Millennials — Learning Their Truth About Lies
Millennials are no longer those new kids on the block. The earliest of their cohort are now middle-aged and many are leading valuable organizations in our community. They are having a profound effect on organizational culture. Much of these changes are making for a more creative and engaging workplace. However, there is one black cloud on the horizon.
As many know, I love to include thinking quizzes in my seminars/workshops. One format I often use is providing participants with a list of options on a particular subject (i.e.: Most Valuable Brand Names) and have participants try to pick the top three. One frequently used is ‘Personal Qualities Employers Want From Employees’ which includes a selection such as ‘Teachability’, ‘Curiosity’, ‘Dependability’, etc. Also on this list of choices is ‘Integrity’, and here is where I’m seeing a large generational divide.
Most research puts Integrity as #1 or #2 among the personal qualities employers want from staff. When I play this game with Baby Boomers and Generation X, the vast majority put this quality in their top 3. However, among Millennials ‘Integrity’ hardly gets a second look. It happened again yesterday with a group of college students/recent grads. They split up into teams of 2 and amongst the eight pairings, only two even mentioned Integrity anywhere among their top three.
According to The Ethics Resource Center, a nonprofit focused on elevating ethical standards in business, Millennials spot unethical behavior far easier than their older cohorts. In their most recent research, 49 percent of Millennials observed misconduct, the highest of all generations. Leading the list of behavior they observed were: personal business on company time, verbal abuse towards a co-worker and flagrant discrimination against a protected class.
The most interesting result of the research is the high percentage of Millennials who consider certain unethical behaviors in the workplace to be acceptable, such as: uploading personal photos on a company network, keeping copies of confidential documents, working less to compensate for cuts in benefits or pay, buying personal items using a company credit card, sharing negatively about their company on social media, taking a copy of work software home for personal use.
The explanations I heard from the most recent group of Millennials went something along this line: “Employers want to see results and don’t particularly care how you get them”. I don’t know if this is true of employers or not, but note that this is the way the next generation views the world. Their deep cynicism about the workplace contains serious implications for the US economy in the coming decades.
