This is the most photographed generation in the history of the world. Practically from birth, ‘Gen-Why?’ has been MySpaced, FaceBooked, Flickred and YouTubed. We are talking about people who know how they look and what they sound like, and are well on their way to developing a personal brand. They possess more knowledge and are more flexible in their thinking than their parents. Improvisation provides the ideal platform for helping them put their look, their sound, their knowledge, their brand, to productive use.

And…

As employees raised (educated?) on video games enter the workforce in increasing numbers, the improvisational skills inherent in the gaming world will naturally become part of the ‘Gen-Why?’ business culture.

Samantha Maxwell is the founder and owner of CYA Human Resouces, an HR consulting company based in Los Angeles. In helping her clients deal with issues unique to Gen-Why and to the networked workplace, she’s on the fault line of a tectonic shift in business culture. In ten years, she says, 80% of the workforce will consist of Gen-Whyers.

“They don’t live to work, they work to live,” observes Maxwell. “They are more interested in what they’re going to be doing tonight or on the weekend than in what they’ll be doing five or ten years from now.” She further describes this generation as having been coddled and comforted throughout their lives by what the HR blogosphere calls ‘helicopter parenting’. “I would never in a million years think of bringing a parent to a job interview, nobody in my generation would. But we see this happening. We have situations where mom and dad call us to complain when their kid gets written up for something at work. This generation wants people telling them how wonderful they are. I tell them, ‘Buck up. This is work. You know what tells you you’re wonderful? The paycheck you get every two weeks.’”

(”I hope that phrase about the paycheck being their praise isn’t too harsh,” Ms. Maxwell emails me after reading this post. “What i really mean is that if it was FUN, we wouldn’t call it work.”)

On the flip side, Maxwell points out that to stay productive in the Networked World, employers have to acknowledge and meet this change halfway.

“Praise is more important than anything else,” she says. “They want to be told they wrote a nice memo, or that they did a good job on a project. And it’s so easy as a manager to do that. It has not traditionally been management’s style. They’ll tell me, ‘Oh, I’ll address it at the review’ you know, on an annual basis, and I’m like ‘You can’t do that. You have to tell them right now. And make sure not only that you tell them, you bring it up in a public scenario if you can, and hey, while you’re at it, shoot them an email.’”

“It’s more difficult to criticize, and there’s a lot more push-back,” she continues, getting to the crux of why I gave them the Gen-Why? moniker. “This is the first generation that got time outs instead of spankings. You have to criticize and praise at the same time. And what you say has to be honest. This generation sees through the B.S. in ways that previous generations could not.

“If you’re only a disciplinarian, they’re going to check out. You’re going to lose the connections you need to drive your business forward. You need everyone on board and everyone to have the desire to perform.”

I inform her that in the improvisational business model, management’s primary job is to identify productive games and incentivize employees to play along,

“Yes, definitely,” says Samantha Maxwell. “We need to be more Human Resourceful.”