Dee Davis (00:08)
Hello and welcome to Management Under Construction podcast. I'm Dee Davis.
Brad Wyant (00:14)
And I'm Brad Wyant and this morning we are going to talk about the millennial quote unquote problem. To sum up what we're going to try to approach in this podcast, I want to talk about how other generations and the business world at large have defined the millennial generation and our to the economy or place a role in the workplace and what people have said and what circumstances our generation is under, how those circumstances have
caused us to react to the economy in certain ways, how they influenced our participation in the workforce and what can be done to best serve this generation as leaders, how we can best bring them up to be the next generation of leaders, all those good things. So who are millennials? Millennials are people born between 1983 and 1994. And I am someone who was born in 1994. So I'm at the cusp of the millennial generation, right at the edge there.
Besides me, what other Millennials have you known and worked with and how would you generally describe them?
Dee Davis (01:19)
kids are millennials, for one. So I know a lot of millennials, but I've had the pleasure of working with a lot of millennials in the workplace as well. I would describe them mostly as smart, driven, intelligent people that I've really enjoyed working with. Yes, their generational view ⁓ of the world is very different than my generation.
Gen Xers or any other generation because every generation kind of has its own little thing and Millennials are no different, but they are absolutely worth nurturing, worth listening to and worth the investment and learning to understand a little bit better for all of us that are a little bit older and maybe even a little bit younger too.
Brad Wyant (02:06)
Yeah, my sister and I are very different generationally. I hope that she listens to the podcast and maybe we can get into that later. A lot of people have said a lot of things in the media, thought leaders have had a lot of books about millennial generation and its input in the economy. This is going to be sort of our take, our conversation with those people and their wildly, widely popular ideas. One of the things that comes up over and over again is bad parenting in form of participation trophies.
were told my generation that you can be anything you want. Our parents went into schools and said, my child deserves to be in the honor class, even though that we didn't necessarily passed into that class by testing. ⁓ it's been described as bulldozer parenting. idea that parents should level any impediments to their child's success, even if those impediments might've been there for a reason. And the effect of the participation trophies has been that we don't feel
better about the achievements that we do actually achieve when we come in first place. It's like, everyone else got a trophy, so who cares? And people who get the participation trophies don't feel good about getting them. They feel an overwhelming sense of being an imposter. Those parenting strategies, those strategies within our schools and other systems have been failing strategies. And along with all of this, technology has had a huge impact on our lives, on the way that we relate to each other. Studies
time and time again have shown that dopamine release is linked to social media use in quantities on par with alcohol, nicotine, and some drugs. So as opposed to the regulations that we've seen on things like nicotine and alcohol and obviously drugs, Instagram was made available to my generation widely with no regulation. We know times are hard. So here's the liquor cabinet is what one thought leader named Simon Sinek said is the effect of what
social media has had on our generation. want that instant dopamine hit. And a lot of people become addicted to their phones, addicted to social media, and it gets wrapped up into their lives in a pretty big way. The big scandal that didn't seem to really impede Metta, the parent owner of Instagram and Facebook, was that the people producing that software knew that. They knew what they were doing. They knew they were creating something addictive, and they sought to make it more addictive.
because they wanted to make more ad revenue because that's the point of any business. But it could be argued that regulation associated with the mental health of being on Instagram didn't keep up. And it wasn't until much, much later that parental controls were implemented for 13, 14 year olds getting onto the social media trains. And aside here about technology, one of the things I've noticed in my life is that my favorite things to do are hobbies that consume all of my attention.
driving old cars where you have to have both hands on the wheel or one hand on a gear shift, working on cars, cooking complicated things, riding mountain bikes, skiing down a mountain. Those things all require my full attention to keep myself safe while doing them. So I end up not looking at my phone for the whole time that I'm doing those things. And if I spend a day doing those activities and then I stay off my phone the rest of the day, I feel better.
I am happier, I'm much more at peace with my surroundings and what's going on in my life. But everyone has had access to phones. So Dee, what has been your experience with the introduction of smartphones and screen time?
Dee Davis (05:35)
I can tell you within my own family and just observing the public as much as I get to as I travel in airports, even the older generations, the Gen Xers, the people that are in retirement stage right now, they're addicted to their phones as any millennial or anybody else. When I go to an airport, all I see is a whole bunch of people going like this and it doesn't matter what age they are.
