The average age of our employees is around 31 and is higher than the one of 10 years ago. The main reason why this happens is still the post-COVID-effect, which promotes the sense of safety, as a need, very high in the rank of priorities for employees. We didn’t have that much mobility. We are also not growing at the rates we grew in all the other periods when we had an organic growth, our normal turnover did not happen during these 3 years – In short, the employees who were young, now grew.

I think the key word is indeed “drive”. We’ve seen people with no degree, with a completely unrelated degree, and with a degree in the broader industry, who have evolved tremendously. The main difference is the drive. Although of course higher education does not produce particularly practical knowledge in these professions, those who have a relevant, in the broad sense, degree along with their drive, do have an advantage so to speak, because they understand better the things that one has to learn empirically. And of course, it is the company’s job to create an environment with a culture that promotes this.

I don’t think young people express their needs as much as I would like myself to express them, as part of the administration. They do not express their needs explicitly and strongly. It is more like their inner feelings and thoughts remain their own. So the best source of understanding them, funny as it is, are the exit interviews.

There you discover the needs of people that in theory you should have had the environment, the process, and the will to have already discovered during their stay at your company. There is a distance between young people’s thoughts, expectations, feelings and their expression towards their work environment. We think this is a big challenge for company: To create the right culture and processes that will allow us to manage and understand the needs of young people in advance.

It is essential to be able to express your thoughts. It’s not a ” nice to have” trait, it’s a must have. The 22-year-old’s thinking is the most valuable thing we can shed our light to, based on the projects we are running.

I have no easy answer, no culture manual. I think we are relatively lucky because our company’s purpose is inherently creative and every day is a different day in terms of project and collaboration. So practically, every day we all “dig” within ourselves to find creativity, and in reality no one is spared in this. The perspective of someone just starting out is just as valuable as the perspective of someone with 10 years of experience. We are lucky because we provide the space for someone to express their creativity.

According to surveys, the number one criterion for younger employees is the work environment. Team spirit, recognition for effort, opportunities for learning and development. This is the number one need.

Number two is the salary and there is an impressive new feature about that, the earnings are now measured in relation to the effort required. It is not an absolute in itself. Obviously all the other criteria, such as the possibility of development and the name of the company are important, but ranking much lower. These two criteria are the most impressive.

I feel that there is also a significant change in recent years, a trend that started just before COVID but is, post COVID, more evident: Young people are not paying so much attention to planning a career with long-term thinking practice. Young people don’t think strategically, they just think about the next step.

Two generations ago we used to join a company and spend our whole lives there, a generation ago we changed 5 companies during our lifetime. Now you can change industry, company, position and genre or do freelancing, the possibilities seem endless. You look at resumes and you see 20 lines of experience, just at the age of 28. This is very similar to the situation we experienced, and still exists in the Balkans in 2006-2007, when we started building our companies, where people had the mentality of just looking to work the next year and then see what happens.

I believe that the next generation is a much more self-confident generation, with a clear goal to further improve their lives. Starting from a high standard of living, compared to the past, in the new generation there is a pervasive self-confidence and optimism that existed of course also in the Balkans that started as a starting point to develop in the 90’s. So in 2007, a Balkan 25-year-old was living their own “spring”. These are all signs of a society being recreated.

At the same time, in the current situation, both in the Balkans and in Greece, I believe that the main characteristic is that all these very big changes come from the way young people have grown up. A 26-year-old worker today grew up during the financial crisis and when they entered the university, they were faced with coronavirus, war, inflation etc. Young people today have grown up with the message that you never know what tomorrow will bring. The concept of stability previous generations grew up with has completely changed. It is very normal not to make long term plans. When your life has changed so profoundly, what plans do you make? This is how I can interpret all this parallel mobility.

I think that this fatigue young people are experiencing is firstly emotional.

In a sense I recognize in companies the obligation now, even more than before, to be able to highlight, beyond stability and security, the joy of life. The joy of creation, the joy of work-which allows you to work in balance to your personal life. Because what we did in our own generation, working 15 hours a day, 7 days a week, was not healthy either. Young people no longer want this, they experienced it as children-their parents worked all day and thus were absent. This has emotionally left them with a trauma. Then came the financial crisis, so the whole feeling of young people is logically now that of frustration: They didn’t enjoy their parents as much when they were children and, financially speaking, everything now seems to have been for nothing.

Since Covid we were obviously all working remotely, we gradually built a system that started to allow physical presence in the office. We finally settled for 2 days work from home, 3 days at the office. But we did have a system that allowed this before Covid as a company, we recognized this possibility. It was of finite use, because by definition teamwork is a main feature of what we do. No one can produce anything alone, so you need to work with many people from different departments.

