Growth at a Startup: Learnin the most from Young Colleagues

As an employee at a startup, your colleagues and supervisors generally don’t act like those hierarchal roles you see, perhaps at a Multi-National Corporation. The space is instead filled with tea talks that give you fresh perspectives over things, Innovative skills- let’s be honest, it takes time to get familiar with connecting your email accounts to cloud storage or video conference tools, and creative dynamism that expands beyond the Marketing department. Undoubtedly, through their adaptable and fun-seeking traits, the youth show significantly higher levels of entrepreneurial intention than adults.

You may feel that a bigger corporation might give you a sense of belonging to a community of people known for their technical, collaborative, innovative skills. But startups are a good way of providing the “push” you might need for the quantitative targets, compliance-ridden behavior, and proactivity to break through unwanted hierarchal pressure. But simple tasks or duties won’t prepare you for it, it’s the people, especially someone you see yourself in, that produce change. Relatability is perhaps one of the most important factors to influence young minds. So exactly how do people who seem relatable, with the same energy, and who have recently taken a similar phase, impact you?

It's Time to Onboard

When it’s someone your age or even a few years older or younger, it feels natural to deal with him/her with more empathy and understanding. Hiring managers can understand the employee’s needs and can provide them with ideal learning opportunities. Whether it is one-on-one meetings with each team member or the time to evaluate their projects, contemporary leaders can understand the skills their employees are most comfortable with and the regions that are challenging for them, thus personalized advice given to them makes adjusting new employees easier.

Imitating the High Performers

Age-mate coworkers can comprehend new trends like the accessibility for remote work, a training culture, and effective learning and development challenges at the same level. This will help the slow learner to imitate the high-performing young minds at a faster pace.

In this techno-based era, startups are facing brand new challenges that require young minds who can deal with a great deal of trial and error to solve them. These challenges are supporting both the company and the colleagues who are learning from each other’s talent as well as from their mistakes.=

The Competitive Scenario

Have you ever seen your college mate preparing material for a new quiz and it immediately drives you to work on your preparation too? well, young employees are generally competing with each other and try to impress with their results. This helps them to excel in their given roles which in turn increases the productivity of the organization, thus the enthusiasm among the young team members could bring positive outcomes both for the employee and for the enterprise on the whole.

Filling the Communication Gap

A workplace with fresh employees of the same age group can relish via the Social Media oriented work strategies. Forget those heavy formal emails as the younger peers are very comfortable communicating via an emoji-laden WhatsApp message or sending quick updates on Slack channels. It might seem casual but the colleagues are well aware of the task.

According to a survey, more than 75% of today’s workers think the primary difference between generations in the workplace is communication styles—and if the young colleagues are contacting each other on their own it breaks down the informal walls between them and lets them take ownership of their roles.

The Happy Workplace

Millennials and Gen-Zs are in the headlines for creating a positive and flexible work environment themselves. They are well aware of today’s needs and know how to deal with people from different races, religions, ethnicities as well genders, developing more trust among each other and enjoying the liberty to work without stereotyping or judgment.

Young Adaptations

Another interesting thing is that the youth that forms workplace teams are again categorized into two subclasses. The millennial employees need flexibility and freedom, however, the younger Generation Z focuses on job security. It means the same strategy wouldn’t bring all-solution. This may seem undesirable, but good management understands the need to develop approaches that would suit different needs as after all employees working at their pace and with their style feel more satisfied and the ease allows them to deliver better results. In addition to that, colleagues with minimum age differences can easily adopt each other’s positive traits while working as a team, where timings, tasks, and responsibilities can be easily shared and executed within the deadlines.

Diversions

The young hires who have worked in companies that follow the same norms throughout their lifespan can learn novel alterations from their newly joined startup peers. For instance, if they have worked in a business where IT developers were just writing the codes all day, following the old school ways of performing things, can become efficient by observing another brilliant young colleague, who has advanced techno–based approaches and coding tricks up their sleeve.

Effective Training:

A workplace where young employees dominate can design effective training programs to teach them new skills. It has been observed that the formally designed programs do not work well in such cases, thus, small attempts within the workplace to cater to the employee’s unique requirements grab the employee's attention. This will help to enhance the on-the-job learning opportunities where a millennial co-worker can help his/her Gen Z colleague at the beginning stage of their roles, by identifying shortcuts, sharing what areas to focus on, and being more informally communicative and open to multiple queries and ideas,

Mutual Understanding

Workmates at growing enterprises can figure out together what parts of your job are most rewarding and which areas are the most challenging. They can gradually distinguish the paths that lead to reaching short- and long-term career goals. Moreover, they can mutually plan to reach some other career goals or bring some productive alterations at their workplace, e.g. using a different communication app/tool, suggesting the use of updated software versions that would reduce time spent on a task.

The Honest Feed Back

During the on-the-job opportunities, contemporary employees present better feedback on each other’s work, there are no “When I was your age” expectations and “Figure on your own” comments for people who need constructive, genuine help/advice. Honest and custom feedback allows young-growth-oriented members to identify what potential they have and where improvement is crucial.