Whether they're a two year old little kid, the parents shoving a screen in front of them to keep them occupied while they're trying to get something done. It's the parents, it's the grandparents. It's terrible. I actually make a point of not doing that very often just to get away from the screen. Means I'm in front of my computer all day long for work. Really the last thing I want to do is flip through Instagram, Facebook, whatever. Do I do it? Yes, I do. But I.
limit the amount of time that I'm on it. I also want to go back to something that you said earlier about the participation trophies. By the way, this is your parents' fault. And you said it without saying it, but I'm going to call it out for what it is. We blame the kids for their participation trophy attitudes. We, the parents, are the ones that did that. Now I'm pointing to myself, but actually I was not that parent. I was not in favor of all that. When I coached, I did keep score in my kids. ⁓
It all participation drovies. I didn't believe in all that stuff. And I, know a lot of parents that, also don't believe in all that stuff, but the loudest people won the arguments for the most part, as is true in society always. And the helicopter parents, bulldozer parents, whatever you want to call them. The parents were in there screaming and yelling, my kid special, my kid deserves all these things. Look what we've done to our children. I've been so many studies done on this. When everything is handed to someone and they have not earned it.
There's no value in it and their self-worth diminishes.
Brad Wyant (07:33)
And there are always generational problems. It's not as if the millennial generation, the first generation to have issues. The greatest generation came back from, from world war II shell-shocked. That's a huge problem. There were latchkey kids that didn't have their parents in their life because they were the first generation to have two parent working households because that's the way the economy went. I'm not saying that millennials, the only generation to have a problem in their lives here. I'm just saying that this is the problem that they've been confronted with here for the sake of contextualizing.
Dee Davis (08:02)
Every generation's challenge is different, for sure. The world is constantly changing. Every time my husband and I talk about something that's going on and we say, well, you know, these kids, they blah, blah, blah. I say, you know what? I bet our parents and our grandparents said exactly the same thing. The challenges were different. The reasons that things were changing were different, but they're always changing. Always. So.
Every generation is going to have their challenges. The phones and technology and the internet in general has been a massive change to everything. I remember when the internet first happened. Okay. I'm going to date myself just a moment here. When the internet first came out, there was no Google. There was no search engines of any kind. I was on the forefront. actually knew programming back in the DOS days. I was one of those people that had one of the early computers and was writing
programs and things like that. And when the internet first hit, I was so excited to get my internet connection. There used to be software stores. You actually go buy the piece of software because there was no internet to download it on. You would go buy the program at the store and you'd put the floppy drive in. That was a floppy drive day, so I'm really, really dating myself here. There was an internet Yellow Pages. I'm not kidding.
It was an internet yellow pages. You bought the book and you had to look up the web address of whatever and type it in. That was the only way to get it. Cause there was no such thing as search engines yet. That's where we started. My daughter just turned 29. I might've been pregnant with her still. This is what was happening in the world 30 years ago. That wasn't that many years ago. We looking up web addresses to type in because there was no Google.
Brad Wyant (09:55)
Wow, very few years later we were looking at where to go on Google Maps. mean, it's amazing the pace that change has had with technology.
Dee Davis (10:06)
Keeping up with the rapid change and the revolutionary things like the internet have changed the face of our society like very few things do. So that changes the people in it and their behaviors and their challenges. So what kinds of instant gratification things does your generation do and see? you experienced in your lifetime,
Brad Wyant (10:31)
Well, a big one for me was that when I went off to college, Tinder exploded. Instead of doing that awkward thing of like being at a new place, going to a bar and trying to find a reason to talk to a girl, I just had this thing on my phone that had pictures girls had taken of themselves to put themselves out into the dating market. And that's faster, it's more efficient. You can explain more. There are tons of great arguments in favor of dating apps.
And not in favor of going to bars and being some version of creepy word. mean, there are great reasons for dating apps. I'm not saying that dating apps are worse than going out to the bar, but there was a step that I feel like I missed compared to the stories that people from different generations tell of like having to be charming on the spot for no reason other than the reason everyone went to the bar. That kind of in-person relationship on the spot making.
is something that maybe my generation has lost. Some people have argued. I also never had to wait for TV shows to come out. Like Game of Thrones, binged the whole thing. binged four seasons of TV the summer after my freshman year, before my summer job that year started for five or six days. I don't know what it was. It was embarrassing amount of time that I watched all that show. it used to be that a lot of people say our generation is so patient because their generations had to wait for every Thursday for the next episode of Friends or whatever.
And now my generation just binges the entire show. We wait and then we binge. ⁓
Dee Davis (12:03)
to get up and walk across the room to change the channel. So, you know, there wasn't even such a thing as a remote.
Brad Wyant (12:11)
Huh?
Dee Davis (12:12)
Now I just lay in bed and binge watch things. It's terrible.
Brad Wyant (12:16)
And you talk into the remote, you just say, play me this. It's like having a medieval squire. AutoSumXL. mean, the, the softwares we have at our disposal to achieve enormous quantifiable results quickly, as opposed to having to write things out by hand to do our work. I had AutoCAD. had softwares that would compute trigonometry and other complicated geometries for me instantly. Computer fluid dynamics.
