Managing Gen-XX
‘Get bots’ or get out
By Anthony Germaine
ZI Moscow business writer
24 Sept 2050
You can pay a self-important consultant 20,000 Yen to tell you what I am about to tell you in this article for free.
Or you can read it, and trust me.
I’ve just spent two weeks of my holidays helping a friend who runs a small media consulting firm. He, like any business, deals on a daily basis with the challenge of finding staff to keep his business working.
He, like any business, is finding the biggest of those challenges is attracting and retaining Gen XXers, the generation born in the 2020s.
“By our generation’s standards they are lazy, lack personal responsibility, have outrageous demands around social networking and have an inflated sense of their own importance,” he says in frustration.
“But whenever I advertise a job, they form the bulk of the applicants, so I have to live with it.”
If this sounds familiar to you, let me share with you what he has learned:
It’s all about the bots.
Gen XXers have grown up completely reliant on bots to perform the most mundane of tasks. If you just emerged from the cave of a doomsday sect, you may not ‘get bots’ as the saying goes, but you need to understand that GenXXers not only ‘get bots’, they can’t live without them.
I’m not talking about robots – those handy little domestic devices that clean your home or trim your lawn – I’m talking about software bots.
GenXXers use bots for EVERYTHING, from ordering pizza, to getting a bank loan, arranging pickup and delivery of their dry cleaning, researching their university homework, or inviting friends to parties.
Why do anything yourself when there is a bot on MyValet that will do it for you?
“Gen XXers honestly think that sending a bunch of bots out into the Omninet and having to manage them, is real work,” my friend groans.
“If I ask my staff to do a media feed for a client about his new product, they plug the details of the assignment into a bot, and send it out into the world for quotes from a vendor. Then someone in Arkansas or Chechnya does the job for them and sends it back to them.
“Most of the time they do accept the cost of doing this should come from their own salary, but I recently had an employee who demanded a ‘bot allowance’ because his bot costs were starting to increase because of my ‘unreasonable’ demands!”
Personal ownership of work results is totally missing, and has to be managed as well, he said.
“When the bots come back with the result and I tell them it isn’t good enough, they shrug and say, “Blame the Bot dude.” They don’t see that it is their responsibility to deliver a quality result, not the bot’s.”
The answer, he says, is not to try to re-educate them, but to accept or even, god-forbid, embrace the way Gen-XXers use bots.
“I hired an in-house coder to take the open-source bots my staff were using, and reconfigure them to use higher quality sources or more reliable vendors,” he said.
“Results improved immediately.”
We want face-time and we want it now
The second struggle many Gen XX employers have, is with the Gen XXer’s need for personal face to face contact.
Most corporations transitioned to virtual offices and streaming conferencing twenty years ago, and the turn-of-the-century model of housing workers in office blocks like so many honey bees died an unlamented death.
But so did collective schooling, Eyeware(R) and home schooling with tactile simulation interfaces has meant that families now spend most of their working and leisure time together, in the home, interacting face to face.
“Gen XXers just entering the workforce, are demanding an environment which is just like home,” my friend tells me.
“They expect me to be like mum or dad – they want us to be located physically together, so that they can just wander in and out of my personal space whenever they have a question or want to chat.
“There was one persistent employee who kept complaining that my Party Line™ status was always ‘busy’ or ‘out’ and he was sick of waiting in line to talk with me.
“One day he just turned up at my house and was sitting there in at my dining table like one of my kids!”
After fighting it for a year, he gave in, and has rented a disused community centre downtown which he visits three days a week for two hours a day, so that any employees who want to interact with him personally can do so.
“I know I sound like my grandfather, but I actually have to commute to work!” he laughs. “And they love it. They get more energised by that two hours of face-time than they do with five hours of conferencing.”
The moral of this story is you may not understand them, you may blame their parents, society or the media for who they are, but if you can learn to see the world through their eyes, you may just be able to make them productive and happy employees.
Anthony Germaine signing out! (Note: this stream was not created by a bot. Or, was it?)
