New Best Practices May Miss Their Mark: Building Educational,Social and Workplace Culture in the Age of the Millennials

Abstract

Sociologists began studying workplace culture as early as the 1830s. Industrial psychologists, once employed to determine the best way to deploy troops on the front lines of WWI or spark achievement among manufacturing workers, turned its eye to general differences in workplace culture when the rule-following, male-dominated Baby Boomer generation opened the factory and office doors to the diverse, independent and entrepreneurial workers of Generation X. One would predict that, lessons learned, transitions between Generation X and the next wave of workers * called Generation Y or the Millennials * would be relatively smooth. Yet while industry haltingly adjusts to a new culture of workers, other important social institutions * particularly higher education and social organizations * seem to be setting up for another culture clash. While embracing the superficial characteristics of the Millennials, like their technological savvy, key sectors are missing the fundamental forest for the virtual trees. For example, new fMRI studies indicate basic pleasure-seeking and reward feedback experiences in these two generations result from different brain chemistry. We will look at emerging best practices literature from a variety of fields, and identify how these trends both attempt to respond to, and may fail to meet the fundamental character of the next generation of students and workers.