Inadvertently, Millennials have employed many marketers around the world for two decades. They have been researched, described, examined, analyzed and labeled like no other generation before. And the good people added a layer with their criticisms, their generalizations, and their caricatures.
Posted at 5:00 am.
And now this generation of young people is… not so young anymore.
The oldest members of the cohort have passed the 40-year mark. They have gray hair, children, a house and a professional track record strong enough to reach leadership positions.
In addition, the 2021 local elections attracted great interest with the admission of 109 Millennials be elected mayor. Three of the province’s largest cities – Laval, Longueuil and Sherbrooke – and four ministries are currently led by people who were not born when Diana and Prince Charles married.
In the world of sports, art and business, young people born between 1980 and 1995 are taking over. With their values, their vision and a long list of applications in their iPhone, they change things.
This observation is the origin of the great files that you can read today and tomorrow in all the sections of La Presse. There you will discover impressive young people, full of conviction and energy.
Despite what has been said about Millennials, also known as Y, we must view their rise to decision-making positions as a source of hope. With their ideals, their skills, their diplomas, their qualities and their priorities, they are able to bring about improvements that benefit us all.
Think about young people’s ease with technology. Let them hurry up so that we can benefit by making appointments and reservations easier with just a few clicks, by enabling all kinds of consultations via video conference, by making waiting lists more transparent, by simplifying the exchange of information, by automatically generating statistics and Data is useful. Stories of lost faxes1 in hospitals should be a thing of the past, as should paper-only court records.
If a young student could create an application in 90 days alone at home that they had been waiting for years to top up OPUS cards with a phone2, imagine what a group of motivated young employees could achieve if given would present us with the challenge of making our lives easier.
Logically, the result shouldn’t take too long to arrive. Because Millennials have a reputation for wanting everything at once. They say they don’t like waiting. It’s better this way !
Once they are in charge, this would allow them to find ways to effect change and improvement more quickly than before. It may not always take 15 years to establish a reserved lane for buses on a boulevard3 or 19 years to establish a true, effective one-stop shop for CPE4.
The Y’s impatience, fueled daily by ultra-fast internet, is even necessary when it comes to finding solutions to humanity’s greatest challenge: climate change.
All experts agree that we no longer have the luxury of waiting before acting. “The environmental issue was not concrete enough before. But now we get tornado warnings every two weeks! “It’s a lot of pressure, but we have no choice to improve society, otherwise we’ll all burn,” Irdens Exantus, a 29-year-old actor who takes a thoughtful view of society, told me. Driven by his work in youth centers and his Haitian origins.
His concerns are quite general. According to a recent Léger study, the majority (60%) of Millennials are stressed by climate change, an increase of 8 percentage points in just one year. It’s not for nothing that we hear so much about environmental fear…
“I would like elected officials my age to make the connection between the economic crisis, inflation, inequalities and the ecological crisis. It’s the most important thing. “For me it is the same crisis, a crisis of over-productivity, of excessive capitalism,” said Nicolas Lemieux, a 30-year-old municipal worker who works in Pointe-Saint-Charles and is preparing for a master’s degree in political science.
Change society for the better
Millennials are expected to perform better when collaborating away from the protocol hierarchy. Because they grew up in an egalitarian world, they value competence more than titles. “For me, a person is a person,” says Catherine Dubé, a 32-year-old business executive who raises two children and sits on the board of Investissement Québec.
A person’s age and seniority within an organization should not be determining factors in the credibility or legitimacy of their comments and questions, she explains. All points of view should be equal.
What she described as “multiple votes based on experience” is no longer necessary, says the woman, who does not take offense at being sometimes challenged by young people she hired three years ago. “We also need to de-bias organizations, grant autonomy and give people responsibility. »
I have a feeling this vision will shake, even shock, many people in their 50s and 60s who have worked hard to gain experience and climb the corporate ladder. But rather than seeing this as a worrying rejection of convention and established structures, I prefer to see it as encouraging more productive decision-making and debate.
Only time will tell if I’m being too optimistic. But we have seen that so many meetings hardened by decorum have resulted in nothing that we can only hope for improvement. We have to dream better, as Daniel Bélanger sings. And it certainly can’t hurt to think differently to solve novel problems.
I also hope that Millennials will improve our relationship with work, which has long been characterized by a sometimes unhealthy imbalance that led to divorce, professional burnout, mental health problems, feelings of child neglect and much more.
You won’t really have the choice to do so. Young people of Generation Z (born 1996 to 2010) are using the labor shortage to assert their values, especially with regard to the compatibility of work, family and leisure time. The heavy and dangerous responsibility of redefining the organization and workplace will therefore increasingly fall on the shoulders of Millennials.
The movement has already begun. Positive initiatives are increasing. Organizations offer incentives to exercise, quit smoking, use public transportation, eat organic and local vegetables, and provide anxiety training. Behaviors that are beneficial to society as a whole.
I’m also counting on Millennials to implement policies to promote equality and career development for women, immigrants and minorities who are little talked about, such as people with autism spectrum disorder. And so that the needs of young, overwhelmed parents, women in menopause and people in their sixties who want to take things slower are heard. That would be consistent with their discourse on inclusion and diversity, right?
It is, after all, a mental health issue. And for those in their mid-thirties, it’s no longer taboo. “We can talk without embarrassment about the antidepressants we take as if they were Tylenol,” confirms Irdens Exantus.
“Less goods, more connections”
Millennials are accused of being glued to their phones and preferring social media to face-to-face meetings. However, in Moffet in Témiscamingue, the 40-year-old mayor Alexandre Binette is multiplying his initiatives “so that the world has fun” in the micro-village of 210 souls. Gatherings often occur, be it in the communal kitchen, in the redesigned park or at a new festival.
“Less goods, more connections,” summarizes the ETS engineering graduate. His strategy: Focus on a variety of small initiatives that don’t cost much but can improve the quality of life, what Radio-Canada called a “miracle” 5.
While the harmful effects of individualism are being criticized, the question is whether Millennials will reverse the trend due to their inexhaustible desire for pleasure.
Of course, it is always difficult to generalize and label entire generations. Some Y do not recognize themselves in the descriptions given to them by the pollsters, others are the perfect incarnation. But one thing is certain: youth bring with them their ideals and the desire to change the world. And with all the challenges we face, we need Millennials to break out of the cage and think outside the box to make our world a better place.
They have everything they need to act, so I want us to shout to them: keep going, we are counting on you!
Learn more
2029 In 6 years, there will be more Millennials (8,616,900) than Baby Boomers (8,442,500) in Canada. In Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa-Gatineau, millennials have already outnumbered baby boomers since 2021.
Source: Statistics Canada
57% share of Millennials who own a home in Canada.
Source: Royal Lepage
39% share of Millennials who believe “they are the last generation that can still live comfortably”
Source: Leger survey