I had CFD in college, which people spent entire PhDs generating and people before that spent entire PhDs in wind tunnels, predicting flight and other flows and velocities. So it certainly was a lot easier for me to achieve the same results that other people spend lifetimes achieving. A little bit of that is technological progress, doing what technological progress does. The steam engine in the industrial revolution got us
results a lot faster, but I think it would be easy to argue that the paradigm shift of software in terms of getting computational results faster was leaps and bounds beyond the slide wall to the pocket calculator. The impact of growing up with Microsoft Excel at my fingertips is pretty huge, I think.
Dee Davis (13:36)
think it leaves people wondering why do we spend so much time in school learning mathematics, especially in engineering degrees? My goodness, you have to take so many math classes. Do I really need to do that when I can get the results from a software program, from Microsoft Excel, from any number of sources? At my fingertips, why do I need to spend years and years and years learning how to do this stuff manually?
Brad Wyant (14:02)
Right, absolutely. I think that's an area I would argue there's room for improvement. think we still need to learn times tables. You should still know how to do math without a calculator, but not as much math. And we should know how to use the tools that are at our disposal to achieve results faster. The last math class I took in college was something called analytical mathematics. And it was all about how to program a computer to calculate something that could not be.
calculated by discrete methods where there was no finite equation that could be used to solve. And that math class was the hardest math class I ever took. was the last class I ever took. And I wish it hadn't been. I wish I had started with that kind of thing and learned more from there because that's what people are doing now. To be able to program a computer to solve problems that had never been solved before that no discrete equation exists for is big business these days, to put it short.
Dee Davis (14:58)
Yeah. And I, and I think my generation and older generations considering that we had to learn all this stuff before there was all this software to do it for us. I think we would say that there's a risk in bypassing these things because if we ever get into a situation where it's not available, let's just say we get attacked and
bombed and you don't have electricity, you don't have the internet, whatever. We find these situations now where kids at the lunch counter can't make change because they don't have basic math skills anymore. In high school or whatever, they're not getting the basic math skills. So they don't understand how to make change without a cash register giving them the answer. I think something's going to happen at some point in time where things are not available. We've even had small blips.
Like not too long ago, there was a prolonged power outage in Southern California. Something happened somewhere and there was like three, four days with no power. Well, nobody can do anything. Even with generators, people were having a hard time functioning because there was no internet. Even if they could temporarily bring power into their businesses and into their homes, there was no internet. Think about it. What would your life look like right now today? Zero internet availability. It's hard to get things done because we rely on it completely.
Brad Wyant (16:22)
And there's a balance to be struck, think, integrating into our life the technology which enables us to do so much more, which gives us the leverage to do things faster and better. And between that and knowing what that technology is based on, knowing how to do it the hard way if you had to. But I certainly think there's room for growth on both sides of that equation. There's room for us to convey the fundamentals better. People not being able to make change is crazy.
And there's room for us to improve the way in which we teach people to use softwares. But we can't have one and not the other. agree with you there. So the last thing that people identify about this millennial generation is that we want to have an impact, quote unquote, whatever an impact means. Instead of just, you know, sufficing with having a career that pays the bills, a lot of people my age talk about wanting to have a career that does something more than that, that has meaning, that serves the community, that
externally benefits the world in some measurable way. We want to change the world and we want to change it for the better. But a lot of the people that we go to work for don't understand that desire didn't grow up with that as part of their culture. Weren't so idealistic were more pragmatic. And I think there are pros and cons to each way of looking at a career. I certainly have gotten more pragmatic as time has gone in my career, but I'm glad for the idealistic tendencies that I do have. And we'll talk about those on a future cast and where those have led me. But
We often have a harder time relating to people outside our generation who are more pragmatic than us for that reason. We want to do things for a reason besides shareholder value. was the running joke throughout the NBA was like, boy, I'm just so passionate about creating shareholder value. That is what I get out of bed every morning to do. Nobody is that way. Everyone wants to earn a paycheck to bring home the bacon or vegan bacon to their families, but they don't.
just want that in my generation. also want to have it in parents.
Dee Davis (18:20)
Let me go back to your statement about wanting to have an impact. Do you think that wanting to have an impact and make a difference, do you see more millennials going towards nonprofit type of work because of
Brad Wyant (18:33)
I do. I see a lot of young people going towards nonprofit work. For the first time, MBA education is orienting itself through its curriculum to nonprofit. It used to be that most people taking an MBA were white men going to consulting or finance, but B, that they were all going to consulting or finance. Now you see a lot of people going to government, going to nonprofit, going to different areas of the economy with an MBA because
They still want to learn those skills, but they want to leverage them into a nonprofit career. They want to leverage them into an impact careers is the way those careers have been described.
