Listen to and Follow the Podcast on iTunes and Spotify
Transcription
By the year 2020, it’s predicted that millennials will comprise around 50% of the workforce. In fact, it’s already the case in a number of young companies in the country.
SEO Hacker has a team that is composed of 90% millennials. That includes the management team that is all around 30 years old.
I have two guests for this episode. The first of which is my wife Apple. She’s been working with us for almost a year and has been enjoying handling our primarily millennial team.
The other guest is Kevin, my brother and the COO of SEO Hacker. He’s been working with me for around seven years and has helped build up the success of our company.
For this episode, we’ll be discussing mostly about Millennials along with many negative stereotypes that have been directed to them.
The first question for the podcast is simple: What is the problem with millennials?
A lot of managers believe that their millennial employees have a lot of character flaws, but they don’t necessarily know where these came from, or how they were developed.
Kevin states that the majority of the problems that we’ve come through with millennials would come from their reliance on their parents.
As a rather pampered millennial himself, Kevin is very familiar with this line of thinking. He also believes that the majority of our team, as well as some probationary teammates that chose not to stay, had this problem.
That they are very confident in their abilities, but their actions don’t showcase their true capabilities.
We have a lot of potential, we have a lot of knowledge available on the Internet, and we have a lot of things we can learn and grow to.
Majority of the time, we’re not there yet, but we think that we are.
And one of the most driving factors for us to develop this mindset is because our parents loved us so much as the way that we are, that we never really tried to excel.
We think “good enough” is good enough.
Kevin particularly shared that in his past, instead of striving for experience and learning to excel, he always settled with getting a mediocre grade. I’m not trying to fail, and I’m not trying to succeed either. That’s been his life.
A lot of studies show that Millennials are the way we are because baby boomers and Gen X-ers have groomed us in such a way that we are able to live our dreams, do what we want, and follow our heart.
I think that pretty much shaped the millennial generation.
That we are the generation that can do whatever we want.
This led to some people settling on just being okay and being complacent. This is because they want to live life like they did growing up. Unfortunately, that’s not how the world works.
Apple pointed out that some parents wanted their dreams to be lived out by their children, the Millennials.
Some of them didn’t want us to experience the difficult times that they had.
The parents of the Millennial generation wanted their children to enjoy the fruits of their labor—which in some cases turned into entitlement.
This then translates into the workplace. In order to effectively manage our millennial workforce, we also have to manage our parents. This is something that we’ve observed over the years of having a 90% millennial workforce.
As Kevin stated, we have always considered them in how we process events and how we communicate our messages. We make sure that whenever we provide perks and benefits, we consider what impression it will make to the parents as well.
A lot of parents have their hands around the lives of their millennial children. And so, whatever the parents decide will ultimately affect the career of the millennial worker.
It’s also worth pointing out that there are millennials who have found a way to rise above this influence, and you’ll see how independence facilitates growth in how they think, how they interact with people, and how they work.
Independence produces a different shift in their character.