‘Get bots’ or get out
By Anthony Germaine
ZI Moscow business writer
24 Sept 2050
You can pay a self-important consultant 20,000 Yen to tell you what I am about to tell you in this article for free.
Or you can read it, and trust me.
I’ve just spent two weeks of my holidays helping a friend who runs a small media consulting firm. He, like any business, deals on a daily basis with the challenge of finding staff to keep his business working.
He, like any business, is finding the biggest of those challenges is attracting and retaining Gen XXers, the generation born in the 2020s.
“By our generation’s standards they are lazy, lack personal responsibility, have outrageous demands around social networking and have an inflated sense of their own importance,” he says in frustration.
“But whenever I advertise a job, they form the bulk of the applicants, so I have to live with it.”
Gen XX: Touchy-feely reborn
If this sounds familiar to you, let me share with you what he has learned:
It’s all about the bots.
Gen XXers have grown up completely reliant on bots to perform the most mundane of tasks. If you just emerged from the cave of a doomsday sect, you may not ‘get bots’ as the saying goes, but you need to understand that GenXXers not only ‘get bots’, they can’t live without them.
I’m not talking about robots – those handy little domestic devices that clean your home or trim your lawn – I’m talking about software bots.
GenXXers use bots for EVERYTHING, from ordering pizza, to getting a bank loan, arranging pickup and delivery of their dry cleaning, researching their university homework, or inviting friends to parties.
Why do anything yourself when there is a bot on MyValet that will do it for you?
“Gen XXers honestly think that sending a bunch of bots out into the Omninet and having to manage them, is real work,” my friend groans.
“If I ask my staff to do a media feed for a client about his new product, they plug the details of the assignment into a bot, and send it out into the world for quotes from a vendor. Then someone in Arkansas or Chechnya does the job for them and sends it back to them.
“Most of the time they do accept the cost of doing this should come from their own salary, but I recently had an employee who demanded a ‘bot allowance’ because his bot costs were starting to increase because of my ‘unreasonable’ demands!”
Personal ownership of work results is totally missing, and has to be managed as well, he said.
“When the bots come back with the result and I tell them it isn’t good enough, they shrug and say, “Blame the Bot dude.” They don’t see that it is their responsibility to deliver a quality result, not the bot’s.”
The answer, he says, is not to try to re-educate them, but to accept or even, god-forbid, embrace the way Gen-XXers use bots.
“I hired an in-house coder to take the open-source bots my staff were using, and reconfigure them to use higher quality sources or more reliable vendors,” he said.
“Results improved immediately.”
We want face-time and we want it now
The second struggle many Gen XX employers have, is with the Gen XXer’s need for personal face to face contact.
Most corporations transitioned to virtual offices and streaming conferencing twenty years ago, and the turn-of-the-century model of housing workers in office blocks like so many honey bees died an unlamented death.
But so did collective schooling, Eyeware(R) and home schooling with tactile simulation interfaces has meant that families now spend most of their working and leisure time together, in the home, interacting face to face.
“Gen XXers just entering the workforce, are demanding an environment which is just like home,” my friend tells me.
“They expect me to be like mum or dad – they want us to be located physically together, so that they can just wander in and out of my personal space whenever they have a question or want to chat.
“There was one persistent employee who kept complaining that my Party Line™ status was always ‘busy’ or ‘out’ and he was sick of waiting in line to talk with me.
“One day he just turned up at my house and was sitting there in at my dining table like one of my kids!”
After fighting it for a year, he gave in, and has rented a disused community centre downtown which he visits three days a week for two hours a day, so that any employees who want to interact with him personally can do so.
“I know I sound like my grandfather, but I actually have to commute to work!” he laughs. “And they love it. They get more energised by that two hours of face-time than they do with five hours of conferencing.”
The moral of this story is you may not understand them, you may blame their parents, society or the media for who they are, but if you can learn to see the world through their eyes, you may just be able to make them productive and happy employees.
Anthony Germaine signing out! (Note: this stream was not created by a bot. Or, was it?)
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