What we have seen is that, in the end, being in the office has the following advantages:

First of all it allows us to form a united culture. Culture means people and that requires physical contact.

Secondly, productivity was extremely low. In a job like ours, micro collaboration, talking in the hallway is everything. It’s the momentum that counts. The second important effect of distance was on creativity. Of course, you can brainstorm online, but work is not a moment you call brainstorming. Work, creative work is when you have a conversation in the hallway, when you pick up the phone and share your thoughts, when you are having coffee. All these moments multiply our creativity.

And that’s key, that micro-collaboration, because if we want to give people the ability to develop quickly, we have to be able to convey small moments of experience to them in an easy, fast way. That is, convey to them what the person next to them does.

My sense is also that being home too much can emotionally affect you. What we call creativity is produced by being with other people, not because you spend your day googling. We need to socially understand what others care about in order to better understand the perception of our work. Part of socialization, in addition to the environment, friendship and family, are also your colleagues in the office. A world that, by definition, brings you into systematic contact with people from social circles that you would not possibly have the opportunity to meet elsewhere. That can often broaden your social horizons.

Although proud of many things, the need to improve in this area is a big drive for us. The environment has changed and we are called to adapt. We have before us every day a very big challenge for improvement. And this is one of the features we are proud of, because after all we have been living and growing as a company for 30 years. Our ability to listen to what is happening all the time and to adapt I think is one of the main characteristics of our company, but it is also one of the characteristics that if an organization does not have, it cannot survive.

We have about 400 employees, the management team is 50. Everyone works in services that are usually dedicated to one customer. Our cooperation is thus a bit ambiguous, young employees often have to understand our own culture and at the same time the client’s culture, so attracting them remains an important bet for us. What we think is a great advantage though is precisely the range of clients and industries that enables everyone working with us to have options and possibilities. It is still a challenge to be able to communicate these possibilities to young people as best as possible.

I was saying back then that young people will always look for opportunities.

The first wealth is having options, the second is having the money.

So I imagine that young people who are more qualified now, more ambitious, more courageous, have more self-confidence, and have a point of view of the world from a small age thanks to technology, have and will continue to look for more options, each time choosing the one that is right for them.

Another feature that I believe will take a more structured form in the future is the need for the people to have much greater ownership of an organazation. A young person now, in order to continue to develop and stay within an organization, will want to feel that they own part of the product. I don’t know yet the way, but maybe ownership will be your ability to shape your schedule, your team, the object you are working on, the project you deliver, to shape your work with much more autonomy compared to today. I imagine that this will evolve a lot while growing professionally.

On the other hand, the big challenge is that, precisely because people do not think about the long term, we must find a way for constant job hopping to coexist with chances of personal development. I believe that sometimes job hopping is done to an excessive degree and I feel that this prevents everyone from benefiting personally from staying at a job long enough. I would say that sometimes job hopping is done in a bit of a superficial and “consumer mindset” manner.

Correctly. The difficult thing here is to train young managers. This is a milestone in the career of every young person, the moment when they acquire their first subordinates. When you are 28 and trying to define yourself plus one, two, three subordinates, you change a lot while you are still in formation yourself, basically having two full time jobs- to shape yourself and to shape others. And of course take responsibility for everything. This is a special challenge for a company, to teach young managers to manage subtle issues of subordinates, to manage a team and not “burning” subordinates because they haven’t found their way yet.

If we add job hopping to this, the margins become even narrower. When the mindset is to evolve, to change, to go to the next thing, the limits of interaction can narrow, employees easily change their subject and do not insist on cooperation with their superiors and vice versa.

Dare to Try. The passion for testing, this is the most important thing, this will lead the youth further ahead.

Businesses only progress if their individual parts progress, most of them at least.So, your own development, the development of each and every member of your group, helps the company to develop.

Coming back to the question, I think the passion to evolve is the driving force. This passion should lead the employer to actions and not to omissions.

Try to act. Dare to Try. These efforts ultimately build your capital.

During a recent interview Obama gave to the LinkedIn Chief Editor, who asked him what he would advise young people to do starting their career, he said that he has seen so many talented people who can describe and do tremendous analysis on a problem, but they don’t get things done. I would say the same about one’s career: Take steps, even if they are the wrong ones. If you don’t do it while tou are 28 years old, when? What do you have to lose now?

So Get Things Done in your work and especially for yourself.