Patronising young people at work

[Starland2]

I work in the public sector. We have a lot of graduates. They are all intelligent lovely people but they have such strange approaches to work sometimes. For example I have a job in quite a niche specialism. I love my job and am very experienced. When the younger members of the team find out about what I do they often want to talk about it in great detail and I am happy to do so. A strange thing that keeps happening is that they will then come across people in a similar role in a different organisation. They then “helpfully “ email me and the contact and suggest we meet and chat so I can learn about how they do the job. More often than not I know the contact as it’s a smallish network.

The thing I find strange is why would I need these meetings? I know how to do my job! I think they think they are being helpful but it’s just odd and a bit patronising. You wouldn’t tell a teacher to meet with another teacher to talk about how they do their job!

I think they think it makes them look connected and helpful!?

A lot colleagues often go on about how young the graduates are in front of them. I never do this as it can get annoying for them. At the same time I want them to understand that older colleagues do have more experience!

Yes @HerculesMullligan for them the meeting is the work as for me getting on with the job is the work! I only have meetings when I have to!

@Starland2 Exactly! For years I worried that I was somehow doing meetings ‘wrong’ as I just didn’t seem to get the benefits out of them that everyone else enthused about. After 20 years of working I am a lot more comfortable just doing what works for me - aka avoiding meetings when possible!

Nothing to do with patronising young colleagues...

I work for an organisation where everyone seems too busy and have wall-to-wall meetings.

I was asked to do a task. Seemed simple enough - find out if A, B, and C existed for a list of projects and where to look for the As, Bs and Cs.

Having looked for them and not finding them, but finding random things that may or may not have been A, B snd C or maybe parts of them, I thpught I'd ask the project managers.

My e-mail was worded "I work for My_Manager, and he has asked me to establish if there is an A, B, and C for Project Name. Could you tell me if they exist please?

Replies were along the lines of 'I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Can we arrange a meeting with My_Manager to establish the requirements?

Why???'

(The question was as simple as a 'Does your car has a valid insurance certificate, valid MOT and is it currently taxed?' where you'd expect a reply like 'Yes, Yes, Yes' or 'No, No, SORN' or something.)

I am an older worker. I know to young people coming in it may sometimes look like people like me are negative about your new ideas. But sometimes it is from long experience. I love when someone new suggests something that will actually work.

So we had this young guy, bright but clearly thinks he is more skilled than he actually is. He wanted to develop a new programme, presented this to Senior Managers and got their enthusiastic assent.
I said to him it was a great idea, but told him where the difficulties were that he would have to overcome. And that we knew because it had been tried before. I didn't say it wasn't possible to overcome these, but I knew it would be hard.
A few months later asked him how he was and he was despondent because he had hit one of the barriers and didn't see a way forward. I suggested a few things, and reminded him of the handful of barriers that were inherent in this idea. Two months later he was gone having achieved bugger all.

Sometimes older workers point out the difficulties because they know what they are. Yes you may be able to find ways around them that no one else has, but just to dismiss it as older workers being cynical, is foolish.

And I agree that lots of meetings is usually a sign of inexperience or a skiver. It is why I loved wfh during the pandemic because suddenly we only seem to have meetings that matter and they are short and to the point.

@WeisheitNurInWahrheit I get so tired of young SJW telling me things I already know. I was working during the eighties when lots of workplaces had way more equality training than now, and training that was quite challenging at times. The equality training in workplaces now is pretty box-ticking in comparison.

You wouldn’t tell a teacher to meet with another teacher to talk about how they do their job!

This is quite funny.

@YoureTheTop I’m finding similar as well. I’ll ask a pretty simple question that can be resolved within a couple of emails. And instead of anything helpful all I get back is irrelevant questions about the remit of x or how this links with project y, and a suggestion that we have a meeting to discuss it in more detail. I think some people just like creating more work and feeling more busy/important than they actually are.

