Abbie and Adrian discuss the perspectives of recent college graduates and the unique challenges they face in today's job market. In an era where technology has rendered remote work more accessible, new grads are asking critical questions about workplace culture and the boundaries of work-life balance.

Abbie shares her thoughts on the relevance of working "9 to 5" (and sings a little Dolly Parton in the process). Are outdated workplace norms ready to accommodate a generation that thrives in hybrid environments? Are organizations that refuse to adapt at risk of losing potential talent?

We discuss the challenges employers face in bridging the generational divide and the impact of remote work on skills development. While we're not sure of the "right" answer, we conclude that advocating for more flexible, balanced, and inclusive work practices will foster richer workplace cultures in the future.

Read the transcript and notes for this episode on our website.

Key Takeaways

• The traditional 9-to-5 work model is becoming increasingly obsolete as recent graduates demand more flexible working environments.
• Boundaries, work-life balance, and the role of technology have become critical topics for new professionals entering the job market.
• There is a noticeable divide in how different generations perceive the evolving workplace, with significant implications for hiring practices.
• Hiring managers increasingly say they'd prefer AI / automation over hiring recent graduates, indicating a disconnect in expectations.
• The future of work may not center around a physical office space, requiring a shift in perspective for employers.
• Companies may miss out on significant talent by adhering strictly to traditional workplace expectations instead of considering a hybrid approach.

Follow the podcast

If you enjoyed this episode, please follow Copper State of Mind in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app. We publish new episodes every other Friday. Just pick your preferred podcast player from this link, open the app, and click the button to “Follow” the show: https://www.copperstateofmind.show/listen

Need to hire a PR firm?

We demystify the process and give you some helpful advice in Episode 19: "How to Hire a Public Relations Agency in Arizona: Insider Tips for Executives and Marketing Directors"

Credits

Copper State of Mind, hosted by Abbie Fink and Dr. Adrian McIntyre, is a project of HMA Public Relations, a full-service public relations and marketing communications firm in Phoenix.

The show is recorded and produced by the team at Speed of Story, a B2B communications firm, and distributed by PHX.fm, the leading independent B2B podcast network in Arizona.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like the PRGN Presents podcast, hosted by Abbie Fink, featuring conversations about PR, marketing, and communications with members of the Public Relations Global Network, "the world’s local public relations agency.”

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past five years--and I mean, if you have, good for you; you've avoided a lot of nonsense that's been going on--you will have noticed that the world we live in has significantly, profoundly changed in a relatively short period of time.

And of course, at the same time, work has changed, partly in response to a global pandemic that sent a lot of people home, at least for a while, and partly in response to increasing advances in technology that have made remote and hybrid work ever more accessible to even more companies.

And there's a real interesting divide that's shaping up between the people who think this is a good thing and the people who think it's not. Abbie, what's on your mind?

(singing) "Working 9 to 5 is a way to make a living."

Or is it? The conversations I've been having recently with up and coming public relations professionals, truly anyone in the workplace right now, is really, is a traditional workplace ... nine to five might be a little bit of a stretch, but that show up every day in the morning and work until the end of the day, every day, the way that the workplace needs to be. Are we going back to that? Do we need to go back to that?

And as we're finding and as more and more studies are coming out, talking to this, you know, the graduating class of 20 25, these graduates think that's a thing of the past, that you don't need to be in an office every single day from nine to five to be a productive member of a team.

And those of us with multigenerational workplaces really have to think about how that's going to impact the work that we do and is it something that we need to concern ourselves with or are we just going to say, okay, fine, graduates, you can think that way, but then you're not going to be getting a job with my company.

And if we take that stance, are we leaving out an incredible resource of smart, creative, technology driven professionals just because we want them in a workplace and they don't want to be there?

You know, it's interesting. It's almost graduation for colleges and universities across the country, the world really. For 11 years I taught in higher education, both as a graduate student then and as a professor. And looking back, that was ... it's been a while now. But one of my favorite things ... actually, of all the things you have to do as a professor, there's like nine or 10 types of things you have to do. And I really only liked two of them.

One was being in the classroom with students, who are always interesting, always curious, always challenging. And the second was meeting with them in office hours, where they would bring their very real questions, not just about the material we were talking about in the course, but about life and careers and how to navigate.