Dee Davis (19:12)
think that's fantastic. It's working for a nonprofit. It's not a paying position for the most part. A lot of people don't want to do that work because the pay is maybe not so great, but if that's where your passion is, is to make a difference and it's driving more people into that, I think that's wonderful.
Brad Wyant (19:34)
I think it's great. And luckily this is the wealthiest country in the world. We have a lot of room in the economy for people to do nonprofit work. We have people that are generous enough to fund that kind of work. have programs that fund that kind of work and those programs have impact. I talked to people who came from the nonprofit sector to the MBA program. It's like, wow, you went into a place and you changed people's lives. That's awesome. That is so cool. I think 20 years ago, people would have poo-pooed somebody.
from nonprofit come into an MBA and be like, really, are you serious about being here? But now, my generation especially, we're like, that's rad. That is so cool. You have the chops to do things, to change the world, and we're glad you're here.
Dee Davis (20:14)
That's great. I'm very glad to hear that.
Brad Wyant (20:16)
Let's talk about how the workplace has responded to the millennial generation, some of the common stuff that gets set up there. And this may be true of every generation, but what is said about my generation a lot is that we're lazy and we don't want to work. We're always on our phones. We don't want to put in the same hours that generations before us did. We don't want to put in our dues the way they did. And like we said, to a certain extent, that probably has to do with progress with each generation being
more efficient than the last, having better command of technology, wanting things faster, better. But to a certain extent, that's also true. think that I certainly feel distracted when I shouldn't be. See the work that's put out in front of me sometimes and realize there's a better way to do this that exists out there. And I would much rather do that and take this much time to do it, take much less time and then go do other things that are going to have a bigger contribution to the overall program.
then do it this slow way. So I'll say, well, why can't we do it this way? And somebody will say, well, that's the way we've always done it, which is always a red flag. But sometimes the way we've always done it is the way that should be done. And having those kinds of intergenerational, separated by levels of experience, conversations can be tense. is that something that's happened with every generation that why can't we do it faster? Why can't we do it this way? Or do you think that's remarkably different with the millennial generation in your experience?
Dee Davis (21:40)
Every generation wants to push the envelope. And I think the way it's viewed by the older generations is, first of all, let's face it, nobody likes change, right? I don't care what age you are, nobody likes change. They want to do it their way. They've been doing it this way for a long time. Maybe they don't understand the technology the way you do. And so it's scary to them. These kids, they always want to change everything. Well, sometimes change is a good thing. And I can tell you without a doubt.
The millennials, the younger kids that I've worked with have taught me so much over the years, so much. And sometimes you got to check your ego and you just got to say, you know what? Let me listen. Let me pay attention. Let me try to understand what it is that they're conveying. Maybe I'll agree with it. Maybe I won't. Maybe we're going to try it and see how it works out. It's hard to change things in a big way. You don't really want to try something new on something big and impactful, but maybe we try it in a little way.
and see how it goes. Is it uncomfortable? Sure. But change is going to happen. And if you got to be, if you don't adapt, you're going to get run over. You're going to get pushed out of the marketplace. If you are firmly unwilling to listen, to adapt, to change. And I've seen it happen firsthand. I think I've mentioned in a previous cast, I worked with this project manager. He had to have been 70.
He was fantastic. He was hilarious. I loved working with him. I was probably my late thirties, early forties and he couldn't handle the technology changes. So they had to pair him up with somebody younger to do the technology things for him. So it took two people now to do the job of one person. Well, how long is that going to last? What company is going to let that go on for too long? And eventually he did retire, but you end up.
Making yourself irrelevant is what happens if you're unwilling to, to listen, to adapt my advice to the, to the older folks listening to this, that get a little grumpy when these topics come up is that it's going to happen with or without you up to you to decide whether you let yourself get pushed out of the marketplace or you adapt.
Brad Wyant (23:59)
And I'm guilty of that myself. I'm 31 now and there's somebody a lot younger than me at my current work who knows how to code visual basic, which is the coding language that records macros, which automatically performs certain tasks within Microsoft Excel for you. Repetitive, boring tasks that my generation and older are used to doing, but that this younger generation really knows how to program into Excel so they don't have to do it. So it happens automatically.
makes me grumpy. like, well, I don't know if I trust that. But then I realized the emotional reaction I'm having to that is, I might be irrelevant if I don't learn this. And then I buckled down and learned some of it. And I'm like, okay, now I'm back on the path I need to be being grumpy about things, not trusting them, learn to trust it. I used to have this great spin instructor who said when people complain on the spin bike about the RPMs being too high, about the rate at which you want to, you're being asked to pedal too high. like my legs are under control.
Get them under control. This is a you problem. You need to work to figure out how to be within this system because this is the new demand. This is what's better for you to be able to get more done in your day to stay relevant.
