Is your 24 year old colleague is more forward about getting what they want, faster, than you ever were? Claire Stewart finds out whether it's millennials who need to check their attitude, and approach.
Recently, a story about a group of young interns in the US went viral. The group had been given jobs in a firm with a strict dress code which the interns thought was unfair on the basis they didn't have client facing roles.
Worse, they said, there was a woman who always wore sneakers or flat comfortable shoes in the office.
So they wrote a petition to the chief executive, and all bar one of the group signed it.
The following day they were called into the CEO's office and rather than the discussion about dress code they expected, were fired.
The interns, so the story goes, were shocked and appalled at the unfairness of it. Why had no-one told them the woman wearing sneakers was an ex-service woman who had lost a leg in battle? Why should they be sacked over a petition?
The popularity of the anecdote reveals many of the assumptions people revel in about young workers – seasoned colleagues laugh at their inappropriate behaviour and scoff at their stupidity, safe in the knowledge they never would have done the same.
But has social media, and the immediate and transactional nature of the world young millennials grew up in, really changed the way they communicate? Or is it just the age old issue of emotional intelligence and the naivety of youth.
Dr Kristin Carson believes it's a combination of both, but that even within age groups, emotional intelligence differs.
"It's a matter of aptitude. At different ages some may be more social, others more academic. The level of maturity factors into that too, where some people are naturally better at handling serious or more difficult situations."
Carson is 31 and admits she's done a lot of growing up from when she was two points shy of failing year 12. Not having done any science in senior school she was on the path to doing a fitness instructor course at TAFE, when she saw a pamphlet for a certificate three in laboratory skills.
It put her on the path to becoming a doctor and senior scientist in respiratory medicine at The University of Adelaide. She grew up fast, working almost immediately with patients many who were children with life threatening illnesses.
"Certainly a lot of my peers were still in school mode because they went through the traditional university level early on, whereas sitting there with crying parents, being thrown in the deep end is a very different experience and you learn from that very quickly as a result."
Carson is in a particular position of having also owned her own retail food franchise. As a result, she has been in charge of a varied group of younger people, "each with their own individual quirks and nuances" but all definitely taking a different approach to communicating and networking than she had.
"In science and medicine, I tend to get more of the formality in communications but on the business side, having just negotiated the sale of my business, I would get much shorter, informal responses or just text messages, very forward introductions and expectations."
She has occasionally taken juniors aside to remind them a certain level of formality is required in the workplace, and that there is a time and place when you can speak to people a particular way.
"I remember having the same sort of conversations with my bosses when I started out at Video Ezy, painful as they were, I learned through trial and error."
Gen George is 25, and has been chief executive of OneShift - the online employment company she founded - for four years.
She is quick to point out that how people relate to team members shouldn't be based on age. It should be a question of similar values and motives.
"I get told all my young staff must be really lazy, and I think, ahh, no, I'm one of them." Admittedly she exhibits a level of maturity beyond her age, although that's something she says her siblings would dispute.
But she concedes there is a difference in the way even young twenty-somethings now operate, from those approaching their thirties.
"My younger brother is four years younger than me. His 21st was basically to put a slideshow on that showed every embarrassing thing he ever did, whereas with my older brother, you had to have the more formal speech which explained everything in detail.
"It shows a different mind shift. People now are used to everything instantaneously."
That doesn't mean older workers should adjust their own work style to fit in with the evolution in the workplace. "It's not about changing people, because the diversity of knowledge brings diversity to the team, and that allows you to make different decisions."
Instead, younger workers are cherry picking what they see has and hasn't worked for their older counterparts, partly through observation but also because it's advice being handed down through mentoring. Whether that means they get to skip the trial and error learning curve in their career remains to be seen.
George says the advent of technology and sites like LinkedIn and Glassdoor, which reviews employers, provides significantly more instant visibility about what works.
That also means it's now harder for a boss who makes a mistake to hide than it was 20 years ago, she says.
The generational difference: young bosses are embracing the public "stuff up", and George says many regularly post to collaborative sites about their mistakes, asking if anyone else had stuffed up that week and what they'd learned.
It's a long way from the way people used to work? Yes, definitely, she says.