What we owe young people
“Young Britons have been hit hard.
We owe them a future they can believe in.”
“It’s time the young got a break”, started Will Hutton in The Guardian at the weekend. “Already, those who left education to enter the workforce after the financial crisis of 2008 have had their lives scarred. If you get unlucky and enter work in bad economic times, it will shadow your entire life”.
Hutton followed with grand answers: We should be ‘using the pandemic to trigger societal reinvention’ and ‘future-proofing our economy’. He concluded with a final call to action: “all plans for recovery and rebuilding must be organised in a way that there is no disadvantage in being under 35”.
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How can leaders support their young people?
What are organisations supposed to do when faced with these huge social challenges? The answer must not be inaction: to simply look up to those in government and express a passive desire for change. Instead, leaders should look to the contribution within their control and ask a simple, practical question: ‘how is the pandemic impacting the working lives of young people in my business, and what can I do to support them right now?’.
Last month, we released a diagnostic on Good Work in Challenging Times, an exploration of how the changes we’re making to our working lives will impact the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and belonging. This week, inspired by Will Hutton’s article, my colleague Zsofi and I returned to our latest results from 250 employees in the UK with young people in mind. We found those aged 18-30 were reporting our lowest 'Good Work' scores, which is predictive of lower levels of mental well-being and performance.
What is causing the Good Work age gap? There’s been a lot of focus on belonging in the business press, but this wasn’t an issue for the young people in our sample. In fact, our data showed that side of their working lives to be improving. The problem was a disproportionate decline in competence: a theme we can break down into the five questions below…
Self-reported competence by age group - the 5 themes
You can draw your own conclusions from the spaces between these lines. I would say it’s a tragedy that young people don’t hear the same praise, or feel they are learning as much as their older colleagues (possibly both antecedents to the ‘achievement’ question). How can we justify this at a time when they need our support more than ever? Aren’t these the things that young people particularly need so early on in their career?
But at least we’re getting somewhere - a little curiosity and diagnosis can quickly break big aspirations into solvable challenges. Let’s see if we can learn even more with this next question: what difference do leaders make to the themes above? Presumably, they have an impact on all age groups but Zsofi and I wondered whether this was especially pronounced for more impressionable young people? The below chart shows how feelings of competence differed in people who reported high levels of confidence in their leaders (the upper-third) vs people who reported low levels of confidence (the lower-third).
Competence by age and confidence in leadership
So, young people are the least confident in their leaders overall, and the most affected by that leadership when it comes to competence. The margins above are quite dramatic. In fact, good leadership cancels out any statistically meaningful difference in competence by age group.
This is not a surprise when we look to the existing literature. We’re finding that everyone is reporting higher levels of stress at the moment, but this tends to result in more detrimental reactions from younger employees, as they feel disrespected and ignored (O’Loughlin et al, 2017). In addition, young people seem to be judged more harshly by managers, especially when the age gap is pronounced (Shore et al, 2003). We can’t say how those dynamics are being impacted by the pandemic, but it’s worth exploring further…
What we owe young people?
The short answer is action. I can't imagine many leaders disagreeing with Will Hutton’s article, but now is not the time for lofty words and principles. Now is the time to put them to work. I hope most are carrying out diagnostics to guide their response, and where possible, breaking their data down by other demographic groups to search for intersectional needs and challenges.
In truth, this is the least we should do - let’s not pat ourselves on the back for asking a few questions. Yes it's great to be able to point to praise, learning and achievement as priorities for young people. It's great to show leaders the difference they can make. But if we really care - if we really, really care - we won't be satisfied until we know we've made a difference. And that means running these measures repeatedly in the months ahead, testing and trialing different initiatives until we’re sure of a positive impact.
Thanks for reading. This is the latest in a series of articles on what we call ‘Good Work’ - a combination of autonomy, competence, belonging and psychological safety. We’ve always focused on these themes at MoreThanNow, but over the past month, we’ve consolidated years of work into quick, easy diagnostic tools that will focus your energy on how to make things better. As Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer said earlier in the month: “The current health crisis changes nothing about what good leaders and good companies should always be doing. It just makes those actions more urgent”.
If you’re interesting in working with us, we can share some of those tools and ideas in an introductory call: