INSIGHT business coaching
Working For and With Millennials Some sage advice for working with young folks, whether they are your firm’s clients or your employees BY GAIL DOBY, ASID
I
nside and out, millennials are changing the interior design industry. As designers, they are bringing a fresh perspective, new technologies and a new set of values to the profession. As clients, they are challenging us to rethink how we live, how we consume and what makes us as designers unique.
For interior design business owners, the growing prevalence of millennials in our industry presents another set of issues. On the one hand, as employers, we have had to make some accommodations for the way millennials prefer to work. On the other hand, as providers of design services, we have had to take a new approach to how we market, how we work with clients and how we communicate our value proposition.
Much has been written about millenials as employees—some of it negative, some of it positive. I want to state clearly at the outset that I am not lumping all millennials—or any other cohort, for that matter—into a single stereotype. All demographic cohorts are somewhat arbitrary and artificial, and all are multifaceted and complex.
From a management standpoint, it’s important to keep the two distinct while recognizing what they may have in common.
From a management standpoint, it’s important to keep the two distinct while recognizing what they may have in common. An employee is still an employee, and a client is still a client.
18 | wf-vision.com | Nov + Dec 2018
WORKING WITH MILLENNIALS
Nonetheless, as a group, millennials have exhibited certain preferences and attitudes about why and how they want to work. Sometimes those have clashed with the work ethic of their senior coworkers. As managers, we need to strike a balance between allowing for differences and not letting those differences disrupt the work and camaraderie of the firm.
Millennials tend to thrive when they are given meaningful, purposeful work in an environment that allows them some flexibility but also provides them with some direction. Also (again, allowing for personal differences), they generally are very social and accustomed to working in teams or small groups.
