How Gen Y workers are ruining your workplace

Working with millennials is the worst

GEN Y workers are driving the rise of the work martyr, employees so driven that vacation days go unused in order to impress the boss — or simply to avoid being replaced.

VIDEO LINK : Discussion - Should schools and universities do more to prepare Gen Y for the workforce?

These workers believe complete dedication means little to no downtime, according to a report by Project: Time Off called “The Work Martyr’s Cautionary Tale: How the Millennial Experience Will Define America’s Vacation Culture.” It found 29 percent of the more than 5,600 US employees polled who work more than 35 hours a week fit into the category.
The New York Post reports.

But among millennials, that figure soars to 43 per cent, perhaps running counter to an ageing stereotype of young men and women who are lazy, inefficient or misguided on the job.

‘The workplace is no longer a physical space. It’s a state of mind.’
 - Katie Denis

“What we’ve found is it’s the exact counter to the popular cultural narrative that millennials are spoiled, entitled people,” said Katie Denis, senior director of the Washington-based organisation. “They actually feel like they have to prove their worth and their worth is proven through long hours.”

Graduating into a rough economy combined with an always-connected work environment has created the “perfect storm” for work martyrdom, particularly among the younger crowd, Ms Denis said. “It’s a really tough blend,” she told The Post. “The workplace is no longer a physical space. It’s a state of mind.”

THE WORK MARTYR

The report defined a work martyr as someone who believes it’s difficult to take a vacation because no else can do their work while they’re gone; who shows complete dedication to the company; who avoids being seen as replaceable; and who simply feels guilty for taking time off.

Workers who fit those criteria, according to the report, tend to be more likely to be female (52 per cent) and less likely to be married than their counterparts.

And among millennials, nearly half (48 per cent) believe it’s a good thing to be seen as a work martyr by their boss, significantly higher than the average among all age groups of 39 per cent.

“The reality is many millennials today have grown up with icons — Mark Zuckerberg and others — who have them believing that they, too, can be a billionaire, almost to the point of being unrealistic,” said Lynn Taylor, a workplace expert and author of Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant: How To Manage Childish Boss Behavior and Thrive in Your Job. Ms Taylor continued: “They think if they just put in the hard work that they have a better chance than any other generation to make it.”

She said not taking hard-earned vacation time has become something of a “badge of honour” on the job, yet another way to impress the boss and stand out among colleagues.
“There’s never been a more competitive time in corporate America,” Ms Taylor said. “I mean, I’ve heard it called the ‘v word.’ The irony is that the work-life balance is so critical to both the employee and employer over time.”

A TOXIC CULTURE

Thirty-nine per cent of respondents said they actually “want to be seen as a work martyr” by their boss, according to the survey released last month. But that flips entirely at home, where 86 per cent of people said it’s a bad thing to be seen as such by their family.
Contributing to that huge disparity, Ms Taylor said, are the growing number of loaded phrases deployed by supervisors that encourage work martyrdom, especially among those who already feel undervalued.

For example, when your boss says that he or she hopes you enjoyed your vacation, that may mean more than you think. Same thing goes for when a supervisor warns of a particularly busy time ahead, Taylor said.

“It’s unfortunate that too many companies in corporate America reward work martyrs, whether it’s blatant or subconscious,” Taylor continued. “There’s definitely a built-in reward system for those people.”

The work martyr mindset is actually “poisonous to company cultures,” according to the report, which urges those who fit that definition to reconsider their approach to taking time off.

“There’s a lot of silence in the workplace about vacation,” Denis said. “And the tone is set at the very top. But, generally, when people start to feel that they can’t take time off, that there’s no work-life balance, that’s when they start looking for other opportunities.”

This article first appeared on the New York Post : 'Working with millennials is the worst' and has been reproduced with permission.

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BOOK: CAREERS - The Path Less Travelled ..... embrace it!

Chaos and happenstance play as much of a part in careers as planning



Things both good and bad happen in our careers that we do not expect and have not planned for.



The idea that we plan our careers by thinking carefully and logically about what best suits us and then simply implementing our strategy is probably the most commonly held view of how our careers work. "Plastics" was the career advice given by a well-meaning family friend to Dustin Hoffman in the film The Graduate. The 1967 movie reflected the societal expectation that all graduates (and school leavers) should have a clear and firm plan for their lives. This expectation is pretty much still in place today, but should it be?



When we start looking closely at careers as real people genuinely experience them and not as some mythologised logical, linear and ever-upward trajectory, a different picture emerges. It turns out that careers are a lot less predictable than we imagine.



Think about your own career - is what you are doing now, what you believed you'd be doing when you were 15 or 21? The career path of most of us better resembles a drunken man's stagger through the world of work than a neat, calculated and straight line.



