How PwC Keeps Millennials Engaged

“Hi, I’m Bob Moritz. You may remember me from such management publications as ‘What Women Really Want From Their CEO’, ‘How to Think Yourself to Efficiency, Fast’ and ‘Networking Over Breakfast: Leveraging Your Familial Intimacy to Add Value and Insight’”

Here is Bob Moritz doing his best impression of ‘Blue Steel’. If you look closely, you can see the lines on his forehead where his brain was removed.

    

For the unaware, Bob Moritz isn’t a real person. Bob Moritz is a theoretical construct formulated by a team of public relations experts, risk management gurus and personal brand consultants over a long weekend spent drinking prosecco in chalet somewhere in Central Europe. The amorphous global chairman of accounting behemoth PwC remains permanently shrouded inside a large black edifice at PwC HQ in New York. Each year, new hires are required to circumambulate the structure seven times as part of their induction programme. In the below article, published in the esteemed Harvard Business Review, Bob elucidates the true nature of that most mysterious of mammalians, the millennial, in an article oozing with the special kind of contempt usually reserved by the British Tory party towards single mothers and the unemployed.

https://hbr.org/2014/11/the-us-chairman-of-pwc-on-keeping-millennials-engaged

Of course, as our readers are too busy being productive to read through the whole article themselves, lest their weak willed psyches be sucked mercilessly into the squalid depths of the world wide web while on company time, we have generously high-levelled the article for you. Going forward, we hope you can leverage this insight into appeasing your own corporate overlords (providing, of course, that this aligns with your relevant core competencies).

The narrative of the piece follows Bob on a metaphorical journey from the halcyon days of the 1980s, when partners had first dibs on the secretaries and when you accepted unquestionably the intrinsic and unerring affinity between the company's profit levels and the moral good of the universe, to the strange new world of search engines and diversity panels. ‘What’s corporate social responsibility?’ he asks, moments before his door is rammed down an unshaven Occupy protester on his way back from the unemployment office.

But his odyssey isn’t all smooth sailing, as Bob himself acknowledges:

'I didn’t realize how little I really knew about these young people in the workforce until PwC collaborated with researchers from the University of Southern California and London Business School in 2011–2012 on a study of Millennials and their levels of engagement*”.

* Engagement level, by the way, is the term used to replace ‘happiness’ in George Orwell’s novel ‘1984’.

Now Bob, modern Corporate Executive as he is, has actually blogged extensively on his two children. Presuming Bob wan't going around knocking up hood-rats in his pre-teens, this would mean his children would have been born somewhere between the early 80s and the early 90s, which places them squarely in the (admittedly arbitrary) millennial age grouping. Yet still he feels the best way to understand this latest generation of corporate drones is to hire a fleet of university researchers, presumably at great expense, to provide them with nuggets such as this:

‘[young people] expect their company to give them time to have a personal life.’

This truly is groundbreaking stuff.

The study goes on to ‘quantify some very real generational differences’, and reveals that:

‘Millennials are ‘adept at leveraging technological advances to be more flexible’

which is quite possibly the most fucking ridiculous assembly of words I have come across since my girlfriend asked why I couldn’t be more emotionally supportive of her 4 hour interpretive dance recital. Given that leverage is a direct synonym for ‘use’, that ‘technological advances’ means IT, and that being flexible, in any modern corporate environment, basically means ‘doing less work’, I think what he’s saying is that we need to stop using facebook in the office.

Ultimately, Bob (which, urban dictionary informs me, is also an acronym for ‘battery operated boyfriend’) emerges victorious from the byzantine world of employee feedback surveys & diversity quotas to reach a fittingly dramatic and spiritually enlightening denouement:

“PwC’s leaders saw that we had to respond to this research in a radical way. So we’ve turned our traditional human-capital approach on its head, developing a system of evidence-based HR practices that address the shifting needs of our workforce. A greater emphasis on nontraditional career models sometimes gives our clients pause, but we’ve learned the benefits of sticking to our people commitments.”

Cheers Bob, it's good to know that some firm action is being taken. We'd hate to think you're just using meaningless buzzwords to obscure the corporate world's ambivalence towards the human race.