Article:
“Millennials Don’t Want Work Life Balance,” by Jones Loflin
Tell us what you think!
Brandon: Welcome to the HR for Small Business podcast, this is Brandon Laws and I’m with returning guest Lacey Halpern. How are you?
Lacey: I’m great, thanks for having me!
Brandon: So you ran across an article on LinkedIn, and there may be an original source, but it’s called “Millennials Don’t Want Work Life Balance.”
Lacey: Yeah!
Brandon: Tell us about this article, and let’s kick it off from there.
Lacey: Yeah, it caught my eye. There’s also one that I saw that’s similar, I think it might even have the same title, similar kind of theme from the Washington Post recently. Oftentimes companies and leaders—everyone’s talking about generations. There’s lots of research out there about the different generations, and how—
Brandon: How they like to work.
Lacey: Right! And the baby boomers are going to be leaving the workforce and the big effect that’s going to have on businesses. And the largest portion of the workforce right now is Millennials, which is a generation that you and I are in. Everybody always talks about, Oh they want this work-life balance! If you want to keep your Millennials you’ve gotta give them work-life balance! And I talk about that! So I saw this article and thought, This is going to be interesting.
Brandon: So first, “work-life balance”—that term has been used and thrown around quite a bit. But maybe just define it for the listener. What is work-life balance in terms of how people use it today?
Lacey: Well, that’s what’s interesting, because in my mind, even before reading this article, it’s always been providing employees with harmony or the ability to have a life outside of work, being respectful of the life outside of work, having their—in my mind, before I read this, it was about there being divide. So it’s like you come to work but you have this freedom to have flexibility so you can enjoy all the things that your personal life has to offer. That’s what was in my mind, and then in reading this article, it really shifted it. Maybe it’s semantics, I don’t know, I really feel this is a different way of thinking and it resonated with me because, being in this generation, this is absolutely—like the article said—what I feel I would say to my manager or what my friends in the same demographic might say to their managers about what they want.
Brandon: To me, when I hear “balance,” it means that you’re multitasking—basically juggling both at once and making sure you’re balancing it so it doesn’t fall.
Lacey: And they’re equal!
Brandon: And they’re equal. When I think of how it should be, it’s either like you’re 100% over here or you’re 100% over here. But it doesn’t mean you can’t do those things all in the same day or all in the same hour. You just have to be in or out and choose. It’s probably more of like a blend, is probably how this article articulates it.
Lacey: That’s exactly how this article articulates it, yeah. And that what Millennials are looking for, I know that we’re going to dive into some of the things it talks about, but they want there to be this blend and it just talks about flexibility in a totally different way. So I’m excited to get to share with the listeners maybe a different way of thinking about this if there’s folks listening who are a Millennial and this resonate with you, it gives you some tools to be able to talk to your organization about how you can improve the workplace. Or, if you’re a leader or business owner, how can we appeal to attracting talent and doing workforce planning to ensure that we’re attracting Millennials, how do we make sure that our workforce is set up for that.
Brandon: I know we put a lot of emphasis on Millennials. We’re in that group, we’re high maintenance to a certain extent. But there are employers trying to attract us, and it’s a huge group, right? The things in this article are things that experts say that Millennials want—I think everybody from every generation wants it.
Lacey: It’s just different to a certain extent. For example, when we think about personal time—if we’re talking about a Millennial, what the research would say is that Millennials want—and the article really speaks to this—to be able to shift between work and personal time more fluidly. The author of this gives a really good example of watching his daughter, who’s home from school, from break in college, and she comes home and he sees her working at her computer doing homework or studying, whatever that is, and shifting back and forth between that and instant messaging and being on Facebook with friends and taking a phone call and back to work. Just going back and forth, back and forth.
Brandon: Wow!
Lacey: And what I think is interesting is that’s absolutely how I operate, and what the research would say is that Baby Boomers and maybe even some Gen-X folks really appreciate more of that dedicated personal time. So he even says, You know, I would rather have a big chunk of time to spend with my family—to be focused on work, get my 
work done, and then be able to leave and shut it off.
Brandon: So an example of this would be, I walk in the door at home, grab my phone, I put it away, and then I have dinner and then have conversation, play with my kids, and then when I’m done with that maybe I set aside 45 minutes to check email or do some work-related activities. And then I’m 100% dedicated to that activity at that moment. Is that what you’re saying?
Lacey: Yeah, and I think part of it is technology, it’s social media.
Brandon: It’s crazy.
Lacey: It’s all of the stuff that we’re connected to and it’s at your fingertips. So I can take my laptop home and I can, I don’t know what it’s called because I’m not a tech person, but I can go right into my desktop so it’s like I’m sitting at the office.
Brandon: Your VPN or something?
