Managing in the 'new' workplace: managing Generation Y isn't easy, but it's not impossible. The first step is discarding everything you thought you knew about the youngest generation of workers.

• Author: Tulgan, Bruce
• Position: HUMAN RESOURCES

One might think a generation raised on mantras like "We're all winners" and "Everyone gets a trophy" wouldn't be particularly competitive. But that's not the case with Generation Y, that category of young workers born between the years of 1978 and 1990.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

While the self-esteem movement had a tendency to chip away at Generation Y-ers' competitiveness, the emphasis on testing they faced during their formative years had the effect of building it back up. Testing breeds a different kind of competitiveness: Competition against standards and benchmarks, against aver-ages and means and against one's own past performance.

Think about a video game that a Gen Y-er might practice repeatedly, attempting to beat their previous high score. He or she wins every time, and nobody has a reason to feel bad. That's the kind of competition Gen Y-ers seek. They want to compete against themselves, in a safe environment where they can try continually to improve on their own performance benchmarks.

When it comes to being competitive at work, this is what one Gen Y-er had to say: "I'll do whatever they want me to do. Just tell me someone is keeping track of all this stuff I'm doing. Tell me I'm getting credit for it, that I've been racking up points here like mad. Tell me someone is keeping score."

When Gen Y-ers know someone is keeping track of their day-to-day performance, their measuring instinct is sparked and their competitive spirit ignited. Keeping close track of their work tells them that they and their work are important. The process motivates them to perform because they want to get credit and score points.

The Point System

One system that effectively captures the new workplace approach is used in the warehouses of a large beverage wholesaler. Every day, hundreds or thousands of boxes come in one end of a warehouse and hundreds more go out the other end. All day, boxes move from one end to the other, meticulously registered by bar codes that are scanned each time they are moved.

Everybody in that warehouse is on a point system.

One of the warehouse managers said, "The only way you get points around here is moving boxes. If you drive a delivery truck, you get points by delivering boxes. You break bottles, you lose points. If you work in the loading dock, you get points by loading boxes onto the truck. Points are how everything gets done here. That's how you make extra money. That's how you get to leave early or get extra days off."

The...