Dee Davis (25:08)
You bring up not wanting to learn something new. In conversation with my best friend, not that long ago, we were talking about some new technology that needed to be learned for her business. And she said, I'm in my forties. I don't want to learn anything new. And I think she verbalized something we all think way in the deep subconscious and in our heart sometimes is like, my God, something new I have to learn.
I feel like I've learned a hundred thousand new things this year. Technology is ever expanding and changing and is causing this gap of knowledge for all of us all the time. We are constantly having to learn new things just to keep up. And we talked about this in a previous cast about how that curve is just.
getting bigger and bigger all the time. I think not only do we have this natural resistance as human beings to grow and to change and to learn new things, but it's happening faster and faster all the time. So the people that are on the outer edge of it are feeling it even more.
Brad Wyant (26:16)
And that curve is vicious. mean, it used to be that software engineer was a job role that was going to exist for up until a year ago. Now we're looking at things like AI that can code for us. They're going to be a lot fewer software engineers. are, there will still be software engineers, but we won't need people to do the grunt work of software engineering the way we did in that part of the economy is probably going to shrink over the next 10 years. So another point that a lot of people make about
our generation is that we don't want to work as hard for the same pay. And I think that's absolutely true. I think that a lot of people I talk to are facing greater financial challenges and are seeing their economy differently than economies of the past. So I want to run through a couple of statistics that we're going to link in the show notes with our sources to explain what's going on. So the richest 1 % of Americans own 50 % of the U.S. stock and mutual funds.
And that's up from 40 % in 2002, according to Federal Reserve data. So where did that 10 % come from? Well, about half of it came from middle class. The middle class owns, compared to 1990 and 2023, 5 % less of the whole economy than they used to, of the stock market. It's not that the middle class is getting poorer. It's that there are fewer people that define
that meet the characteristics of being in the middle class. And there are more people owning more of the wealth at that richest 1%. Incomes have not kept up with housing costs. We see that inflation and the cost of housing are diverging rapidly, especially in some of the most popular, most profitable places to live and work. I am currently taking this cast from the San Francisco Bay Area, a notoriously expensive area.
30 years ago, somebody working on a government salary could afford to buy a modest house here. Now people are struggling to afford a one bedroom home here. A one bedroom home in San Francisco is a million plus. And that's a pretty small home. That's not the kind of home that we traditionally think of as a home that you could raise a family in. And there's no putting that genie back in that bottle because demand for these areas is not going to change. I know a lot of people.
moving away from the urban centers of America, which traditionally were where the great jobs were concentrated to Alabama, for example, that are moving there because they don't see a future where they get to own a house with a yard for the dog and great school districts for the kids in this area. It's just too darn expensive. college lost 10 times what it did 40 years ago. In 1980, it was a lot cheaper to go to college than it is now.
So the argument by some people that my generation doesn't want to work as hard for the same pay is in part, in my opinion, due to the fact that that same pay does not afford the same lifestyle that it once did in most urban centers, in the places where great jobs are bountiful. So what can be done about that? One of the things that's being done is that remote work is becoming much more popular. We're seeing people take their Silicon Valley
tech job or their HR job for a big fortune 500 company and move to a place where housing and the lifestyle that everyone wants is a lot cheaper. That seems to be working for a lot of people, but there are still problems with that that we'll talk about a little later on. do you think? Do you think that really the cost to have the life that Americans want to have has really gone up in a lot of these places? Or do you think that it's just that something else is impacting
our desire to work for the same pay.
Dee Davis (30:05)
Inflation is a real thing, 100%, especially in the last seven years or so. Its inflation has really impacted the cost of real estate and everything. I went to the grocery store a couple days ago. I got a few bags of groceries, nothing spectacular, $250. It's like, wow, it's a very real thing.
But I also think that the younger generations value their time in a way that my generation and older generations, we were brought up with a very different mindset about work. I have been working since I was 10. All I've ever wanted to do was work. That's not necessarily a good thing. My kids, I made them all get jobs at 16. I was so anxious to work that I went knocking on neighbors' doors until someone would hire me.
to clean out stalls at 10 because I wanted to work and that really hasn't changed. I'm a certified workaholic. I love to work. I get an inherent sense of accomplishment out of working and achieving and checking boxes. So that having an impact that you're talking about with your generation, I think for my generation and older generation, our idea of having an impact.
was different. It was going out and achieving financial success in a way that would allow us to buy a home for our family, raise a family until I got to the point where I had a good enough career path. I worked two and three jobs. That was not weird. People everywhere did that at that time. If you propose getting a second job to somebody in your generation or younger, they're going to look at you like you just grew a horn out of the middle of your head. The values are different.
