Is Z equal to X and Y?

1. What do you like about working at Jombay?
2. What should the company START doing?
3. What should the company STOP doing?

This was an open-ended survey that I just got done with my team at Jombay. I wanted to get a pulse on how they are feeling about the company, their aspirations and their insecurities, if any.  The intention was to crowd-source ideas on our people strategy. Some of the common responses from the team:

1) What do you like about working at Jombay?

• Energy of co-workers
• Philosophy of Think, Own, Run   
• Smart colleagues
• Challenging work and growth opportunities

2) What should the company START doing?

• More face-time with the founders and management
• More team bonding activities
• Regular updates on company’s product strategy

3) What should the company STOP doing?

• Ad-hoc experiments
• Running very fast
• Less Appreciation and feedback
• Open ended HR policies

I further went and compared the responses from millennials vs. the older ones. And I didn’t find much difference!

It seems that regardless of generation or when they were born (millennials or not) people want roughly the same things: to be assured of their jobs, to get challenging work and smart colleagues, to be rewarded on the basis of their contributions and to be given the chance to work hard and get ahead.

I am getting a feeling that differences among Millennials, Gen Y, Gen X  employees are a bit too exaggerated. Thanks to the advent of social media, the millennial generation got enough platforms to speak up and all the liberty to be vocal. As a consequence, perhaps the extremes of this generation got amplified and created a seemingly different perception of what the millennials want from their jobs and workplace! It could very well be the case that the expectations of this generation may not be very different from others.

Have we then characterized the millennial generation a bit too much? To what extent should we rely on generational cliches to decide our people strategy? I would love to know your thoughts and experiences.