Recently I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of about two dozen high school honor students.  I asked them to picture in their minds the ideal workplace, and describe what it would look like.  Their answers were:

• Fun
• High-tech
• No interruptions
• No work.

That was pretty much it.  Money wasn’t even mentioned.  Neither were benefits.  Or career advancement.  The funny thing is, none of their answers should really come as a surprise.  Is your organization a fun place to work?  How many times have we heard people say, “When it isn’t fun anymore, it’s time to leave?”  Is laughter a regular occurrence in your office?  Or do people actually refrain from laughing, because they don’t want to be seen as “goofing off?”  Sometimes we forget that laughter is just as contagious as cynicism.  Which would you rather have?  Unless you have a thing for high turnover, maybe you’d better start looking at ways to create a fun environment.

Hi-tech should be obvious, but all too often office technology becomes a burden, when it should be a performance booster.  Instead of drowning your people in information, and leaving them starved for knowledge, it should help them learn quickly, so they can make informed decisions, and grow in wisdom and experience.  And when they gain more personal knowledge and experience, the market value of your organization increases as well.  That's because for most organizations, intellectual capital is worth more than financial capital.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt”

How many times have you heard that?  Or said it?  In many organizations, there’s little difference between cell phones, Blackberrys, and Martha Stewart’s ankle bracelet.  And let’s not forget the dreaded cubicle.  Those wonderful optimizers of space give your people lots of opportunities for deep thinking and reflection, right?

Which brings us to the last item, which is no work at all.  As we discussed this a little further, I found out what they meant.  They were talking about the amount of unproductive grunt work they encounter in their homework assignments.  The same goes for knowledge workers.  Reading pages of useless memos.  Sifting through mounds of reports.  Doing administrative chores, timesheets, trip reports, weekly reports, monthly reports, quarterly reports, you name it.  Plus, throw in Sarbanes-Oxley, and all the other regulations we need to comply with.  At the end of the day, it's no wonder there is very little time, energy, or enthusiasm left to do real knowledge work.  Meeting all the administrative deadlines may keep you out of trouble, but it’s certainly not very fulfilling.

Now you know what Gen Y knowledge workers will be expecting when they show up at your door, looking for a – heck, you can’t even call it a job anymore.  What do you call it?  Welcome to Workplace 2.0.