Now Let’s Talk About the Youngs

Many of my colleagues are very young and seem to think that they all are equally effective at their jobs (or maybe equally ineffective?) and freak out when someone is let go, without seeming to consider that their colleague may not have been good at their job, or that the situation was unfixable. I’ve been a rank-and-file staffer and I’ve been management, and I know some of this is important for worker solidarity! But a workplace where management isn’t trying to be recklessly cruel still has to be a business. I feel like I learned this by my second or third job, but how do new-to-the-work-force people learn it?

— Manhattan

Nothing helps here except time. That being said … it’s hard for managers to remember how information-starved employees are. In America, they’re socialized to not ask “Does this company actually make money?” or “Is Bob suddenly gone because you finally found out he touched all those butts ‘on accident?’” Add an H.R. system that’s often captured by the concerns of lawyers, insurance companies and management, and is therefore bound to enforce a huge amount of silence, and we have an office of under-informed, overly group-bonded, hypervigilant people searching for any clue to what’s really happening. Yeah, they’re maybe sad because Bob is walking out with a cardboard box. But really they’re asking: Is this systemic? Is the company in trouble? And, at heart: What if I’m also a bad employee? Take a load off their minds and tell them how bad they are today.

Also? They might just be hungry. Don’t forget to feed and water your millennials! They have to eat their daily four pounds of Chipotle or they get fussy by 3:30 p.m.

Slack it to Me, Kiddo

My company has been using Slack for a couple years now. At first it was slightly annoying to have one more thing to monitor, but it did replace some unwieldy email threads. It was a marginally useful piece of software. But at some point Slack became something more complicated. Certain people in the office clearly established themselves as being “good at Slack.” I don’t mean they used emojis and GIFs well. They were good at a kind of quick-twitch banter that I simply cannot keep up with. I’m not an old person (I’m 35), I’m just not good at instantly being clever in a chat window at work. Recently, some people got promoted and I’m convinced a large part of it was this maddening new “skill.” How do I get “good at Slack,” or whatever comes next? Am I seriously going to have a worse career because of this?

— Brooklyn Heights

Because people who run the tools at companies are not usually the same people who run the culture of companies, and because people who are more senior are generally also locked in senseless endless meetings all day, the adoption of Slack in offices is extremely haphazard and hazardous. Communities of people begin working in different ways in the same workplace. Messy! Some of us Gen Xers and many (most?) millennials grew up chatting online all day, every day, and we have taken to Slack perhaps too enthusiastically, we know. You email people will never be like us! (Though learn to adjust your notifications — make Slack work for you.)