I have noticed with some of the fast track ultra-bright ones, they suck up to senior staff, and are rude or patronising to junior staff. Not all of them though. But certainly some of the men.

@RoyalFamilyFan I find that some people like to organise endless virtual meetings because they are bored and lonely at home!

If it’s “a meeting that could have been an email” I limit the meeting time to 30 minutes!

We have 5-minute meetings. Literally.

Some of the people who want a meeting instead of replying to a simple email are doing it because they don't understand the request but don't want to admit that in writing. I see it with people who've made it into senior positions based on their networking and "people" skills rather than technical ability. They're just out of their depth.

And some people can't be arsed to write an email and just want to fill more time with a chat, definitely.

@HardbackWriter

I think I'd also point out that introducing you to people you already know is a bit embarrassing for all involved. Because it is.

...And then say "anyway, Dave Smith from Anonco? I taught him everything he knows"

Interesting that other people find the fondness for meetings to answer every single question irritating. I find that’s a culture perpetuated by senior managers who produce very little, but are happy to work long hours and fill their calendars with three meetings for every time slot. It’s the mentality of “stop playing email tennis and go and SPEAK to them” taken to extremes. And it’s self-perpetuating, because once they’ve successfully filled their calendars with triple booking, they only have time to read emails at 11pm, and they think everyone else is the same.

I have wellies older than a lot of the new people I work with, also public sector specialist area. Help train them up and within a very short time they launch off with remarkable confidence, trying to be independent in their decision making, arguing the toss about stuff I have been doing as long as they have been alive and I clean up the mess. Many of them have degrees in obscure and completely unrelated subjects (ceramics, pop music etc). Being seen to be keen, gleefully pointing out shortcomings of their cohorts and making connections in the way you describe is part of their culture. Deeply cringy. If it wasn't for the fact I love the work I would leave.

I find that’s a culture perpetuated by senior managers who produce very little, but are happy to work long hours and fill their calendars with three meetings for every time slot.

I'm going to add to this those narcissists that refuse to send emails as 1/ What they say can be tracked and 2/ you have to chase them for information and it makes them feel powerful.

@tectonicplates

I've worked at offices where people sometimes walk in off the street with their CV, looking for a job, which is annoying enough as it is. But a few years ago, someone walked in and asked to speak to the HR Director. Erm, no? I don't know what's happened since the pandemic, but certainly just before then it was getting a bit more in-your-face which did make me feel a bit taken aback.

This is what we did in the 1970's - called in and asked if there were any jobs! Quite often there were, it worked well for me.

@deleteasappropriate that was 50 years ago, things change.

[quote RoyalFamilyFan]@deleteasappropriate that was 50 years ago, things change.[/quote]
Oh I know they do, and as I was a working class teenager I was looking for basic jobs. We have a business now and often get people calling in seeking work but they're not brits - it's now asylum seekers who've been approved to work. They're usually highly qualified but in a small northern town there's not much for them.

I think over my life (I'm 50) there has been a huge shift in a preference for sharing information by people talking, away from reading. Perhaps it started because some people find reading difficult and boring and genuinely don't end up knowing what they need to know if they are expected to read it; so there was accommodation made for those people; and now I feel that it's spun wildly out of control, and the gloriously efficient, quick and elegant method of lodging information in written form in known places for reference has been forgotten about. So a lot of these meetings, especially with young people, are because they literally don't know about any other way of finding things out and they assume everyone needs to do this all the time (as other PPs have said, also assuming that everyone knows as little as they do).

At my last job there was a monthly internal meeting that I wasn't invited to, because I had nothing to contribute, but the things that were decided on in that meeting did have indirect relevance to me (basically: what territories are we likely to be going into in 5 years time? Good for me to know, not for me to decide.) Whenever I asked anyone about the outcomes of these meetings (initially, in my innocence, asking where the meetings notes were saved and could I take a quick look, ha ha ha ha ha ha) I always got sort of bristled at and I was told defensively that if I really wanted one, perhaps an invitation to the meeting could be arranged for me. NO! NO NO NO NO I do not want to go to your meeting, I just want to know what you decided - or even what couldn't be decided yet, which is still useful information. No one ever understood this. No one ever understood the distinction between information and attending a meeting.

