Verified by 
Why don’t people today—of all ages and generations—hold themselves to a higher standard when it comes to their attitude, work habits, and people skills?
There are five reasons.
1. The newest workers are usually coming straight from school.
Maybe they have the most in-demand technical skills, coming from college or university or perhaps graduate school. That means they’ve probably become quite accustomed to a very luxurious situation: Room and board are not only covered but also arranged conveniently in close proximity to campus. College students are surrounded by their peers all the time and often by intimate friends.
College students have access to the resources of a major institution, but their only responsibilities are those of a valued customer. They have the support and services of staff, administration, and faculty, but their social status is determined by where they fit in with their peer group. Their “job” is a privilege for which someone else is paying (even if it is paid for by student loans, and the tremendous cost of all this is deferred). They have very little supervision and a great deal of latitude in all manner of personal habits and conduct.
How many college students come to work for you who have gotten in the habit of staying up too late hanging out with their friends? Skipping too many classes? Doing their work at the last minute, or not at all, and still expecting to receive an inflated grade?
2. More members of the new workforce have been raised by helicopter parents.
Even after they arrive in the workplace, young workers are only a phone call (or text) away from their parents. Maybe they are on their own now, for the first time, after being reared by parents (and their parenting posses) who did a lot of the work for them of closely scheduling, managing, and supporting their every move. With their parents doing so much of the work, many young workers never mastered the basics of taking care of themselves.
3. Individual accommodation is increasingly the norm.
Even if they themselves did not home-school, never had an ILP (an individual learning plan), and never took meds for a diagnosis, they surely grew up among kids who did. And in all likelihood, too many people told them way too often, “You are a special case.” Meanwhile, there has long been a growing current of personal customization in every sphere where consumers dwell—especially media. Of course, all of this dovetails with the long-term zeitgeist swing toward relativism—i.e., “all styles are equally valid.” Increasingly, the basic assumption is that workers should be able to just “be themselves” and “express” their true identity at work.
4. People have become so accustomed to electronic communication that they are losing the ability to communicate well in person.
This may be an easy point to make, but it is undoubtedly a big part of the story. Communication practices are habits, and most people are in the habit of remote, informal, staccato, and relatively low-stakes interpersonal communication because of their constant use of hand-held devices and the mores of social media and instant messaging.
5. What more experienced workers might see as matters of professionalism, today’s workers may consider matters of personal individuality.
There are two valid points of view in this debate. Some standards of conduct are more burdensome than others—arbitrary, exclusionary, constraining, and worth resisting. Others, however, are necessary, efficacious, and worth some inconvenience. How does one tell the difference?
The bottom line: You cannot have a functional workplace in which everybody makes their own rules of conduct. Imagine an organization in which some employees support the mission, but others support the opposite mission. Where nobody agrees about who is in charge. Where people come and go whenever they feel like. Where some people wear pantsuits, and others wear bathing suits. Where people only work on the tasks and responsibilities they enjoy, insist on doing everything their own way, and only work with the people they like. Where meetings are held with no agenda, and people are encouraged to blurt out whatever pops into their heads. Where people may or may not return each other’s calls and emails—you get the idea.
Sometimes, conforming makes a lot of sense. Nobody needs workers of any age, shape, size, or persuasion to give up their uniqueness as individuals, or their non-conformism, or to adopt too many arbitrary, exclusionary, or overly constraining standards. But most managers would very much like their employees to make some reasonable adaptations—to adjust at least some of their attitudes and behaviors to the realities of the workplace.
