The Great Incompetency Crisis is upon us.
But if you think your Millennial and Gen Z employees deserve all the blame for being entitled, impatient wanna be influencers...
๐ฌ๐ผ๐๐ฟ ๐๐ผ๐บ๐ฝ๐ฎ๐ป๐ ๐ช๐ถ๐น๐น ๐ฆ๐๐ณ๐ณ๐ฒ๐ฟ
The rules of employment have changed. 30 years ago, your most junior employees had no leverage.
It was hard for them to change jobs and there was a larger social stigma about living at home, so they HAD to be loyal.
These last 3 decades they've seen:
-Peers make millions in crypto or as influencers
-Behemoth employers fail
-The social acceptability of quitting increase
All while the media is telling them they are victims and TikTok is shortening their attention spans
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So what does this all mean for you? It means your foot soldiers don't need your money and they won't have much patience to wait. Complain all you want, but it won't change this reality.
To succeed in the modern economy, you will need to:
1. Cut down your dependency on mass cheap white collar American labor. Because it's not as cheap or reliable as well-sourced foreign alternatives.
2. Reconsider the value of elite degrees. They used to be a proxy for reliable white collar work. But judging by the Modern Ivy League curriculum, it might now be a better proxy for lawsuits.
3. Incentivize the white collar labor you do employ to stick around and perform This doesn't mean pay them more, though that's probably part of it. It means giving them meaning. And not the clichรฉ "meaning" as a substitute for wages that so many corporate consultants have been pitching for a decade.
Meaning can mean appealing to their narcissism. Making them feel like they are part of an exclusive club and that climbing the hierarchy of this club is itself worthy of a massive ego boost.
If you expect your employees to perform because you're the boss, you will fail.
If you expect your employees to perform because you pay them a salary, you will fail.
To succeed in business today, it requires what it has always required - attention to new trends and the awareness of the ever changing leverage points inside and outside your company.