Workplace 2.0: Motivating and Managing Millennials

This article was published in November, but it’s still timely and over the past few months I’ve read a lot of blog posts on the web that remind me of it. So even though I wrote it, I figure it might be a good idea to dredge it up again for a whole new set of readers who weren’t subscribing to the blog back then.

What motivates young people isn’t the promise of a distant retirement check thirty or forty years after they’ve given all they have to a company that doesn’t let them have a piece of the pie. The first thing you need to keep in mind is the fundamental idea of ownership.

You don’t have to give up stock in your company, to give a young worker a feeling that s(he) is contributing to themselves, as well as the firm’s bottom line. But you do need to invest in their sense of desire to contribute in meaningful ways to institutions that matter. To them, coming to work is an exercise in mutual benefit.

Higher ed: Adapt or die

When the economy is down, folks might run back to school in droves, but the ones who’ve made it out enter the workplace with poor prospects and it immediately begs the question, “Why should I go to school at all?“

A recent Chronicle piece entitled What Colleges Should Learn From Newspapers projects a future that might seem distant now, but won’t be for long if the trends that we’ve begun to see continue.

Much of what’s happening was predicted in the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web burst onto the public consciousness. But people were also saying a lot of retrospectively ludicrous Internet-related things — e.g., that the business cycle had been abolished, and that vast profits could be made selling pet food online. Newspapers emerged from the dot-com bubble relatively unscathed and probably felt pretty good about their future. Now it turns out that the Internet bomb was real — it just had a 15-year fuse.
Universities were also subject to a lot of fevered speculation back then. In 1997 the legendary management consultant Peter Drucker said, “Thirty years from now, the big university campuses will be relics. … Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable.” Twelve years later, universities are bursting with customers, bigger, and (until recently) richer than ever before.

The arms race that leads to bigger, better palatial campuses with more amenities simply won’t do in an increasingly digital world. The still too overly reliant on paper, fee-increasing financial drain of the current higher ed marketplace simply won’t cut it for future generations who are already tuning out marketing efforts that wouldn’t look out of place a decade ago, despite the massive innovations and tools at our disposal.

What will the future of higher education look like? Will an iTunes-like application provides access to thousands of university courses from around the globe, allowing students to download a la carte courses and craft them into a customized degree? Will brand name degrees backed by credible institutions replace accreditation?

No matter where the industry heads, one thing is for sure. A lot of adaptation and change will be needed, if many of the schools in this country expect to survive into the next decade.