Lacey: Yeah, and like I’m sitting right at the office. My cellphone has my work calendar so I can schedule appointments, it’s got all my work contacts in it, and it’s also got all of my personal stuff on it too, right? It’s inner-connected. So in the same phone that I can easily see how many work emails I have, I could go on Facebook and check out things that are going on on Facebook or I could update my LinkedIn profile. So everything’s just so connected that I think that this generation, we’ve been exposed to this. This is how things have been since I’ve been working in the professional field in the last 10 years, this is how it’s always been. I don’t know how it would be any different, I can’t imagine.
Brandon: Do you like it?
Lacey: I do! I like the ability to, if I need to take a personal phone call at work, I can do that. I like that I can get a text message from the person that’s watching my daughter and know what’s going on with her in the middle of the day and it doesn’t have to be disconnected. So I like that ability for it to be flexible. I can certainly appreciate heads down time or if I’m on vacation or it’s the weekend—I want that time to be dedicated. I think there’s a place for both.
Brandon: But in the case of your phone, it’s your personal, so if you’re on vacation, how do you tune out?
Lacey: It’s hard.
Brandon: Do you remove it from your inbox?
Lacey: You could. There’s probably folks who do that. For me right now, I’m carrying two phones and even my work phone has personal stuff on it.
Brandon: I did that for a while, it’s not worth doing. I’ll tell you that. [Laughing]
Lacey: Yeah, I’m definitely going to be moving away from that because I just don’t like carrying two around. But I think there’s ways to set healthy boundaries and what the research in this article is saying is that within the next ten years, the Millennials are going to make up 75% of our workforce.
Brandon: That’s crazy.
Lacey: It’s crazy, yeah! So we’ve got to find a way to, when we can, look at our work environments to support their needs. And so, having schedules that are so rigid where—the first thing that comes to mind is I think of maybe a manufacturing facility where folks are maybe working on a production line and they take a break when a bell goes off. And so that mindset is certainly not current with what maybe the current generation of workers—these Millennials—might want. Because that is completely separate, and there isn’t much flexibility. And there are companies that even write policies that would say that if you’re on your phone in between, if you’re connected in between, that you could be disciplined.
Brandon: Absolutely right. At a college job I worked in that environment where you’re not allowed to have your cell phone out anywhere, otherwise they’re going to write you up.
Lacey: Yeah, me too. There are some that are so strict that you can’t even have it on you in your pocket, it has to be in a locker.
Brandon: But, to your point, when that bell rings or you’re clocking out, you’re just totally checked out from work. And I think with the way Millennials are and I think just people in general, for me, money’s a motivator, but actually being passionate about what I do is more of a motivator for me. So actually blending in my work with my life is actually part of who I am. I wouldn’t want that bell to ring and then to just totally check out or even on vacation not to think about work at all. I love business, and I love marketing, and I love what I do so much that I wouldn’t want to stop thinking about it, honestly.
Lacey: Me neither. I don’t know that I would know how to completely shut it off, I certainly haven’t figured it out. And that’s another good point that you make—Millennials are really focused on making a difference.
Brandon: That’s a great way to articulate it.
Lacey: And having their work really apply to the greater good, having their work be connected to some great vision, and maybe it’s the company’s mission, for instance, or something like that. So this article, and maybe we can talk through some of these recommendations about what he’s suggesting a company focus on when you’re really trying to create some people practices within your organization. So one of the things he talks about is this flexibility, this idea of what is flexibility. And I think, previously to reading this article, my mind would go to: there would be divide. And I’m really thinking about it differently in that there would be flexibility to give employees time to get away, even if it’s 
just small periods of time. Shorter, more frequent breaks would be more appreciated.
Brandon: Take a nap in the middle of the day.
Lacey: Right! I have clients that have areas for employees to take naps.
Brandon: I think that’s great.
Lacey: They’re in an environment where they work really long hours managing events and they need a place to relax. Providing employees with an environment where they can do fun stuff with their coworkers—so if you’ve got, for instance, a pool table in your facility or a workout room in your facility where they can go for 20 minutes and do something. Or maybe you don’t have the means to do that but everybody has access to computers in your workplace, so maybe what you do is you project onto a screen. You’ve got employees who are interested in working out and maybe you want to go on YouTube and have employees get together and do one of the videos on YouTube together. Even little ways like that, finding little ways for people to sneak away just for short periods of time.
Brandon: It’s interesting that you say this, because in my mind when I hear you talk I think, oh wow, so if you blend in the flexibility throughout the day to do those things, it seems like it would actually extend the workday.
Lacey: It could!
Brandon: I think that could be an okay thing! You’ve heard the 4-hour work week stuff, there’s a book written on that, and I think people think, If we have a shortened work week we’re more productive! I would argue the opposite, I would argue what you’re saying actually, in that if you blend in these flexible, personal time off or whatever, just away from work, you could be more productive because you’re refreshed, you’re not thinking about work all the time, you’re getting up from your desk, you’re getting away. What do you think about that?
