<p>Recently I found myself in the midst of a conversation with two other adults chatting about the work ethics of some recent hires. </p>
<p>One spoke of the mom who called him about the female employee’s performance review. </p>
<p>I told a story about a mom who called me for an internship for her daughter. (Mutual friend had previously been told to have the girl contact me directly). </p>
<p>Another 20-something cried in disappointment at her 30% raise – thought she deserved more. </p>
<p>Yet another had an evening event in the city. She told the boss her father did not want her to go. Later, the boss found out <strong>from the client</strong> that Dad had gone too!</p>
<p>I’ve got two sons who are 20-somethings and neither of them would ever do anything like what you describe.</p>
<p>In addition, I’ve worked for years with 20-somethings and can’t fathom that any of them would do this stuff either. Admittedly, some of them need to mature, and most of them at least need to become accustomed to work etiquette, but the behavior and dishonesty you describe are wild.</p>
<p>DH gets calls from parents about why their college graduate kids didn’t get the job they interviewed for. It’s really sad actually. He had one employee several years ago that would call his dad and ask for advice on business matters-which, wasn’t all that bad, until he told customers that his Dad didn’t think it was a good idea to do the deal or whatever…</p>
<p>I know a few parents that it wouldn’t surprise me if they called employers about raises, etc. down the road…</p>
<p>Not my experience, either at my work or with my family. These kids are amazing. I find the job “culture” now suffocating. They deal with it. Bless them.</p>
<p>Sounds to me like all of the OP’s examples are the case of some really bad parenting. What kind of father in his right mind would tell his daughter not to go on a business trip, and then accompany her - to meet the client?! What kind of mother seriously calls her child’s employer to complain about performance reviews or interviews? These kids really had no chance if those are the kinds of people that raised them. Sounds like they had very sheltered lives and don’t understand how the real world works. I don’t even discuss performance reviews or raises with my parents. </p>
<p>I am a 20-something and work primarily with 20-somethings, and I don’t have a single story that even comes close to any of the above. Most of my peers are very professional, and have been living on their own and working their way up through management from a very young age. I have never seen or heard from any of their parents, let alone a complaint about a raise not being good enough.</p>
<p>The op post is not typical. I had a 40-50 year old woman’s husband call me because I discussed her poor performance with her. Should I use that a jumping off point to discuss married women in the work force. I do not think so.</p>
<p>I agree that this is a parent issue, not a 20 year old worker issue but it does happen, more often then most care to admit, unfortunately. Unless you 20 year olds are in hiring management positions, you wouldn’t know this is going on.</p>
<p>So all of you managers getting calls from parents/husbands of workers unhappy with their performance reviews: How do you handle these kinds of calls?</p>
<p>Nrdsb4–if the person in question is an employee it is simply “I can’t discuss this with you”. If it is a parent calling about a kid that didn’t get a job (which is what happens more than someone calling about a current employee for us) the comment is met with “the fact that you are calling just reinforces my decision not to hire your child”. They never get it but it ends the conversation.</p>
<p>I’ve had 2 calls about current employees, by spouses, ever. One was to help plan a surprise anniversary trip and making arrangements for time off, the other was when a spouse was in a horrible car accident and was in the hospital. Neither call was out of line I felt.</p>
<p>The only situations I have ever known of in which family members have called someone’s boss are when the employee was unexpectedly hospitalized or was involved in some other emergency situation.</p>
<p>My only complaint about the work ethics of the young is that many of them have multiple windows open on their computers at all times and are often involved in IM conversations while working. I don’t think they realize how much this impedes their efficiency and that they need to cut it out when they’re working on something urgent.</p>
<p>I believe that work ethic is situational, almost like a chemical reaction, regardless of age. The same 20-something or 50-something that is unmotivated and does the minimum in one office often works incredibly hard for a different manager or in another office environment, just like the same person can be friendly and outgoing around some people, while others bring out their sullen, surly side. </p>
<p>Whatever the person has been taught prior to being hired, it’s up to the manager to train, motivate, set the tone for professional interactions, and figure out how to bring out the best in their employees. In my experience, most people are quite trainable as long as expectations are clearly laid out. I would not hold a first time offense against anybody. </p>
