"From an IT executive’s perspective, social networking isn’t about
giving the millenials a place to play, rather it’s about how to improve
the flow of information throughout an organization, using collective
knowledge to solve problems, respond to customer needs, or exploit new
business opportunities faster than ever before."

-Irwin Lazar, The Rise and Fall of the Millenials?, Enterprise 2.0 Blog, January 29, 2009

The New Workforce: Generation Next (Generation Y) in your Organization

4. Recommendations

Organizations are beginning to take note that a new generational cohort is entering the workforce. However, even articles and publications that discuss differences in contemporary work cohorts often fail to make a distinction between Generation X and Generation Next (see Kogan, 2001 for example). As the number of Nexters continue to grow and make their presence known, organizations are likely to realize the generational changes taking place. The earlier cited strategy + business article noted that "if consulted these young employees (Nexters) can be an enormous force for positive change and success in their companies. If ignored, they will doubtless spend their brain cycles on the job plotting how to make their own work lives, not their companies better". Those businesses that respond positively to the traits of the new generation will likely succeed. Those who do not positively respond to the Nexters, but instead continue with their pre-Nexter culture may face failure.

Zemke (2000, pp. 146 - 147) offers a number of suggestions with how best to manage Generation Next. Among some of those suggestions are:

1. Budget plenty of time for orienting. Learn about each new employee's personal goals and develop a strategy for interleaving those goals with job performance.
2. In areas where you have lots of members of Generation Next, consider expanding the size of your teams, and appoint a strong team leader.
3. Be sensitive to the potential for conflict when Xers and Nexters work side by side. The gap between those two generations may end up making the one between the Boomers and the Xers look tame.
4. Grow your training department, Nexters want to continue their education and develop their work skills.

5. Conclusion

The New Workforce: Generation Next (Generation Y) in your Organization

2. Generation Next and Contemporary Work Cohorts

Generation Next defined.

In Generations at Work: Managing the Clash of Veterans, Boomers, Xers, and Nexters in you Workplace, Zemke (2001, p. 19) observed four generational groups currently in the workforce. The identified generational groups (and the year of their births) are the Veterans (1922-1943), the Baby Boomers (1943-1960), Generation Xers (1960-1980), and the Generation Nexters (1980-2000). Researchers may disagree with the time periods for when each generation begins or ends, but are in general agreement that the each cohort are represented by differences in dominant work values and historical background.

Typical for every generation, the work expectations and the influences a generation has to an organization's culture is often a byproduct of their generation's unique upbringing and life experiences. The Nexters "grew up during prosperous times but find themselves entering a post-boom economy" (Robbins, 2005, p. 20). Nexters are considered to be one of the most coddled, well informed, open-minded to diversity, and technically enriched generation America has ever produced (Zemke et al., 2001, pp. 127-134). Dominant core values of Generation Next have been observed to by various authors as including confidence, achievement, optimism, civic duty, sociability and diversity.

Nexters, given their size in numbers, are expected to have a significant influence on U.S. culture. The cultural influence will be greater than the Xers and possibly even the Boomers.

The New Workforce: Generation Next (Generation Y) in your Organization

1. Introduction

Fifteen years ago a new employee with the federal government was in the office break room and found an interesting note on the union reading board. The note was in response to an intern questioning the union's emphasis of supporting management-union agreements favoring promotions based more on an employee's time in service and less on the employee's competency. In the note, the union representative rebuked the intern's comments and stated that "younger employees need to wait their turn and pay their dues because that's the way the world works".

The young employee's initial response was that neither management nor the union was likely to look for his best interest as well as he could do for himself. The rules he would follow and the pace he would advance his career would be of his own choosing. The employee's attitude of taking charge of your own career was pretty much typical of the generation entering the workforce in the late 1980s and 1990s; now identified as Generation X (Zemke, Raines, & Filipczak, 2000, p. 104). Fast-forward back to the present and the same not-so-young employee that was in the break room fifteen years earlier is finding himself no longer the "new employee".