Right. The values are different and it's hard. We had hardworking parents. Those were the values that were instilled in us. You go and you work and that's your sense of accomplishment. And it works for me. It doesn't work for my kids. They're very hard workers. Every single one of them, they go to work for you. They will work their buns off and they will do a great job. But when they're done at the end of the day, they're leaving and they're going to go live their lives. And my generation doesn't do that very well.
Brad Wyant (32:21)
And there's pros and cons to each of that. think that there's mental health issues with being a workaholic. I think there's mental health issues with separating your work from your identity and not wanting to define yourself by it. I don't think there's a right answer. think there's just that you have to understand these are these generational differences and how to work within them. Imposing one generation's values and expectations on another generation's expectations and values will not get you anywhere. Expecting a millennial to have the work ethic
of a baby boomer is not going to be effective as a management strategy. Understanding that millennial and what motivates them to work will enable you to get the same amount of work out of them as that baby boomer because they'll be able to use technology that will make them more productive because they'll see things that person didn't because they'll leverage their world to move mountains for you if you make it worth their while. So.
We're not saying one generation is better than the other here. We're saying you got to understand these differences and navigate within them. Find a way to motivate that young person to get the work that you need done within the time they're going to be there and enable them giving them what they want on the side. Perfect example of this, one of my bosses from my previous career said, all right, what do you really want to be doing? was like, boy, I noticed the guys on the site are.
freezing their butts off because the little UTV that we have to run around the site doesn't have any doors on it. I want to go see if I can find some cheap doors to put on that so that these guys aren't freezing their butts off because that'll make me feel good about the work that I do warm here inside the trailer in Colorado winter. He's like, all right, once you're done with the rest of your work, bring me a business case proposal for how much it's going to cost us to buy that door to enclose that space, get a little cabin heater.
and how much it's going to benefit us and how much more productive the team's going to be. I was like, all right, cool. That'll be fun. That'll be something that will be meaningful to you because it's going to improve working conditions for people on site. I'll get the rest of my work done faster because there's this carrot at the end of the rainbow for me to do that so that I can do the work that I want to do, which was outside of my purview as somebody who wasn't interested with putting me out of business plans. I was young in my career at time, but I did put that business plan together. We did end up getting the doors because
business plan and revealed that it wasn't worth it. And I talked to the guy that was on set there like, yeah, we're not in that thing often enough anyway. We don't care. I was like, okay. But to learn that, to do the work, to do the math, proving that was something that I was interested in. Let's talk a little bit about turnover in the millennial generation versus previous generations. think a lot of people remark on the fact that millennials don't stay in a job at a company for very long. leave more often because
We feel like we're not having an impact because we're not making the money that we could somewhere else because we have this desire to leap and go around. When I interviewed for a big marketing firm that's based in Ohio, one of the things that they promoted as part of the gig was that I was going to have the chance to rotate between departments very often when the company to be exposed to different challenges. think that's a sign of a big company.
which otherwise people might say is very old fashioned, understanding that my generation gets bored easily. We have a short attention span and that one of the contributing factors to people turning over in jobs quickly is that once we understand how to do something, we want to learn the next thing. We want to keep growing, staying with whatever we were tasked to do and constantly refining that doesn't keep us getting out of bed every morning the way that kept other generations. I think that's a great adaptation by that.
otherwise traditional, otherwise very old fashioned company to try to keep people around. And it certainly gave me what I wanted from their pitch, which was that I wasn't going to be stuck somewhere that might be outmoded tomorrow. think one thing that my generation grew up with that few others did was the recession of 2008. It was the greatest economic downturn to that point since the great depression of the 1920s and 30s.
We saw our parents let go from jobs they'd done their entire careers only to have to find a new career in the middle of their lives, which for many was so stressful that it impacted the family life. For others, it was so impactful that they never found another career that was as high achieving, that was as productive for them. My generation certainly doesn't want to be shoehorned into one thing. We want to be well-rounded. We want to be able to do anything that we might need to do.
if another downturn comes, if we are becoming outmoded, which with AI, we're all becoming outmoded. So Dee, what do you think of the turnover thing? In our industry, in construction, we see people jumping from one company to another because we were promised the moon one place and we didn't get it, or because another opportunity came up and we wanted to chase it. How do you think, generationally speaking, the difference between previous generations of this millennial group impacts turnover?
Dee Davis (37:32)
my generation and older were taught you go to work for a company, you stay there for a long, long time. There's this cooperative loyalty between company and employee. And it's to everyone's benefit that you stay there for 20, 30 years. My dad worked for the same water district for 42 years when he retired. My husband worked for the same mechanical contractor for 37 years before he retired. That's the way those generations were.
brought up and I was brought up with the same values. didn't get that same thing. I went to work for a company that I thought I was going to work for forever and ever amen. That company had a lot of changes that I did not like. And I ended up walking away and going and doing other things for other companies and then starting my own company. This is the best thing that could have possibly happened to me. So I think, especially now.
