EYE on GEN Y – Gen Y employees may have trouble with long-term projects.

Posted by on Feb 13, 2012 in Baby Boomers, Generation Y, Marketing, Millennials | 0 comments

Gen Y employees, aka Millennials, may need special help with long-term projects.  

Why?

Gen Y workers are unusually good at multi-tasking.  The history that occurs during the formative years of a generation creates its values, attitudes, and lifestyles – in this case, Ys’ ability to do several things at once, to handle many tasks at the same time.

Just picture the typical night of a young Gen Y employee (age 30 and under in 2012): talking on a speaker phone, with the TV on, music playing in the background, simultaneously surfing the Net, waiting for the pager to beep or an instant message to pop up, all the while still carrying on a phone conversation.

Growing up in the information age – using computers, at home and at school, and living in a 500-channel television universe – Gen Ys  receive an overwhelming amount of media messages everyday and they thrive on it.

However, when it comes to the job, one that requires long-term, in-depth research, there’s a down side to Gen Y’s multi-tasking love affair.  For example, if you assign to a Gen Y, a long, frustrating, intricate project that requires plodding along, trying to find and fit the pieces of the puzzle together, they’re not going to love it.

The solution is to break any long task into pieces.  Heap praise on this compliment-loving generation all along the way.  And, it doesn’t hurt to reward them at the end of each piece of the long task.