Careers are riddled with chance events. They are also subject to a complex array of different influences. Career decisions are not the result of cold, rational and logical thought processes, rather they emerge from a melting pot of personal history, circumstance, interests, experiences and more.



The rise of foreign economies has dispossessed many Australian workers. Whether it is using an iPad to order your meal in a restaurant, driving a Chinese car, or sending your dictation to India to be typed, the way we work, and hence our careers, are changing continually.



Here are some facts about careers and their trajectories:



■ At least 70 per cent of us will experience a chance event that significantly alters our career.



■ A US study found that over a period of 25 years about 60 per cent of us will change occupations and will report higher levels of well-being because of it.



■ A 2005 report from Monash University showed that after one year 29.7 per cent of enrolling students had changed courses, universities or had dropped out.



■ Federal government figures suggest 26.2 per cent of apprentices dropped out in 2009-2010.



We may think we make our own decisions about our careers but all of the following factors have been shown to be influential in our choices: where you live, your mother, your father, your siblings, politicians, the media, the web, your health and injuries.



What all this means is that shift happens in our careers continually. Sometimes it is the result of planning but often it is not. It means that "planning a career" is a less viable and useful thing to do. The appropriate reaction to this is not to become fatalistic or despairing but to recognise that our careers are the result of a complex, dynamic system of influences, people and the environment. 



Emerging from the complex interaction of all these different things will be a career pattern that has periods of stability but is subject to unpredictable and sometimes radical change.



The appropriate reaction to the complexity of our lives and careers is to place more emphasis on learning the skills of planning - how to make a plan, how to change a plan, how to copy someone else's plan and how and when to abandon a plan. It means developing the skills and mindset to embrace uncertainty and realising that unplanned events - both good and bad - are inevitable. 



This will help us to be resilient and persistent in the face of bad-chance events and ready to take advantage of any good-chance events that come our way.



Those who react to uncertainty by trying to control and predict everything by risking nothing are likely to be either confounded in their efforts by the forces of change and complexity, or they will limit their careers to such an extent they risk never fulfilling their potential. Successful people live their careers on the edge of chaos, a place where they are sufficiently open to change to engage, learn and transform.



The Chaos Theory of Careers describes the realities of working in the 21st century in a complex, changing and unpredictable world. To be successful in our careers now, we must be more open than ever to new possibilities, continual learning and the need creatively to reinvent or recast ourselves as circumstances permit or demand.



It is no longer necessary or even desirable in a world defined by change to have too firmly decided what we are going to do with our lives, because shift happens. Perhaps we should adopt the approach of Peter Ustinov who said, ironically, on his 75th birthday: "I really must decide what to do with my life."



The Chaos Theory of Careers: A New Perspective on Working in the 21st Century by Robert Pryor and Jim Bright is published by Routledge and is available from Palgrave Macmillan and Amazon.com.

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Employee Health and Getting the Work-Life Balance Right - Finally Business is Taking Notice

Below is a collection of current articles and information about how the workplace is changing (America-Australia). The pressure within a workplace to maintain long hours, increased workloads pressured with employer inflexibility creates a toxic workplace, and can cause imbalance as some workers are given more leeway over others based on discriminating factors ie: parents v's single or people without children, people who choose to live further away from work than those who live around the corner, or those who have been in the company longer who are on older employment more 'giving' agreements than the newer 'bare bones' work conditions. It is good to see that there are some employers now willing to give everyone equal access to more flexible working conditions. Also that governments are willing to lead the way for industry to take care of employee health and working conditions. All this contributes to a more positive and productive work environment where people want to be.

WORK-LIFE BALANCING

Years ago I interviewed for a job where the HR Director told me point blank, “this job will be your life. I have family too, but this job comes first.”

Thankfully, I didn’t get the job. Another colleague did, and less than a year later she was hospitalized for anxiety as a result of the stress associated with the position.

Fast forward 15 years, and not much has changed. When a class conflicted with a weekend office event and I chose the class (after giving management ample notice), my manager asked me if I was telling her that my life outside of work was more important than my job. Her question shocked me, and knowing that my answer was a resounding “YES”, fueled my determination to leave that environment as quickly as possible.

But it finally seems that some employers at least, are attempting to make room for life and work. In a recent NPR interview, Katie Sleep discussed why her company, List Innovative Solutions, lets employees telecommute and set their own hours. As a mom herself, accustomed to long commutes and managing the nightmare of transporting kids to and from school and daycare, Sleep was determined to offer better options for her own employees. Not only does she have an unheard of 95% retention rate, she finds that employees still get their work done.

The problem with 9-5, is that it’s based on an outdated model of work. Back in the day, the workforce was largely male, and women stayed at home. In 2010, most households are dual income, and women are increasingly becoming the breadwinners. Sadly today, most companies, particularly those run by bad bosses, don’t trust their employees to work independently and out of sight. Allowing for flexibility and freedom in the workday is almost seen as a sign of weakness. As a result, both productivity, and employee moral suffer.