Companies do not have the loyalty to employees that they used to. And employees certainly are going to turn around and do the same thing. Hey, you're not going to be loyal to me. I'm not going to be loyal to you. I'm going to go chase the dollar, the opportunity, the growth and expansion over here. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It was frustrating to see as somebody who was working for this one company for a long time, I saw people leave and come back and not only were
Were they getting more pay? They were getting promotions after they would leave and come back. And I remember being mad about it and saying, Hey, I've been here the whole time. Why am I not getting that promotion and that pay raise? I've been loyal to you. You've not been, you're not being loyal to me. And I think that's what was happening is that companies just stopped being loyal. Did they do that? Did they do that because of the quarterly reports that we've talked about on other casts? You know, they're, chasing the quarterly.
numbers and not really paying attention to their employees so much, probably. Whatever the reasons were, the loyalty has stopped between employer and employee. And I think it's a shame to some extent because I think it's leaving the employees feeling undervalued and feeling a little adrift out there in the workforce. Like they could be let go anytime. I better have my ducks in a row all the time because I might get let go, especially right now.
We're September 1st, 2025, Labor Day everybody. Hopefully you're off and enjoying yourself today, but look at how many people have been laid off in the last year. I know people that have been laid off and been out of work for well over a year, in two years now. People don't feel secure in the workplace. It's not a good thing for the economy and for the workplace for people to feel this way, but I certainly understand why they feel this way.
Brad Wyant (40:22)
think another factor that this might be the hottest labor market in history. think that there's a greater number of professionally trained people seeking the same jobs than ever before. And that the moment somebody else comes along who might do a better job, everyone feels the pressure to put that person in that job. Better to be honest about the fact that this labor market is as hot as it is and that you should keep your ducks in a row at all times than it would be for companies to say things like, we're loyal to our employees.
take care of everybody here and then to not do that. So yet with the times tough though they are is the impact there I think and the millennial generation is picking up on that trend I think. So I want to try and tie this all off and say what really seems to be going on and other people have made this point but I think it's very true and it has certainly proved to true in my life. Greatest challenge that the millennial generation is facing in the workforce.
is that we're having a harder time forming meaningful relationships than any generation before us due to social media, due to the participation trophy phenomenon, due to the imposter syndrome that comes with that. And that is especially true of the intergenerational relationships between us and our mentors, the people that we're going to look to as we seek promotions, as we develop ourselves into people worthy of those promotions.
Relationships take a long time to form, but they're shattered in an instant. And my take is that they cannot be made over text or Microsoft Teams chats or Microsoft Teams calls where everyone has their camera off. And we ignore my generation, the importance of those relationships at our peril. So what do do about that? I think that the current generation of leaders and companies needs to take charge to help millennials overcome the barriers.
to become the next generation of leaders understand us understand where we're coming from and push us over the edge into our next race to evolution. We need to show millennials that forming deeper relationships is worth the work to form them even if they don't always work out even if you don't work for that person all of your life staying in touch with them learning from what they have to share will be better for you in the long run then.
Letting that relationship poof into nothing and moving on to the next. Sticking it out in a career, even at a company can end in having an impact. Even if you get promoted later than other people, if you understand the company's values, if you have deeper relationships, if you have a network within an organization, then that is something that's valuable. And by the way, worth talking about when it comes to talking about promotions, talking about bonuses, talking about raises. If you think that.
You're getting promoted slower than other people who just came into the organization wrongly. Talk to your managers about it. Be transparent. Say, I know more people in this company than that person. I get more done in this company than that person because of those relationships. Tout those things as meaningful and your managers may listen. If they don't, job hop. But if you're not making that argument, try making the argument first. The job hopping thing, what do companies do about that leading to higher salaries? If you can't afford.
to pay your people as much as somebody else does. How do you find a way to reward them? I don't know. I think the talent that proves itself in one place can then demand a higher salary someplace else, but taking the risk and saying, know we need to match that offer that they got from this place because they should stay here. Us losing them is going to cost us this much money. That's a really, really tough argument to make. It's a conjecture argument where you have to say,
I know that we're going to lose this person and that's going to save us this much money on not having to pay them. But here's all the value they were adding. It's a lot harder to make that argument, but it's worth making that argument. If your people are leaving to try to prove that them leaving is costing you money to try to prove that keeping them on would make you more money than losing them.
Dee Davis (44:23)
There's been study after study done that will help support that argument that, you know, losing somebody turnover costs you two to three times the person's salary, losing that productivity, having to replace it. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. There's lots of data out there to help support.
