Know who you are dealing with

1 Generation Y is generally considered to consist of graduates aged up to their mid-twenties. But it’s not their age that sets them apart, rather the conditions under which they grew up. Jez Cartwright, the chief executive of Performance Consultants, a coaching consultancy, says that members of Generation Y are different. “They think they’re owed a living. In the press they’ve read about dot-com millionaires; we live in a celebrity society. Kids aspire to that.”

According to Anne Riley, head of recruitment communications at Penna, the management consultancy: “They’ve always been in a work climate where the world is their oyster . . . They don’t see a career ladder; they see it as a network.”

You are only human

2 Ron Eldridge, a director at TalentDrain, the employee engagement consultancy, is not a fan of generation theory, in general. They might be more vocal if they’re not happy at work, but that’s just their youth, he said.

Don’t assume

3 Myth No 1: Generation Y are keen on corporate social responsibility. Penna has recently done a survey of age differences in the workplace. “Those issues didn’t come up at all in our survey [among Generation Y],” Ms Riley said, adding that they are considered much more important in the baby boomer generation. Myth No 2: “The perceived wisdom about Generation Y is that they move jobs all the time. That also didn’t come out of our survey. Most expect to stay in their current organisation for four to five years.”

Be wary of generational bias

4 Simon Walker, a director at Talentsmoothie, an organisational development consultancy, once worked with a large bank, where he found that a consistent complaint about the graduates was that they were “too laid back”. The supervisors resented the graduates turning up at 9am and leaving at 5.30pm. “They said: ‘When we were their age, we came in at 7am and left when it was dark.’ But when I asked if the graduates had achieved their targets, the supervisors said that they had exceeded them.” They were biased because of the difference in working hours.

There are no jobs for life

5 “This generation has finally got their head round that,” Mr Eldridge says. “They know that their organsation isn’t necessarily prepared to invest in them over a long time, so they think: ‘I am my own little business; I will develop my own skills.’ ”

Get your pay package right

6 “If they don’t think they’re being fairly rewarded, they’ll move on,” Ms Riley said. Mr Eldridge advises introducing flexible benefits to keep younger workers engaged – pensions and medical insurance are likely to be irrelevant to those aged 16 to 25. Better to allow them to buy more holiday to go snowboarding, he concluded.

The technology issue

7 There is danger and opportunity in the way that the younger generation weave their lives around technology, said Gary Curtis, the global co-lead of Accenture Technology Consulting, which has done a survey on “millennials” and technology. “People coming into the workforce have the most advanced personal technology in the history of mankind,” he said. The survey found that they tend to disregard their companies’ IT policies and use their own devices for work, eroding privacy and opening up companies to hackers and viruses. Mr Curtis said that communication of the policies could be done better in a lot of instances. But there is opportunity for companies to learn from this generation’s affinity with technology.

Let them get on with it

8 Younger workers’ networking work style means that they might not work in a methodical way. “For us who are used to following a linear plan, that chaos can be unsettling,” Mr Walker said, “but think about the outcome and let them get on with it. Trust them: they expect and want to have an impact from Day One.”

Be clear about your values

9 Mr Curtis said that the biggest challenge for managers was to understand their own corporate goals and to communicate them to the younger workers. Mr Eldridge said: “As opposed to saying: ‘You’re Generation Y, so we’re going to throw training and development at you’, it’s saying: ‘As an individual, whatever your generation, we’re going to make training and support available to you.’ ”

Give them what they want

10 But make them work for it. “They will ask for an Aston Martin,” Mr Cartwright said. “You can help them to achieve that, but they need to be shown in simple terms how to earn it.”

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