Apr122010
Are Millennials Lazy?
Filed under Uncategorized, breakout sessions by admin at 8:36 am on Apr 12 2010
Erica Williams, deputy director of Progress 2050 and a Washington, D.C.-based activist, has a bone to pick with the portrayal of "Millennials" as lazy. Citing a recent Washington Post article and a Pew Research study, Williams claims that the authors have "missed the mark" on describing her generation. In her HBR post titled "Debunking The Millenials' Work Ethic "Problem", Williams tackles the misperceptions:
"Millennials are lazy, right? Wrong. You might have gotten that impression, though, reading the April 3 Washington Post piece on Millenials' supposed "lax work ethic." The Post's article isn't the only recent piece on the topic: In February, the Pew Research Center released a report called "Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change" that also missed the mark on describing my generation.
"The Pew report states that a majority of Millennials "say that the older generation is superior to the younger generation when it comes to moral values and work ethic." The phone survey conducted for the report found that Millennials are the only generation to not list work ethic as a Top 5 claim to generational distinctiveness in an open-ended question.
"Believing that work ethic isn't amongst the Top 5 unique characteristics for one's generation is very different from actually admitting to having poor work ethic, a point lost on many commentators. This and the Millennials' response that other generations have a greater work ethic are in fact self-assessments rather than a qualitative behavioral analysis using some objective tool or metric.
"The Millennials' educational accomplishments alone, as noted in the same report, would belie any assumption that we don't work hard or value the process and outcome of said work.
"So why do these misperceptions persist?" Click here to read the full post >>