As long as the person's good, keeping the person in place, now keeping toxic people in place, that's a whole different thing. And there's lots of studies out there about that too. We've established that money is not everything. People leave companies for all kinds of reasons. And most of them have nothing to do with money. They have to do with poor leadership, poor culture, lack of advancement opportunities, lack of ongoing education. A lot of the things that you've hit on that are important to your generation.
are the exact reasons that people leave companies. It's more than just money. If you are a company that is like, hey, I can't be out there one-upping everybody all the time to hire the best talent. Well, there's always gonna be people that are gonna chase the almighty dollar, but for the most part, people are gonna care far more about culture and opportunity and feeling valued than they are going to care about the dollar.
There's other benefits that you can give people that don't necessarily result in pay and bonus structures and direct dollars out the door. And by the way, it's not pizza. It's funny because there is a section of people in the industry who are all about the food. There really are. There's one in every company. If you've ever worked in an office of any kind, I was at the main office for a while in between projects or something. And there was this one guy that would lurk.
Whenever there was lunch brought in, he'd be the first in line or if it was brought in for a specific meeting, he would lurk by the door until the meeting was over so he could swoop in and get leftovers. There are absolutely people that are completely food driven. And as long as you feed them, they will stay in the pharmaceutical marketplace. It is very, very common for companies to offer free food, free snacks, refrigerators full of free things every day. I worked at.
one pharmaceutical that they brought in fresh fruit every week, bowls and bowls of fresh fruit. They drawers and cabinets full of all kinds of snacks. People would eat it up, but those kinds of things can get pretty pricey, but they matter too. There's a big subset of people that stuff matters to you. Try taking it away and see what happens.
Brad Wyant (47:00)
think the point of a lot of those amenities, I'm in the Bay area. This is the greatest amenity workplace environment the world has ever created. My first job out of college, my first career project was a $40 million, a hundred thousand square foot building that was a TI. It was a retrofit of an existing building. didn't do hardly any structural work. We put in a gym, we put in massage rooms, we put in
an eight million dollar kitchen with gorgeous banquet serveries with quarter walnut veneer ceilings. And at the time it struck me that that was so much money just to create an office. What I missed at the time was they were trying to create spaces that people wanted to be so that people would form relationships there. The company's not buying the pizza to bribe you. The company's buying the pizza so that everyone will sit in the same room together and eat pizza and talk to each other.
and form relationships. Relationships at work make the work worth doing. Whenever people in the military get asked about why they took that hill, why they achieved the result they did in battle, they say it wasn't because the general commanded our infantry group to do so, was because I wanted to do right by the people next to me. And that is an innately human trait that spans generations, I think. If you're a millennial listening to this podcast, don't do it because your company
leader said to do it for the people next to you because those will be your peers the rest of your life. If you make them your peers for the rest of your life, if you keep them in your life, if you keep them around you, and if you're somebody who is debating whether or not to spring for the pizza, spring for whatever keeps your people building relationships with each other because that is what's worth the money, not the pizza itself.
Dee Davis (48:48)
Perhaps ask them what they want. When was the last time leadership came to you and said, Hey, Brad, what's it, what, would you like? Would you like an activity? Would you like lunch for the love of all that is holy choose something that forces people to put their phones down. Yeah. And look at each other in the eye and have a conversation. There's tons of school districts right now across the country that are going to a no phone policy at school. There's a reason for that.
I have friends that are teachers and I've talked to them at length and I'm the parent of a school shooting survivor. So I have a unique perspective here because I know that's always the very first argument that comes out is, well, I want my kids to have their phone because if anything happens, I want them to be able to call for help or contact me. ⁓ Your kids will be able to contact you. The teachers and the staff will be able to call for help. The overwhelming results from the teachers that have already implemented this in their classrooms is in
Engagement is up exponentially when the kids don't have their phones in front of them. So no matter how much you try to get them to put their phones down, they're going to be looking at their phones. They're talking to each other and they're forming friendships and relationships in the classroom like they never were before. Well, it's the same thing at the job site or in the office. Put the phone down, talk to the person next to you, form the relationship. That's internal networking.
We're going to do an episode on internal networking eventually. This is exactly what it is. The people that you are working directly with, that's internal networking and forming those relationships in these relationships can last decades, your entire career and turn into real friendships. And these people can help you later, whether you're working at the same company, you're working at different companies. These are the people that are going to talk about you in a positive way in rooms that you're not in.
and they're gonna help you throughout your career.
Brad Wyant (50:49)
Well put, yeah, think that's a good place to end it.
Dee Davis (50:52)
Thanks for joining us, everybody. We'll see you next time.
Watch us on YouTube at YellowstoneProfessionalEd.co. Don't forget to like, share, and follow us. Apple, Spotify, everywhere you listen to your podcasts. You can email us with questions, comments, and suggestions at heyd at managementunderconstruction.com. That's H-E-Y-D-E-E to get me or Brad at managementunderconstruction.com.
