If you’re shaking your head in horror at what millennial workers will bring to the companies and organizations they will soon dominate, rest easy. There’s actually a lot of great habits that workers of all generations can learn from them.
Here are five great strategies we can incorporate from the generation born between 1977 and 2000.
1. Don’t look for a job; look for a life: Life as an either/or proposition between work and the rest of our time is over. Millennial workers want a seamless blend of the two, and they are managing to get it. Sometimes it involves working at home; sometimes it involves making use of modern technology that allows them to be in more than one place at a time. Either way, it involves a no-compromise attitude and a commitment to have it all in a way that no previous generation has dared to demand. It’s not about work/life balance: It’s about the integration of work and life.
What’s so great about this? Consider all the work/life push-and-pull stress it can eliminate.
2. Don’t be impressed by the person who looks busy: Think you’re getting a great investment from the worker with the cluttered desk and the bulging in-basket? The millennial boss will be unimpressed. Clearly, that worker is operating inefficiently. There must be some new app or technological process that could clear up that paper clutter. “Messy” doesn’t mean great work to the millennial; it means lacking the proper process. Next time you feel yourself drowning in paperwork, ask yourself if there might be an app for that.
3. Don’t worry whether your boss is good or bad; be your own boss: Millennials want to work for themselves, even when they are in a big corporation working for somebody else. They know what they have to do and the results they have to deliver, and they are “on it.” If we all had that attitude, think of how many “take this job and shove it” bar conversations we could eliminate.
4. Be a good team player: So much stress at work comes from the back-stabbing coworker who is determined to take you down a peg to magically move themselves up the ladder. Millennial workers don’t care about movement and ladders; they just want to get the project finished. So park your attitude in a field outside of town, and come in and join the team. Talk and you will be respected. Give all of your talent, and you will be finished faster. Be the best player, and be the first-picked player next time around. That’s how you win.
5. Change the work one project at a time: Millennial workers aren’t going to waste their days doing work for they can see no relevance. They want work that in some way makes the world a better place for somebody or something. If there is no point of relevance to a task, perhaps there is no point of doing it.
Can you even think in those terms when so many people desperately need jobs that they will do anything?
Apparently, you can. That way, when you find your work, it will be fulfilling. This strategy works best if you have a parent’s basement to live in between fulfilling projects. Obviously not everyone has this luxury, and some people’s biggest driving force for work, any kind of work, is money.
Not all of these points need to be taken literally. The objective is to take segments of how millennials think and work and try to incorporate it in the way you get work done. One key takeaway is that the new word relating to work is “balance.”
Roz Bahrami is a regular blogger for https://skyprep.com.
