Do Gen Y Workers Fit With a Championship Corporate Culture?

I just read a great article by Sarah Newton, who is an expert in Gen Y issues (You can find her at www.GenYGuide.com ). This article, which is worth the few minutes to read is titled “Has your company got a culture that is Young Worker Friendly?.”

This struck a particular chord with me for two reasons. One is that I used to work in an industry that relied heavily on high school and college students in the summer months, minor league baseball. This generation was responsible for, well, pretty much everything that impacted the bottom line performance of our business. They were probably 80% or more of our concessions operation, they were a significant portion of our merchandising sales during ballgames, they helped to park cars, and they provided the manpower to run our in-between innings contests that kept fans entertained as the teams changed sides.

Yet, despite the importance these team members played in our operation, we through them into the fire of the season with limited orientation, limited training and limited discussion on what the expected behaviors were for a team member. Then, we exacerbated the issue by not dealing with issues as they came up and we enabled behaviors, and it became a slippery slope. It was “only” a summer job we rationalized for these kids and we just accepted this as the way it had to be and plowed through the two-and-a-half months ’til they left us to go back to school.

I lived this insanity for 20 years in the business. It wasn’t until I got out and started working with other organizations that fell into the same trap that I woke up. An even deeper challenge is that companies do this not just with GenY workers but most all of their employees.

Few companies I’ve found, especially small to medium sized businesses, recruit, interview, hire, orient, train, set performance expectations, and manage to those expectations effectively. And, they wonder why performance is lacking in their company.

The ironic thing is that most business leaders in these situations spend more time putting out fires and confronting issues caused by the lack of systems for managing performance that if they just invested time on the front end doing the things they should be doing, it would be no less than an even trade-off in time, energy and financial resources, and I believe it would pay handsome dividends at the end of the year in lower employee turnover, higher productivity and lower raises/bonuses because people will not demand as much compensation when they are working in an enjoyable work environment.

Anyway, enough of my rant. Much thanks to Sarah Newton for getting me started this morning.

P.F. -FYI, for those of you out there uncertain about the value of Social Media and things like Twitter. I found Sarah through Twitter as I search “Company Culture” tweets and her tweet came through to me and I responded.