Setting Priorities

It will probably come as no surprise that my husband and I discuss our jobs and work together. It allows us to consolidate our thoughts and opinions on issues at work, and provides an outsider's opinion and solutions that we would not otherwise have been able to obtain. One of the topics we have discussed on more than one occasion is managing millenials. Personally, I'm not really of the opinion that generations make for huge differences in work ethic and personality. I think a lot of the complaints older generations have about millenials can be chalked up to inexperience, rather than some generational psychology. I also think the ideas the younger generations embrace have more to do with culture change than generational differences. At the same time, there are things in the work environment that younger generations seem to have a harder time grasping or working with.

One thing I've noticed about millenials is that they have difficulty setting priorities. A lot of this is inexperience. Whenever you start a new job, you have to determine which work is more important. And it's not always easy. In a perfect world, priority levels would be based on the urgency or need for the finished product, but in reality, office politics, company policies and client demands can alter the order in which things get done. However, millenials have an obsession with priorities. When given a list of tasks with equal priority, they want their manager to tell them in exactly what order they should perform the tasks. It can cause a mutual frustration between manager and employee - the manager because they just want the work to get done, they don't care about the order; the employee because they feel a need to achieve and think that they cannot unless the tasks are done in the right order. On the other hand managers can get in trouble for setting priorities. Give your employee too many top priority tasks and they may think they're authorized for overtime. Give an employee a low priority task and it ends up never getting done. As my husband says, if it's low priority that means you can check facebook before doing it. It's actually the low priority tasks that get millenials in the most trouble, because they don't get done - there's always something more important to do. One of the things I've tried to explain to millenials I've coached is that the longer something sits on your desk the higher its priority becomes. If you have a project that's been on your desk for over a week, and you don't have anything due five minutes ago, that project is now your top priority.

Speaking of facebook, the internet and its use in the workplace is another area where millenials get a lot of criticism from older generations, and also have trouble adjusting. A lot of managers and older workers feel that surfing the web while at work is wrong. Personally, I'd be a hypocrite if I supported that opinion, because I've done plenty of web surfing on the job. I have always felt that as long as the work was being done in a timely manner, and took priority over personal web use, there was no harm in looking at facebook, or looking up airfare. As a manager, when I felt my employees were on the internet too much, I evaluated whether they were getting their work done correctly and on time. If so, and they still had a lot of time to surf, I simply gave them more work. If they weren't, I had a heart to heart with them about getting their work done and prioritizing that above internet usage. Not everyone gets that message, but most millenials understand that they are in the office to work, and alter their behavior. I think a lot of the conflict over web use during office hours has to do with a difference in how older generations and younger ones view pay. Most younger employees are non-exempt, even if their wages are stated in an annual format, they are still technically hourly employees, which leads employers to think that every minute for which they are being paid, they should be working. But millennials don't see their pay as hourly. Sure they come in from 9 to 5 and get paid extra if they work more than that, but really you pay them to do a set number of tasks in that time, and if they can accomplish those tasks and get some web surfing in, that's fine. This mindset also leads them to not understand why they can't leave at 4:30 some days if all their work is done. All this has led analysts to say that millenials are more project oriented and would prefer contract work to regular salaried employment. I'm not sure that's true, but I see the basis for that belief.

There are other mistakes that inexperienced employees, or maybe millenials make, but these two stand out as the most contentious and relevant. If both sides could see where the other is coming from, maybe a lot of office tension could be resolved.