And just a few days ago, my daughter posted a picture of herself on Instagram where she was mucking out a horse’s stall. The 20 followers who had double-clicked my daughter’s picture to “like” it probably did not think much about how the stable smelled.
But I accidentally created a stink myself: I of all people failed to double-click the picture. I simply forgot. After all, I don’t spend as much time on social media as my daughter does. But I still felt like I’d been caught off-guard – not just as a father, but as a manager with direct reports.
You see, this little anecdote applies to the entire business world as well. Millennials grew up in the digital world with sites like Instagram and Facebook – even though recently the economic journal “Absatzwirtschaft” referred to the latter as “a place for old folks to meet.” This generation is used to getting “likes” — every day, if not every hour, and in real time. They can get frustrated very quickly when bosses my age do not give them this kind of ongoing positive feedback: managers may feel that simply refraining from criticism is praise enough in and of itself.
The rise in employees’ dissatisfaction with their supervisors is due first and foremost to a generational conflict, according to Johannes Prüller, the head of communications at the workplace-review portal Kununu. More and more digital natives, i.e. people born between 1980 and 2000, are streaming onto the labor market or perhaps even taking on their first management roles themselves. And certain things matter much more to them than they did to their parents and grandparents: receiving fast and direct feedback, self-determination, self-actualization and enjoying a certain independence, even at work.
So I’m going to do my part starting now:
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