How Generation Y is Shaping the Future of Business

[Image: screenshot from Google search]

Millennials have been battered, bruised and buried under a barrage of online critiques and commentaries – especially when it comes to marketing and business – that exalt or vilify them. So, if you finally thought you saw an article that talks about another generation, sorry to disappoint you, but Generation Y is just another (earlier) term for millennials.

So, we'll use both terms interchangeably here and get down to business...

The impact of Generation Y on business is two-directional. Those born after 1981 are now America's largest generation, and helping to set worldwide trends and expectations for their age group. They're changing the workplace, but when they're not at work they're changing how businesses sell their products too! Between the two effects, Generation Y is steering business in new directions.

Confidence, Control and Courage

Millennials are frequently characterized as lazy and entitled – really, you get close to 100,000 results if you google it. Aren't they all messing around on their smartphones and eating Sushi in San Francisco, or living with their parents and racking up XP on World of Warcraft? Well, that's the myth. Along with it comes the tropes you'll find in movies like Joy – Generation Y not only don't know how to talk to the other gender or their boss; they can barely get dressed. They show up for work, and they're like, dude, whatever.

In fact, though, all of that may be a myth. It looks that way from the outside because millennials really do have different expectations of work. Just like Americans and Japanese both place premiums on politeness, but what's polite in Boston is shockingly rude in Kyoto and vice versa, so rather than idleness and self-obsession (or selfie-obsession), with Generation Y, it's really a culture clash. Generation Y might not be more selfish or self-obsessed. But they are self-motivated and self-confident. They're focused on fulfillment and they understand branding from years of experience even if they haven't yet codified that understanding.

Workplace Culture

Depression-era parents thought they were lucky to have a job, and their boomer kids were the biggest generation ever to go to college; they thought they were lucky to have a career. In the 90s Generation X slacked off to Blind Melon and REM, read their reflections in Douglas Copeland and resented the workplace as inimical to their ambitions. They made up for their lack of interest by a willingness to work long hours.

In the 2000s, by contrast, millennials identify with the workplace as few previous generations ever have. 67% want to run their own business, and 72% wouldn't even apply for a job with a company whose aims and values they didn't approve of. They're not willing to work long hours: they want to "do great work," in the words of millennial-inspiring boomer Steve Jobs. When they tell you how they'd do it they're not being rude – they're "managing up." They're contributing.

Millennials expect flatter corporate structures, leadership rather than management, and membership rather than employment.

That doesn't mean they want summer camp – but when they find traditional working structures stifling it's not because they'd rather be watching Vines of people falling off skateboards and you're making them clean their room. It's because they want to be getting something done, not sitting through a meeting and queueing for the photocopier. And they have a penchant for using (and creating, where they cannot find) simple, free digital tools for everything from routine to high-impact business tasks.

Compliance for a paycheck? No. Enthusiasm for a mission? Yes.

In that sense, Millennials have far more in common with baby boomers than either generation might like to admit – right down to their enthusiasm for vintage American workwear!

The Millennial Revolution

That generational shift in values had 60s parents baffled too. But those 60s kids went on to revolutionize business: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are just two examples of people whose exposure to the values of new cultural moments in the 60s were a part of their journey to success – a journey that turned the business world on its head. So we shouldn't discount the ability of millennials' generational values to blow the business world we're used to now out of the water either.

The extent of this change is easy to forget because we're living in it every day. The UK's Virgin Media Group have a Corporate Day, requiring staff to wear suits and ties, call each other Mr. and Mrs., eschew social media and personal phone calls.... "It was," says Virgin chief Richard Branson, "a horrible experience." Then why do it? To give Virgin staff a taste of "a taste of what a lot of the world is still run like," Branson explained. Much of the millennial revolution is already happening.

One of the biggest changes we'll see is the struggle companies have to engage millennial workers. On the face of it, millennials seem to want to have their cake and eat it: 96% aspire to be leaders in their careers, but 91% plan to leave their current role within the next three years. That costs employers money, and thus they're more reluctant to spend cash supporting and training millennials. But when that happens, millennials don't see a future with their current employer – which maybe is the real underlying reason why they're leaving. Viewed in that light it begins to feel like we're looking at a vicious circle.

But there is another way to look at it.

Employers have to alter their understanding of what they're offering millennials, as well as what millennials are offering them. Instead of insisting that millennials pay their dues before being promoted, employers need to look at ways to offer millennial workers advancement in terms of more responsibility and a wider working experience. Employers need to realize that millennial workers see contributing as their job, and experience – not wealth – as their primary goal. This is evident from the fact that 77% think the chance to work abroad would make them want to stay with a company; 50% would take a pay cut to work at a company whose values they agreed with.

Entrepreneurs, Early Adopters – and Consumers

At the same time, millennials are the most entrepreneurial generation ever. In an economy where businesses weren't hiring, millennials sat down at their laptops and invented businesses of their own.

How's that working out for them? 76% say they had a good 2014; by 2015, millennial-owned businesses were outperforming other businesses, with 50% better sales increases, and half planned to hire within the next three months.

Early adoption of technology and agile, unconventional funding models facilitate rapid growth; maybe that's where millennials get their fast-career expectations from. Startup culture is their baseline perception of business, and they don't see the same barriers between organizations that older workers do. They don't fit traditional company structures designed for organizations that sold steel or refrigerators or cars any more than they fit the organization structures invented for those activities.

Finally, we've got to think about the other end of the process: those of us who can remember not having an email address need to get our heads around the idea that millennials regard the marketing channels we're used to as antiquated. Email, sure; but millennials are driving a move to mobile that has profound implications for marketers. And Facebook? For people born after 1990, especially, it may as well be Myspace. The "kids" are all on Snapchat, Instagram, and Slack. Their interaction with social media is seamlessly integrated into their lives, and anyone who doesn't understand how those networks operate has no idea how to market to millennials.

In the end the rest of us (or you, I'm not telling) are going to need to build for them and sell to them – and to do that, we're going to need to hire them or get used to working for them.