<p>If a parent or spouse called me about a performance evaluation (which has never happened), I would have no trouble conveying surprise, telling the parent that their behavior was inappropriate, and simply ending the conversation. If an employees father attended a client-event, the employee would be told this is inappropriate and not to happen again. If an employee started crying due to disappointment over their raise, lack of promotion, or other criticism in the evaluation, I would ask them to excuse themselves and come back to discuss when they felt more composed. I dont mind venting, if its done calmly and professionally, and in turn I will repeat the rationale behind the evaluation in the hopes that we reach a mutual understanding, even if at the end we agree to disagree. I did have an employee once who started swearing at me during a performance evaluation. I immediately stopped the process and asked if she would like my boss to be present to also hear her concerns. She thought that was a great idea, restarted her tirade in front of my boss, and was promptly fired for insubordination. There are lines its a good idea not to cross unless your bags are already packed.</p>
<p>Nrdsb- in my case I said “excuse me” and when the husband started to go into a rant I laughed at him and hung up. I did say " you have no business making this call".</p>
<p>So you understand what the issue was with the spouse- she failed to process a taxpayers payment properly so they continued to be billed. The taxpayer had called her to correct it and she continued to fail to resolve the issue. They finally reached out for help through my office and I called her to find out what the issue was. It was clear she did not care and was only interested in doing the part of the job she liked. She told me she would work on fixing the issue later but she needed to go in the “field”. I told her she would stay in the office until the problem was fixed. Five minutes later her husband called.
She no longer works for us she was terminated about a year later.</p>
<p>I"m also curious what these 20 year olds are using for comparison for “work ethic”. I agree the multiple windows open, IM’s, texting, etc. at work hampers your productivity.</p>
<p>I had an incident at a national home improvement chain where an employee asked for my credit card to input the last four digits (not an unusual request), but then STARTRED TO TEXT WHILE MY CARD WAS IN HIS HAND!! Probably innocent, but there was the thought that my acct number, exp date and security code were compromised.
What made me nuts was that the employee,store manager and corporate thought I was making a big deal over nothing–in this age where identifty theft is rampant.</p>
<p>They paid 4 months of account protection to basically shut me up.</p>
<p>I found out later that Walmart will fire you if you are texting while on the clock.</p>
<p>This is what today’s generation doesn’t get–that you can survive a few hours without touching your dang cell phone!! When you are on company time you give the company your complete attention. You can reply to the text about your evening plans on your break.</p>
<p>Having multiple windows open is not only a new phenomenon with this generation…but also younger Gen Xers like mine. Also, the IM issue depends on the company/office concerned. </p>
<p>One department I worked at used IMs in lieu of phones to coordinate/discuss work related matters and fine-tuning of our work product. As such, it was not a surprise that having your IM window open was MANDATORY and leaving it off tended to get employees chided or if they continued to do it…terminated. </p>
<p>Some of this is also generational…younger Gen Xers and moreso…millennials tend to be used to having multiple windows open and working on multiple things at the same time. </p>
<p>Older generations tend to have a much harder time having more than one window open…especially considering older computers didn’t have enough resources to reliably do that without crashes until the early '00s. </p>
<p>Didn’t seem to be an impedance on efficiency…especially considering in some of the work I did…having multiple windows open was the only way to do our jobs.</p>
<p>Wow. That’s unbelievable. Definitely in the wrong!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I can’t. I won’t always respond right away or answer right away, but I am “on-call” basically at all times. I get all my email, text messages, and phone calls straight to my phone. Our cell phones are our primary form of contact in my company… mostly text messages or BBM…</p>
<p>I agree with cobrat. When I interned, almost everyone in the state government was on im (at least the workers I needed to talk to). You got much quicker responses than with email or phone calls. </p>
<p>My generation has been multitasking with multiple windows since, well, as long as most of us can remember. It’s not always a distraction, it is just how we do things.</p>