And it seems to me that the questions students are asking today are not unlike the questions they were asking back then, except for the specific content of the question has really changed. Because the world, as I said, has changed. You talk to a lot of students every single year. What are they asking you these days?

Well, yeah, you know, I just hosted a group of graduating seniors from Northern Arizona University a couple weeks ago, and amongst the more traditional types of questions, multiple times in multiple ways the questions had to do with workplace culture, having to do with the "boundaries," a word that I would have never addressed when I was interviewing for jobs.

But they really wanted to understand, you know, if I come to work for a place like HMA Public Relations, what does the typical day look like? But it wasn't about, I do this for this client and this for this client. It was really, do I need to be there every day in the office? Do I need to be there in the morning? Because I'm really much more productive in the late afternoon and early evening. What about nights and weekends? Because I have another job or I have this volunteer thing that I like to do?

And all extremely valuable questions. I mean, nothing was out of line. But the fact that they are thinking about it as part of their evaluation about whether or not they're going to come to work for someone when, you know, even as recently as maybe 10 years ago, it was, what is the job title, what is my salary, what are my benefits, how much vacation time am I going to get? And nothing that would lead you down the path of I will not be in the office on Tuesdays and Fridays after 4 o'clock. It just wasn't part of the vernacular.

And I think that's in part because this current graduating class has known only a hybrid environment. You know, they were in high school and college when the pandemic was at its peak. So they readily adapted to technology and doing classwork and interacting with their fellow students in an online way. They understand that they can be successful that way, at least in their own mind, from a college perspective. They completed their homework, they took their tests, they presented their papers. There's no reason for them to think that they can't do it in the workplace.

The real challenge, I think, is those of us that are managing workplaces and we may have again, an office like ours is multi generational. We have representation across all the different Gen X, Y, Zs, whatever they are all called these days. And we bring our own bias to that conversation about how we were raised in the workplace.

I'm not suggesting that anyone has to necessarily change their mind about how they want to orchestrate their own particular workplace. But whether or not recent college graduates fit into your cycle of hiring really is going to force you to take a look and decide.

And there are a couple studies that have been out, and one of them that we're kind of referencing here as we're chatting, basically says that hiring managers are actually thinking about whether or not they would rather fill the position using a robot or artificial intelligence than bringing on a recent college grad, that they would rather put the work out to a freelancer, which for those of my colleagues that are more in that consulting freelancing role, is a great opportunity.

But rather than bring on a full time employee who wants this remote hybrid environment, they're saying, you know, maybe we just won't fill the position at all. And maybe that works for today. But it seems a little shortsighted to me if the workplace of the future is going to need to accommodate this graduating class at some point. Are we shortchanging ourselves by kind of being so definitive in what we're looking for?

What I'm really struck by in all of this is the mismatch between many different narratives which just don't seem to make any sense taken collectively. And this is a very casual and somewhat irresponsible sociology that I'm doing here. But taken together, it seems as if everyone's searching for an explanation for something we simply can't explain yet. We don't really know what's going on.

We've got members of the administration, the Commerce Secretary, et cetera, saying that the future of America is people putting little tiny screws into devices in factories again, which is clearly a disconnect from what's actually happening and what kind of jobs people want.

We've got college graduates--ever optimistic, ever rosy in their outlook--saying, "oh sure," it's 80-something percent saying, "yes, I'll have no problem finding a job." And then as you pointed out, we had a whole bunch of hiring managers saying, "I'm not hiring these people!" 37% of the hiring managers said that they wouldn't do that, 44% said they'd rather give the job to an older freelancer instead of a new graduate.

What I think is interesting is that none of these people actually know the thing they claim to be speaking about. In other words, you've got a billionaire talking about how great it'll be when somebody works in a factory. You've got a hiring manager saying they'd rather hire a robot, which doesn't exist yet. So they're projecting some kind of imaginary ideal thing and at the same time having a negative stereotype of recent graduates who they probably also don't know a lot because they've been in university, maybe internships have exposed them, et cetera. But clearly there's a story about "the youth" that is being perpetuated here.

And then, of course, as much as I would like to take their side, I think there's a disconnect from reality if you've got recent graduates who essentially have been following the playbook for a career trajectory that does not exist anymore. And they're going to have a sort of rude awakening of their own.