Not every type of job is conducive to flex time and telecommuting, but many are, and unless companies begin doing a better job of helping their employees balance work and life, we’ll continue to see a U.S. workforce at odds with itself.
You can listen to the entire NPR story here.

Options On The Flex-Work Menu

For those who think working 9 to 5 is all takin' and no givin' (as Dolly Parton once sang), there are options for a more flexible work arrangement. Don’t know your flextime from your job sharing? Here's a quick primer.

Flexible Working Benefits Offered By Some U.S. Companies

	Organizations that offer the benefit	Plan to eliminate or cut the benefit within the next 12 months
Casual dress day	59%	2%
Flextime	54%	1%
Telecommuting (ad hoc)	45%	1%
Break arrangements	43%	2%
Mealtime flex	41%	1%
Compressed workweek	37%	1%
Casual dress every day	36%	2%
Telecommuting (part time)	34%	2%
Shift flexibility	21%	3%
Telecommuting (full time)	19%	1%
Job sharing	16%	2%
Seasonal scheduling	16%	1%
Alternating location	4%	9%
Results-only work environment	3%	0%

Source: Society For Human Resource Management

Flextime is when employees choose their own work hours within limits set by their employer — for example, working an 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. schedule instead of the traditional 9 to 5 schedule, or working extra hours one day to make up for shorter hours worked another day.

Telecommuting is when employees work outside the office — say, at home or on a laptop in a coffee shop. The benefit can be offered on a one-time or ad hoc basis — for example, when a commuting crisis such as a snowstorm keeps workers away from the office — or as a part-time benefit.

Job sharing is when two or more employees share one full-time job; the employees can either alternate weeks, split the workday in half or work 2 1/2 days each week, with one overlapping day.

Still another option is a compressed workweek, which means, for example, working a four-day/10-hour-day workweek or a three-day/12-hour-day workweek.

Companies can also give employees flexibility when it comes to when they take their breaks or meals. For example, mealtime flex allows employees who take shorter lunch breaks to leave early. Employers can also let workers adjust their schedules by picking up shifts or trading them with co-workers, an option called shift flexibility.

Seasonal scheduling is when employees work only a certain number of months a year. And some companies allow employees to work part of the year in one location and part of the year in another location.

Finally, a results-only work environment basically turns the traditional workplace model of work hours and meetings on its head. Under this arrangement, employees can work where and whenever they wish, as long as projects are completed on time.

Work-life experts caution that many flex-work programs appear more generous on paper than in practice and can be highly dependent on individual supervisors.
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EMPLOYEE HEALTH

In AUSTRALIA the Victorian Government has a a number of Work Health programme initiatives that employers can adopt into their workplace including the WorkSafe's employee health and wellbeing program.

WorkSafe launches major WorkHealth campaign
This Sunday February 7, a major WorkHealth advertising campaign will commence, including the first ever WorkHealth television commercial. Watch TV Commericals Here

Focusing on WorkHealth checks, the campaign will target both Victorian employers and employees and will demonstrate the benefits of participating in the program.

The campaign, which will run in metropolitan Melbourne and across regional Victoria, was launched by the Minister for Finance, WorkCover and TAC, the Hon. Tim Holding at Flight Centre head office today. Flight Centre have been identified as a leading employer, as they are currently rolling out a health and wellbeing program across 315 workplaces in Victoria.

The campaign comes on the back of new research conducted by WorkSafe on the first 56,000 workers who participated in WorkHealth checks. The data shows that an alarming 40% of workers who received a WorkHealth check had one or more results indicating a high or very high risk of developing type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease (CVD).

We have a number of health and wellbeing programs you can introduce in your workplace.

The healthy workplace check
will help you select the right program for your organisation

The free online resource kit
gives you the tools you need to start building a health and wellbeing program for your workplace

The workplace programs
give you access to programs to address specific health issues in your workplace

Also see The WORK HEALTH Programme

What is WorkHealth?

WorkHealth is brought to you by WorkSafe Victoria and is the Victorian Government’s response to improving the health of the Victorian community.

The initiative will see a significant investment of $200 million over the next 5 years in the health and safety of Victoria’s workers. WorkHealth aims to support Victorian workplaces in offering voluntary programs to promote worker health and well-being.

Workhealth Checks

Workhealth Checks are delivered one-on-one by a qualified health professional at your workplace. No matter the size of your organisation if you choose Corporate Bodies International as your provider the health checks are 100% free of charge. Click here for more information

Workplace Health Promotion Grants

Companies have the option to apply for a one off grant to deliver a health and well-being program that meets the needs of the workforce. There are a range of options available in regards to health promotion. Depending on the size of your organization you may be able to apply for up to $50 per employee towards the program cost. Click here for more information