While listening to a friend describe her new job at a popular social media company this weekend, it became clear how different today’s workplace is from what past generations would have you expect.
My friend explained a workplace with frivolities like pingpong tables and expressed her own shock with the playful set up. However, such combinations of fun and work make sense in the modern world.
According to the Pew Research Center, millennials make up the largest generation in today’s workforce. We are also the first generation to experience the ease and speed that recent technological advances have allowed us.
Though some from previous generations claim technology makes us lazy or spoiled, what it actually does is make us more efficient. That carries weight in the work place and allows for some big changes to be made.
We now live in a world where communication is constant. Emails, texts and phone calls are all mobile and accessible with the touch of a fingertip or even one-word commands, if you’re a die-hard Siri user.
All this mobility means the previous idea of being confined to your cubicle is no longer applicable. If your office goes with you everywhere, why would you need to stay in one place to work?
There is something to be said for a place where you can concentrate and focus with no distractions, but there is little to nothing to be said for the comforts of a gray carpeted, windowless cubicle.
In addition, the ease with which tasks can now be completed is a huge time saver.
Skype and other forms of instantaneous conversation mean less waiting. Technology allows for banking, organization and planning to be streamlined and connected with little effort or savvy required from the user. The constant availability of the Internet makes information instantaneous. All of these things that used to require time and effort to accomplish are now infinitely easier tasks — all of which, in turn, affect the workplace. The ease with which work can be completed at a home office, coffee shop or library means the nine-to-five, five-days-a-week model is losing its appeal.
Perhaps the lack of technical difficulties have made millennials a little spoiled in all the time and space these advances have freed up. Forbes.com claims the number one thing millennials look for in a workplace is “work-life integration.” This is because we live our lives in a world of immediate reactions and responses and we live on a global scale.
Millennials live in a world that is more connected than any previous generation. We want more time off because we’ve already completed our work during the commute.
According to Forbes.com, millennials also want a job that is fulfilling and that will spark their passion. That seems to be the thing that confuses pervious generations the most — the idea that work shouldn’t just feed you, but also sustain you.
Perhaps because it takes less time to do things, millennials have more time to think about what they should be doing. It shouldn’t be seen as bad or selfish to want what would make you happy. Millennials are living in just the right time to discover that the workplace can be more fulfilling than “The Office” would have you believe.
The passage of time brings inevitable progress, and every new generation has to figure that out for themselves.
Perhaps the revolution of work is our progress because the pursuit of passion should be seen as noble instead of nonsensical.
We, as a society, spend a lot of time working, so why not make it worth the time? If past generations had time for pingpong at work, don’t you think they would have played it, too?
jordrile@indiana.edu
@riledupIDS
