Is Gen Y Really All That Different

For a few years I’ve been reading up on and dealing with Gen Y. I’m probably a borderline Gen Y’er based on some definitions but have had a team that was half gen-yers in the past so I thought I’d share some thoughts. This article by Sarah Parez got me thinking about how Gen Y and specifically:

1. The changing dyanmics in the workplace
2. The potential change to marketing for B2B

In articles about management and hr related issues you’ll often hear of Gen Y refered to as Gen “Why”, Generation Me and so on. Sarah’s article talks about their need to “buy in” (the Gen Why reference should make more sense now) and also about work not being their whole world and social conciousness. I’ve had a few high performing Gen Y’ers work for me in the past and some of the stereotypes do apply. It did take a while to “connect”. The one thing I have noticed though is that the motivated Gen Y’ers aren’t very different from motivated Gen X’ers or those before them. They want to excel at work and will do what’s needed to excel, it’s never been just about the paycheck in past generations either. Those same people tend to want to excel outside of work, weather it’s marathon training, volunteer work the motivation is there. Just like managing any previous generation it’s about understanding the motivation of each individual weather it’s money, recognitiion, a challenging work people place, or a unique work environment. In that context I haven’t really found it that difficult to work with or manage gen y’ers, the motivations may be different but the fundamental premise of dealiing with the individuals needs seems to hold as it did in the past.

Sarah also had an interesting comment about “They Don’t Care About Your Ad, They Care What Their Friends Think”. That got me thinking about what this means for B2B. In the B2B context let’s equate collegues with friends to simplify things a little. Looking back at my 10 years in the workplace in tech I have seen lots of surveys that point out that collegue referal or information is a key factor in making a purchasing or technology selection decision, that seems to have been the case for a while so realying on this personal information isn’t new. What’s differnent today is that our network of collegues and ability to communicate with them has transformed with e-mail, LinkedIn, and on-line communities hosted by indviduals, vendors or compaines. The distrust of Ads Sarah mentioned should also be present the further away our friend or collegue is from us in our network. Today my network on myspace, facebook and other sites is a lot broader and looser so I know I’m less likely to trust all the people in my network. Consider a question you might ask on linked-in to your “network”, some of the responses are going to be from people pitching a product or service so you’ll judge them differently, if you see a response from somebody you know closely you’re probably going to pay more attention to it. What’s wonderful about online communites is the mechanisms in place to establish the credibility of members of your network. At the simplest level it’s not just about how many comments somebody has posted but also about how many people found them useful. As we see the credentials of people from different communities get shared through efforts like Open Social we’ll hopefully have more insight into members of our network so we can continue to expand the potential sources of turstworthy information from our increasing network of friends close and far. It’ll be fun to see how all this evolves.