When my boss joined the company I had been in post for a couple of years. One of the things she asked me to do was to set up a regular internal "creative meeting". I asked her what the objectives of the meeting were, as she ensvisaged it; what sort of things would be discussed, for what purposes, and therefore whom I should invite. I explained the meetings I was already running and what they did and I asked her what we were missing and what the new meeting she had in mind might be for. There were no answers. She was very clear that she wanted a certain kind of meeting, that would have a certain vibe and come with a very definite sense that an important and stylish looking new meeting was now happening since she had joined the company. But she had literally no idea what for, or what we weren't doing already that needed to be done.

@SenselessUbiquity that is an interesting observation. In my current job, the company record team meetings. There are no minutes. I have never come across this before. If I cant make it, I have to watch the meeting, instead of just skim read minutes.

When I first started teaching, I was always a bit cynical of new and shiny ideas and used to be a bit reserved. But I did used to get a bit tired of older staff members complaining about how they'd seen it all before.

Of course, now I'm that older member of staff and yes, it's been round and debunked and round again.

@RoyalFamilyFan

But nothing really happened in the women’s rights movement between the suffragettes* & then a few people doing some bra burning & The Glorious Now, surely? And the Civil Rights Movement was only an American thing; & their generation invented activism, tolerance, environmentalism… And. The. Rest.

Jaysus I sound cantankerous. And about as old as God, rather a wee bit older than the age Christ is said to have been at the crucifixion. In fairness, there are people of my own age who do this nonsense too, & it really is excruciating.

Clearly I was not in the workplace in the 1980s - other than as a very occasional visitor to family members - but can imagine potential for equality & diversity trainings then to be incredibly challenging. Presumably they were also rewarding, rather than feeling bland & box-ticky as they do now? Have to question slightly if equality & diversity trainings are truly doing their jobs if everyone sits there & feels comfortable & thinks how lovely it all is. Not that you want to go round traumatising people, that’s not what I mean at all, that wouldn’t be helpful either; but if the difficult questions don’t get asked, are people actually learning & is it useful? I fear that the demand all spaces be “safe” means such a thing is (for now?) impossible though.

• Yes, yes, this does make me wish to do violence to people unless it is indeed suffragettes that they mean.

@WeisheitNurInWahrheit I recognise your cantankerous. So many young adults seem to know little about history, but think they do. Many are shocked or don't believe you if you say there were lesbian and gay rights organisations before the Stonewall riot. And I remember seeing an interview with a much older gay man in Britain who said we heard about the Stonewall riots, but we didn't pay much attention.
It has been seized on this defining moment, and it does appear to have helped push forward the gay rights movement in the US. But it was not the first moment people fought back as SJW often portray it.

I also get tired of the - people your age had it easy compared to now. I remember leaving school in an area devastated by Thatcher. Unemployment was very high and getting any job was a struggle. Yes house prices were cheaper. But lots of other things were very difficult. I know young people face their own struggles these days, but there is a total rewriting of history based on the middle-class experience rather than most people's lives.
And yes diversity and equality training was tough then. The vogue at the time was to get you to ask yourself tough questions. Some of the training was excellent. Some of it was very clumsy and I think this is why there was a bit of a backlash against it and a retreat into training that was easy.
The diversity training I had to do in my current job was online and asked you a series of questions with answers. For example someone being racist in the workplace, what do you do, with multiple choice answers. Is it okay to use this word to describe this group of people? If not what word should you use. Again with multiple choice answers. Basically it tested basic intelligence as whatever your views, the right answer was pretty obvious.