With the Net Generation Grown Up and getting jobs, or trying to get jobs in the workplace, we have had a number of clients wondering about how to manage the new hires with their different values and behavior into their work place. How is the Net Generation going to impact your business--your employees, your customers and your product line? 

The challenges are many. Net Gener's seem to be texting to friends while they are in the middle of meetings; gaming in the middle of work; reading blogs and looking at Facebook--these are all happening around us and changing the way we live, work and play. And it doesn't seem to matter what type of business it is--from physician offices to pharmaceutical companies to customer care call centers. 

What is happening? How do we manage with a new generation entering the work force?Let’s see some of the implications this has for your business, particularly in terms of workplace customs. Whatever happened to the water cooler hang-out?

First, you are going to find that these Net Generation employees work differently. They collaborate differently. They value different things.

Second, these new hires seem have different motivations and don’t have the same concept of a career. They approach work as they played soccer—as a team. Team efforts are the basis of how they want to work.

Third, they have different work ethics, are collapsing old hierarchies and challenging prevailing assumptions about much of everything. They enjoy breaking up the day with things of importance to them—from an online search to a video game.Where do we see it?

• We saw it in the hospitals that we have worked with. Boomer physicians have a hard time dealing with the new physicians who simply have a completely different set of values and expectations and behavior patterns.  And in one physician practice the folks in the middle—the GenXer’s were the translators making sense of the different culture, values, beliefs and behavior of the young doctors who came to work to make a living and the boomer doctors who came looking to make a killing.
• Some of the same is happening in law firms that I speak to. My friend recently told me how she, as managing partner, hired a number of young lawyers and find that they want very different life styles. Their values are so fundamentally different from their predecessors that they are changing their work habits and billing practices. Value billing, for example, is replacing billable hours. That is very fundamental.
• One business owner in a workshop I was doing was completely frustrated that her last two hires didn’t work out at all. They just had such different work styles and attitudes that they couldn’t fit into the team she had—almost all of who were GenXer’s or Boomers.

There is no shortage of discussion going on. In the recent Chronicle of Higher Education there was a great article on why all of this generational nomenclature is wrong-that it really creates stereotypes out of individuals and we should forget the pressure to pigeon whole people into categories. Rather, we should really start to look at each individual, be they a student or an employee, or even the boss, and set a standard and hold them to it. It doesn't help that student if they text a professor at 3 in the morning and expect an answer--then. Or if that employee wants a different team type of activity in an environment that expects individual performance who shall change? Maybe both the employee and the culture.

At the foundation of it all is the question of how do we get our work, life and play done--what is the cultural values, beliefs and behavior that make us vital and vibrant? The Net Generation is going to change things but our things still need to get done. And those Boomers are still part of the defining cultural mores that set the stage for the Net Generation to perform.