As companies gear up for millennials in the workforce, middle managers are removing their beer goggles and realizing that their layer of the organizational chart may no longer be needed.  The biggest complaint read on Glassdoor.com?  Middle management is pretty useless, even at companies known for having great corporate culture.  Most middle managers aren’t natural-born leaders; they are typically the rock stars of their position who got a promotion into management.  Great companies realize that more emphasis should be placed on who you with, not who you work for.  Furthermore, as terms like agile become more popular than a Brittany Furlan Vine post, it can be determined that bottlenecks occur at the middle management level, slowing companies from innovation.  When monitoring clock punches, lunch breaks, and bathroom breaks was a necessity on the job, middle managers were absolutely necessary.  Most companies with great cultures have come to realize that it’s not about where you work or how long you work, it’s about the quality of work you produce. The middle management position is becoming about as popular as MySpace.

How Millennials Are Redefining the Workplace

Employee is another term that is starting to be redefined as millennials don’t flock to Wall Street, but nerd out over startups and the appeal of startup culture.  Younger generations aren’t sprinting to jobs that scream stability as studies show most will forgo a fat paycheck in lieu of other cultural perks.  How does this trend affect the term employee?  The appeal of hiring contract employees is becoming more prevalent and can be beneficial to both the company and the person under contract, depending on the situation.  Intrapreneurship (corporate entrepreneurship) is on the rise as more companies are setting aside funding for fresh ideas from their employees combined with giving employees creative time to generate ideas.  Companies understand the value of serving as an incubator for their employee’s startup ideas, as it could benefit their bottom line.  Company hackathons are increasing in popularity and are essentially becoming internal startup competitions.  Taking this a step further, most millennials graduate college with a side business, such as a blog, a college project that launches a new product, or another creative way of making money like becoming a Tasker on TaskRabbit.  As millennials are bringing in income from other sources, they are becoming more like contestants on The Bachelor; they will use your company to get their 5 minutes of experience, but they probably won’t be around for the final rose ceremony.

Diminishing bureaucracy by overthrowing middle management and the redefining the term employee will create big shifts in the structure of companies in the next few years as more millennials enter the job market.  Couple this with other cultural trends like eliminating or never having job titles and posting everyone’s pay and it will be quite a different corporate cultural landscape in the not so distant future.  What other big picture shifts do you see happening as millennials migrate into the job market?  Holla at your HR Chick!