Declined Work Attitude by Millennials

I owned my salon for nearly a decade. Being an entrepreneur, I have resorted to balancing my staff with an adept leadership team paired with young college students to assist me with managing my salon while I am in class. For the most part, our relationship revolves partly around my desire to help nurture subordinate talents as well as leadership skills. However, I tend to have a laissez faire leadership style. As a result, I have discovered that some millennials possess a more dominant value of leisure time verses work. It has also taught me a percentage of the younger generation displays a sense of entitlement for higher salaries despite poor work ethics.

 In the beginning, when I started noticing changes regarding passion for work, I was reluctant to prognosticate that generation Y was not invested in plausible work ethics. However, after nearly a decade of working with a rotation of younger employees, I consider the changes in the attitude as major source of employment conflicts and human resource relations.

Throughout my entrepreneurship journey, I have encountered clients and staff of varying attitudes towards everything such as how much I charge them for my spa services, and more so, I have grown to accept that the younger generation seems to have changed their perception and attitude towards work. My first interaction with millennial employees was thrilling. Little did I know the relationship was timed and that complications would arise trying to strike a balance between demands for working and free time. It took me a while to discover greater percentage of millennials declined work attitude. The pattern revealed that within several weeks of hire, (typically around the time I let my guards down), I noticed increased incidents of lateness, dishonesty, and unethical conduct. My business, being in the beauty industry, calls for high flexibility and responsiveness to client demands.

Among the mildest example is, an incident where one of my employees ended up polishing the wrong color on a client’s nails. The client requested an alternating pattern of Tiffany blue and opaque pink. The staff member was distracted sneaking peaks on her cell phone and applied opaque pink and forgot to alternate fingers with the blue polish. During the client exit interaction, I did my usual departure probe wherein I asked if there was anything we could do to improve our services. The client made innuendos about it being a great visit other than the matter of the staff member who made the polish oversight. While I was oblivious to the request, I quickly offered to re-polish the child’s hand. In the interim, the staff member remained signed in and continued to be glued in her cell phone while I assumed the responsibility of correcting her mistake. This confusion resulted in me giving a discount to the client as well as a gift card for a free spa service on her next visit.

Over the years, I have also discovered that my staffs tend to exhibit desire for better pay though they are not committed to either minimizing idle time or taking the initiative to gain a better pay.  Therefore, this forces me to come up with new management policies such as being more authoritative.

I recall another example when I had to repeatedly counsel one of my female employees because she had several incidents throughout 2017 where she forgot to collect money from a client. She was worried when I advised that this would impact her being eligible for a pay increase. However, in most cases, no matter how constructive I am during training I encounter rigidness to the extent that they are not receptive of change and they fail to match their expectations with demands for salaries increase and more leisure time. To me, I feel this also impacts the decline in work attitude and ethics.

I treasure these opportunities to find a balance in life and more so, rejuvenate myself in preparation for other semesters. However, when I think about how the staff conducts my business when I am away, it impacts my mood. I, more often that have to keep returning home to check on my salon. This is not because I don’t trust them, I worry about the impression of the younger staff, and possibility of things could going wrong. When I was establishing the business, I was certain that the young generation would be appropriate to work with due to their efficacy. However, as time unfolded, I noted that employees can change with time, and what they portray today, may be different tomorrow; they would show any side anytime tossed by giving them different duties in different positions.

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