them by the age of 30.

‘We see young people that are searching for some sort of meaning in life and if you can’t align their values with the organisation they might leave,’ said Julia Middleton, the group’s chief executive. ‘I think life is cyclical – and there is a return to people searching for meaning and searching for values.’

Middleton agreed that economic prosperity had fuelled the values of Generation Y

The economic prosperity had fuelled the values of Generation Y is a key point here. A tale well told by Ronald Inglehart and Soshana Zuboff ( Why companies are from Mars and Customers are from Venus)

The values surveys of Ronald Inglehart indicate that the new postmaterialists demand true voice. Theirs is a psychological reformation that suggests some interesting parallels to the religious reformation of the sixteenth century. Today?s individual rejects organisational mediation seeking instead to have a direct impact upon matters that touch his or her life.

They shun traditional organisations in favour of unmediated relationship to the things they care about. The new individuals thus demand a high quality of direct participation and influence. They have skills to lead, confer and discuss, and they are not content to be good foot soldiers.

Young adults place a premium on the efficacy of small groups of people working together to effect change in tangible ways. And they showed strong preference for leadership ?that emphasises the collective participation of many individuals over the strong leadership of the few.?

This rejection of mediated influence also helps explain the growing interest in the concept of ?direct democracy? as a natural evolution of representative democracy.

The new individuals seek true voice; direct participation, unmediated influence and identity based community because they are comfortable using their own experience as a basis for making judgements.

Worth checking out is the World Values Survey

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Posted in: Culture, Generation C, Philosophy, Society, Trends

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