Why, indeed?
The Case against Millennials
So much research and news coverage have been devoted to the Millennial demographic that it’s easy to imagine we know all there is to know about this cohort. In the course of doing this research, we heard talent specialists, business leaders, and Millennials themselves make a host of assertions. Millennials, we were told, have very different priorities than previous generations. Determined to find meaning and purpose in their careers, they are more interested in advancing a global cause than committing themselves to a global corporation. Hungry for recognition, they’d rather build their personal brands than those of their employers. Confident of their worth, or intent on starting up their own companies, they’re focused on boosting their own compensation rather than contributing to their companies’ bottom lines.
Millennials are thought to be in it for “me me me”—and when companies fail to meet their unrealistic expectations, the story goes, they’re out the door in a flash.17
Research plays to these themes, reinforcing stereotypes. Jean Twenge’s landmark book, Generation Me, helped give rise to the notion that Millennials are entitled, narcissistic, and overconfident (“Generation Me has never known a world that put duty before self, and believes that the needs of the individual should come first,” she writes). The cover of Twenge’s book, splashed with an image of a young woman’s tattooed midriff adorned with a belly button piercing, rather nicely makes her point that Millennials can’t see beyond their own navels.18 Following the trail that Twenge blazed, an army of publications have succeeded in branding Millennials as the needy “problem children” of the corporate workforce, constantly angling for a trophy, a promotion, or a raise; many of the studies that have attempted to bust these myths have, in effect, only served to reinforce them.19
Research diving into subsets of the Millennial cohort hardly bring greater clarity to the portrait. Millennial women, for example, have been the focus of several large-scale studies in recent years—yet the picture painted of young women in the workplace is fuzzy. Are Millennial women finally closing the gender and wage gap? Or are they kicking feminism to the curb and leaning out, rather than in? Consensus is absent among relevant studies.20 While the very few studies looking at Millennials of color tend to agree that the Millennial generation is far from “post-racial,” most research serves to reinforce existing stereotypes: diverse Millennials are seen as highly qualified and tech-savvy employees vested in entrepreneurship, not corporate success.21 As for economic and micro-generational differences within the Millennial generation (such as Millennials from low-income backgrounds, or Millennials over the age of thirty), research is next to nonexistent.
One Foot out the Door
The danger of all these stereotypes is that they tend to coalesce, for talent specialists, into one big takeaway: Millennials are a looming flight risk.
In a recent survey of HR professionals, just one out of every one hundred said that Millennials are loyal to their employers.22 The other ninety-nine fully believe that Millennials are “job hoppers,” unwilling to commit to their employers for more than a few years.23 The global talent head of a multinational consultancy told us that giving Millennials what they want isn’t going to make them any more loyal. “Can you get these kids to stay?” she challenged. “We cross-train our Millennials, to keep it interesting for them. But we hesitate to send them off to far-flung places for two years, because they won’t stay with us for two years. We’re not going to see the payback. Their next employer will.” As another talent specialist clarified, by way of explaining why she wasn’t allocating any budget to Millennials’ training or development, “Our job is to give back money to our shareholders. We’re not a charity.”
In short, HR professionals recognize Millennials as their next workforce, but see no reason to groom them for leadership until they start acting, sounding, and looking like previous generations.
That’s a mistake with profound implications, as we’ll endeavor to show in Part Two. Drawing on two nationally representative surveys—our US survey of 3,298 college-educated men and women working full-time in white-collar professions in the US, and our multimarket survey of 11,936 college-educated men and women working full-time in seven critical markets (Brazil, China, Hong Kong, India, the Philippines, Singapore, and the UK)—in addition to over sixty interviews and several focus groups, we unpack the needs and wants of the Millennial generation. We uncover not only the unparalleled diversity of this generation, but also the tremendous investment opportunity they represent for employers across industry sectors and around the globe.
But first: let’s see just how flighty Millennials in the US really are.
* Indicates name change to ensure source’s anonymity, here and throughout the text.
2
Who is Flighty?
Do Millennials have one foot out the door? This was an assumption we elected to test. We surveyed 765 college-educated men and women, born between 1982 and 1994, working full-time in white-collar professions in the US. And we indeed uncovered a high incidence of flight risk.
But not among all Millennials. We had a hunch that socioeconomics matter—something for which we hadn’t tested in our original survey. So we re-fielded to a subset of our original sample. Our hypothesis bore out.
It turns out that, in our nationally representative sample, Millennials who have a financial safety net—those who have families that could support them indefinitely, were they to quit or lose their jobs, or who receive financial gifts from family members totaling at least $5,000 per year—are more likely than those who do not to say they plan to leave their jobs within a year. Fully 40 percent of these financially privileged respondents present, that is, a flight risk. Intuitively, this statistic makes sense: these men and women may be more inclined to explore other options because they can afford to take risks. They have a safety net at the ready should they fail.
But only 9 percent of Millennials, we find, have such a safety net. The vast majority—91 percent—do not have such financial privilege.
In some ways, this divide should be patently obvious. As noted in Chapter One, the wealth gap is far more pronounced for Millennials than for any prior generation. The US Gini coefficient—a measure of income inequality that shows where a country lies between zero (perfectly equal; everyone’s income is the same) and one (perfectly unequal; one individual receives all of the country’s income)—has been rising for decades, from 0.362 in 1967 to 0.464 in 2014.24 Put another way, the wealthy have gotten wealthier while the poor have gotten poorer: household income for the top 1 percent of households grew over twenty-four times as much as that of the bottom 20 percent between 1979 and 2007.25 And those dollars don’t stretch as far as they used to. Between 1978 and 2014, the cost of college tuition rose by over 1200 percent—as compared to a roughly 240 percent increase in prices for other consumer goods and services.26 With national student debt totals hitting $1.2 trillion in 2016, nearly 70 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients find themselves saddled with heavy financial burdens before they earn their first paychecks.27 Little wonder that, in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump managed to exceed expectations in winning the votes of Millennials: they tapped into a deep well of frustration among Americans who felt disenfranchised and disempowered by the wealthy and well-established elites in Washington and on Wall Street. 28
Millennials are, in other words, navigating an economic landscape utterly unlike the one Boomers and Gen Xers faced upon their entry into the workforce—a landscape in which socioeconomic status is as much a deciding factor in career mobility as race and gender are.
The upshot of this uneven financial playing field? The “flighty bunch” stereotype that talent specialists cling to in order to justify stingy budget allocations is grossly misapplied. Failure to take into account socioeconomic realities also explains why so much of the existing research on Millennials serves to amplify the stereotypes. Seen without the filter we applied for financial privilege,