Lacey: I think that’s totally possible! I think it would certainly depend on the people that you have and the type of work that you’re doing. You know, you may have folks who can’t work a 9 to 7 day because they have daycare constraints or things like that.
Brandon: Yeah, absolutely.
Lacey: So that’s another thing too. And in the article that the Washington Post put out, there’s some data in there about how 80% of Millennials that are working are dual income families. So both people are out of the home working, and the baby boomer generation is about 46%.
Brandon: Wow.
Lacey: Right? So there’s an opportunity for there to be a gap in terms of empathy. So if I’m a leader, and I’m just going to use as an example a Baby Boomer leader in an organization, and my partner or spouse is home, do I have the same empathy for my employees who are dual income families, because that’s what it takes right now to maintain a household in some cases. And there are struggles that come with both people working and I know there are struggles the other way, too.
Brandon: There are, I’ve lived in both worlds.
Lacey: Yeah. And I’m not saying one is worse or more difficult, but it’s just something to think about because giving employees time for having schedules that meet their needs, I think is a great way to have there be flexibility. He talks in here, too, about making sure that we’re focusing on outcomes. So if employees are most productive at, let’s say, 5:30 in the morning, but you’re a normal professional like a service organization and it’s an 8-5 job, well if that’s their peak time, why wouldn’t we want to get the most out of it, offering modified schedules?
Brandon: Sure.
Lacey: We’d get better work done. And having people work in teams and groups that support their creativity, and I’m not talking about, you know, completely shaking up your organization.
Brandon: There’s got to be some standards.
Lacey: Yeah, but really looking at: Do we have the right work on the right desks? Are people producing their best work and if not, how can we change that? Because that’s what Millennials want. They want to produce good work.
Brandon: I like the outcomes, because it almost puts the success in your court to say, Ok, if you have some flexibility in your schedule, all I’m going to do is measure your performance based on your outcomes and the way you finish the work and how quality it is. If I know that going in, I’m going to be more likely to take advantage of those things but also not prove you wrong.
Lacey: Right, right. So if we’re focused on outcomes and I’m incentivized to produce good ones, and that means that if by Wednesday I’ve met my expectations and there’s 
flexibility for me to take a couple days off, great! And having those types of policies whether it’s vacation or sick or PTO or unlimited PTO like everyone’s talking about right now or a truncated schedule where people are working just four days, I think there’s a company in Portland that just announced that they’re going to 32-hour work weeks because their CEO doesn’t believe that people are productive in the last 8 hours.
Brandon: Yeah, I agree with that one.
Lacey: I know there’s different schools of thought on all of that, but just focusing on what works for your people, and what research says is that Millennials want to be focused on results.
Brandon: That’s good, I hope more than just the Millennial generation focuses on outcomes.
Lacey: So the last thing that he talks about in here is to encourage collaboration. I think part of this comes from all the social networking things we’ve been exposed to for so many years, right? It was MySpace and Facebook and Twitter and and LinkedIn and all this stuff. We’re connected electronically and so finding some ways to mirror some of that inside the workplace I think could do a world of good for employers who have Millennials.
Brandon: Expand on the collaboration part, could working in teams, working in pairs, just having a friend at work?
Lacey: I think it could be all of that stuff. Creating things like buddy programs or mentor programs.
Brandon: Mentor programs would be a great way.
Lacey: Yeah, that’s one way to have collaboration. And there’s a great benefit to pairing people up who are maybe in different generations or different work groups. Baby Boomers usually, and this is a generalization—a lot of what we’re talking about is a generalization—but Baby Boomers often want to teach and it’s a great way to get that legacy knowledge instilled in your younger workforce. So pairing someone up like that and maybe having a Millennial or maybe, if you’ve got really young employees in your workplace, the Gen Z generation that’s going to be coming up, is so technology-based.
Brandon: Gen Z, they start what, 1994? Is that right, they were born starting in 1994? I’m looking at this article which says, “Millennials are from 1982-1993.”
Lacey: Yeah, anyone born from 1994 until now.
Brandon: So they’d be in the workforce already, they’re starting to come into the workforce. Maybe not necessarily full-fledged, but probably college jobs.
Lacey: Yeah, summer and college jobs. I have some clients who hire minors, even, and what a different world it is. It’s so interesting having conversations with Baby Boomers who are managing Gen Z employees.
Brandon: Oh because they’re probably glued to their phones and they’re not socially there.
Lacey: Yeah, and the client I’m thinking about, a company I’m working with is one of those where it’s no phones on the floor. So what a different world it is.
Brandon: That’s challenging.
