New Challenge - Gen Y

How do you motivate a staff who:

1) would like to be spoon fed
2) is a gen-Y and thinks that you owe them a living even though they have no business experience or technical background
3) wants to have high remuneration package and yet do not want to put in effort to earn their worth.
4) do not want to learn things from end-to-end but would rather take the easy way out and ask if there's a short cut - (*without business knowledge or technical expertise, it's very difficult to bluff your way through la, dear... Even amateurs like me can see right through your shenanigans.)
5) demands to work on a 9-5 basis only but yet do not want to be viewed as merely a clerical. (want to be regarded as professional it seems)
6) thinks that you are too restrictive when you do not allow access to Facebook, MSN chats and webmail services. (Actually, I am very liberal. If you can justify your need for these services in relations to your job efficiency and effectiveness improvement, by all means, please apply and I shall approve accordingly).

It's pretty worrying to see that in this competitive world, where we not only need to compete with peers but also machines, there are still people out there who thinks that they do not need to work hard to prove their worth.

While I know that if you have such staff, you also would like to slap her to wake her up, we cannot do that. We have to handle the case professionally.

First of all, we would need to ensure she understands her job scope or job description. It is important to discuss the job expectations with your staff in relations to the KPI to ensure she does not lose focus in her job.

Also, ensure she understands her career path on why she needs to learn from end-to-end. (I have already tried this but beware that a sly and lazy person will try to wriggle themselves out of every hard work where necessary. Thus it's important to put in the right amounts of control checks like milestones or checkpoints).

Engage her in her responsibilities in explaining to her that the importance of on the job training and the importance of learning end to end. Every staff have to know that they are part of the complex wheels that turns the company. Every staff is a cog in the company's wheels and as they fit, mesh together and work with other cogs, they can generate enormous power to turn the wheels of the giant machine called company. Let them understand the goals of the company, the division, the section, the team, down to the level of individual team members. All of the goals and objectives must be in line with each other and each supporting its own and the higher level.

The real challenge is to instill the basic value and underlining self motivation into the individual. They must understand that despite how much potential they have in them, it doesn't count if they are not willing to do the difficult, mundane and repetitive daily tasks that are essential to success. Yes, it's difficult to instill humility in an individual, but that's the challenge we have to face today with the gen-Y.

The above 3 things are important factors to ensure you are covered in the old management style perpective especially if your HR is still of the baby boomers generation. One thing we need to understand about the gen-Y is that they have a higher comfort level whereby most graduates nowadays move back to stay with their parents and don't really have the urgency to carve a career path and working is not a survival need, affording them the luxury to choose a job that they truly enjoy. So motivating them with only money is not enough.

They want to have fun at work and if it's fun, money and time spent at the office is not really a problem. Gen-Ys enjoy challenges, are face paced and want to learn new stuffs all the time. So to motivate them, we have to make our work environment fun and a place to hang out, i.e. Google makes its office environment so comfortable that you can literally stay there without going home.

These are some basic traits of gen-Y so that you can identify whether the staff is just plain lazy or the complains are the true manifestation of a disguntled gen-Y.

Good luck and let's have some fun in managing the gen-Y. hahaha.

~ viewed from the eyes of a hybrid of gen-X and gen-Y.