I just don't know what to make of it. I don't know that there's anything definitive to say other than nobody seems to know anybody anymore. And we're making all these assumptions and statements about each other. But what we do know is that the workplace of the future is probably not a place. And that's something that I don't think we've fully wrapped our heads around.

A physical place, right?

Yeah.

So I think where I land on this, and this has been kind of my view for a while, when we might not have had the words to put to the content.

The context of online learning ... I taught classes online, and those have evolved from me recording my lectures and students just popping in and watching them at whatever time they wanted to, all the way up through and doing teaching through technology on Zoom or whatnot.

My concern has always been about the availability of online learning opened up tremendous opportunities for students that needed different learning environments, right? That their lifestyle, where they lived, what they were doing in their own world, they had to work if they were an athlete, whatever it might have--a dancer, you know, whatever it might have been--they needed a different learning environment and online learning gave them that.

So it allowed them to continue whatever they needed to do for in their personal lives and still get the education. I'm 100% on board with that. My concern has been what happens when those individuals are in the workplace, the physical space that they would come into every day. Because my feeling was they were missing some of the things that happen in a classroom that are not the textbook learning, the stuff that says the other person on your team isn't pulling their weight. And how do you navigate that so your grade doesn't fail? That teaches you how to be on a team. Or if the professor is, you're just not jiving with the professor. And you've got to figure out, you know, it's the only section of that class and it's the last class you need to graduate. You've got to figure it out. That's no different than working with a difficult boss or a difficult coworker.

So without some of that learning opportunities, were we creating a workplace or an individual that was coming into our workplace that didn't have those kind of skill sets? To some extent, I think that's true. I think that has happened.

But we have jumped ahead of that now. And the fact that this whole group of, well, we can call them kids, a whole group of kids are graduating who know nothing else. Do I then sound like the old relic in the room because I don't know how to do building a team online or dealing with my difficult boss on a screen right there. Am I the one that has to figure out how to do this? Because my workplace, my team, my employees all know how to do this.

So to the extent that we agree or disagree about the physicalness of coming into work and, and what the structure is of our work day, then we have to put the people into those positions that make the most sense. And that should never change. I don't want to hire someone simply because they're willing to work within my guidelines. I want them to be the best person for the job. I want them to have the talent and the skills to do it and, by the way, happen to be okay with. But I don't want to be so stubborn as to say but that other candidate who has told me at the interview all the other wonderful things, but they ...

The one thing that doesn't sit with me is this boundaries question. I'm probably the one going to lose out if I immediately stop my conversation with that individual because they've asked a question or they've had the nerve to suggest that there could be something different than what I am proposing. It doesn't mean I have to do. It doesn't mean I have to agree with it. But I certainly wouldn't want to stop the conversation from happening just because it doesn't fit with what I've been professing to do all this time.

And we're going to watch, you know, the return to work discussions will continue as large organizations, small organizations are all saying, you know, it's time to get to work, get the employees back into the office. And that might be the right thing for their particular business. They may or may not lose employees as a result of it. That's going to be a decision that they're going to have to make. I'm not inclined to make those kind of bold statements and tell someone that that's the right way or the wrong way to do it. I think it's very much dependent upon the business that you're in.

But I would want all of us to be open to the idea that this different way of thinking and this intent that these graduates have on creating a little bit more balance in their life isn't such a bad thing. And perhaps we can all learn from this discussion and expose ourselves to some new ways of thinking.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Copper State of Mind. If you enjoyed the conversation, please share it with a colleague who might also find this podcast valuable. It's easy to do. Just click the "Share" button in the app you're listening to now to pass it along. You can also follow Copper State of Mind in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app. We publish new episodes every other Friday.

Copper State of Mind is brought to you by HMA Public Relations, the oldest continuously operating PR firm in Arizona. The show is recorded and produced by the team at Speed of Story, a B2B communications firm in Phoenix, and distributed by PHX.fm, the leading independent B2B podcast network in Arizona.

For all of us here at Speed of Story and PHX.fm, I'm Adrian McIntyre. Thanks for listening and for sharing the show with others if you choose to do so. We hope you'll join us again for another episode of Copper State of Mind.