Lacey: And there’s, I don’t know how else to say it, there’s an empathy gap in terms of like, how do I put myself in your shoes, even a Millennial to a Gen Z employee. It’s just different.
Brandon: The empathy’s an interesting point. I don’t know if you can, because they’re in totally different places in their lives at the moment. What I think they can do is say, Hey, each of us have something really good to offer. Let’s team up and collaborate. And to your point with this article, that’s probably the route you’d want to go. I don’t know, we’re not experts on this necessarily, we’re just having a discussion.
Lacey: No, but I think it’s an interesting thing for businesses and owners to think about, because look at your people, if you’re listening to the podcast. Look at your people and where they’re at and who they’re working with together and just find ways to encourage collaboration. I think better ideas happen when there’s lots of thinkers in the room. We can accomplish more, and so I think people of all generations want to work together, especially when they’re aligned with a greater purpose within an organization as long as everyone’s aware of it.
Brandon: I’ll say one of the best things our organization did in the last two years was we developed the mentorship program which was awesome, that sparked collaboration between people who wanted to get to another level in their career and to also develop a good relationship. And maybe there was already an established relationship too. The other thing was the book club. I love the book club just for the fact that you’re all reading something similar, I mean it’s people across all departments who want to participate, and they all have something different to offer. And they’re part of different generations—there’s Millennials, we don’t really have any Boomers necessarily, but X-ers for sure, and it’s just really great to see the collaboration. So that’s probably one thing you could do right away.
Lacey: Yeah, and it’s a low cost—especially the mentor program that we have.
Brandon: It’s no cost.
Lacey: It’s no cost other than the time you’re allowing your employees to use. And I can speak from being a mentor and being someone who is being mentored or a mentee, it’s been so great for me. It’s stretching me in my leadership skills, and now coming into this new position that I’ve taken on and managing some of the employees, it’s been a great opportunity to learn and grow and get me ready to take this position. I just think it’s been great and everybody’s learned a lot. And we even had cross-department mentoring going on, where there’s people like you—the person you’re mentoring isn’t even in the sales & marketing department. I think that’s so great. And it’s a low-cost thing a company can add.
Brandon: And tying it back to this whole point about the balance, think about what you would normally do to get knowledge and further your career: you’d go back to school. Where’s the balance in that if you’re going to night school when you’ve got kids at home or a spouse or partner to get to. There’s not a lot of balance because you’re going to school 
either in the morning before work or after and your world just seems out of control. But a mentorship program or a book club, these things where you’re collaborating with others to get knowledge, and to still integrate your work and what you’re passionate about within your personal life, that to me seems like, maybe not a substitution for a formal education, but it definitely helps.
Lacey: Yeah, and it’s definitely something that a business can share with the market that they’re offering. I mean, these are the intangible things that we can talk about when we’re looking for talent and planning ways to recruit new employees to our organization. This is where people should be focusing. Cost of healthcare—it’s going up. And we recognize that maybe we’re not going to be able to be as competitive on that front. So what else can we do to attract people to our organization? Talk to your employees, ask them what they want, find out what’s missing for them. Employee surveys are a great way to get that information, focus groups, stay interviews—there’s lots of means an employer can use to get that information. But your people have ideas about what they need, so that’s a great place to start.
Brandon: There’s a ton of information out there. I actually was just searching for a book on generations in the workplace, there’s books on it, there’s tons of trainings. This gem that you found in LinkedIn Pulse is where they have all of the expert articles. There’s tons of stuff in there on this topic. So for those that are listening, don’t let this conversation be the last step in figuring out work life balance and the Millennial topic, there’s so much information out there and we’ll definitely keep talking about it. Anything else from your perspective, Lacey?
Lacey: I don’t think so. I just would think about, when you’re talking with your teams and at your leadership table, and the word “work life balance” or that phrase comes up, think about blend. Just try to think about it in maybe a different way where there’s flexibility and blending in terms of time and activities.
Brandon: And that word is great, but for a lot of people it’s not meaningful. Maybe even further define what you mean by that, being specific. You can go work out in the middle of the day, you can use our nap room. Just be specific about what the blend means.
Lacey: Exactly, and communicate that to your employees so they know that there’s permission and it’s encouraged. And—this might seem crazy, but even to have the leaders in the organization that maybe aren’t Millennials partake in some of that blending and balance and flexibility. Because when they see it modeled, when I see my manager or the leader of an organization going on a walk outside in the middle of the day, that’s encouraging to me. That tells me that it’s okay for me to do that too. So think about, maybe, doing that as well.
Brandon: Well I’d like to thank my co-host and partner in crime, Lacey Halpern, for joining us today. If you like what you heard or have been a long time listener, feel free to go on iTunes and give us a review. We’re always looking for feedback on how we’re doing and topics you’d like to hear as well. Thanks for listening today!
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