Baby Boomers or those born between 1946 and 1964 understood the value of work security and consequently prized a career that would lead to a job for life. Generation X, those born between 1965 and 1981 were the first to experience mass redundancies of the professional classes so learned to adapt to survive. While Gen Y, or as some prefer GenMe, work to live and want the time spent at work to be enjoyable and rewarding, with career advancement coming second.

With management still largely drawn from the Baby Boomers and Generation X it can be hard for those in management to motivate and incentivise staff of the Gen Y generation, who hold very different attitudes to corporate life. The following are some measures that can be utilised to engage and encourage staff who value transparency above growth, and equality and respect for talent over status and hierarchy:

·     Internal coaching programmes can assist a business to design performance measures that are personal to the individual employees within it. The first place to start is with the company’s vision and values and if the company is to succeed, there must be a willingness from the whole team to get behind these.

·     For a company establishing their vision it makes sense to give employees a voice in designing the direction in which the company wants to go. Employee engagement is more important now than at any time in the history of the workplace. But for companies which have an established identity it is the brand and the company’s values that may make all the difference to getting the right staff in the first place.

·     Once the staff are on board it is necessary to ensure that they work hard for the brand and adopt the vision of the organisation while they are at work. The long hours culture cuts no ice with Gen Y and the buzz phrase is ‘working smarter not harder’. A coaching approach to performance management with all individuals and not just key employees gives the GenMe group the respect they crave. By focusing on them as individuals they feel listened to and able to make a contribution to the direction the company is taking.

·     Flexible employee benefit schemes are another way to recognise that individuals value different rewards depending on their personal circumstances. Saving via pension contributions takes a back seat when you have a student loan to pay off. Single employees may resent all the incentives being thrown at parents, while little thought is given to rewards that will ease the pressures on their lives.

With individual goals set by staff themselves, albeit fitting into the corporate vision, and incentive schemes led by an understanding that not all staff want the same thing, one could take the view that HR will be working overtime and that too much focus is given to this narcissistic generation.

A sense of entitlement, without years of hard graft to justify it, may appear to define the latest generation but, right or wrong, employers need to tap into Gen Y’s need for respect and reward by giving them a degree of freedom and creativity in their work, and the workplace, to get the best out of the talent they can bring to it.