I am about to employ my first new recruit in her 20s. Like many bosses, I will be facing the issues of communicating with 'Generation Y' (loosely defined as people born since about 1980). And if you believe all the hype, it isn't going to be easy.

Generation Y are supposed to be "demanding, selfish, text-addicted job hoppers with little loyalty to their employers". Also known as the iPod Generation, they are the focus of a shed load of research and comment by management journals, business schools and market trend analysts.

But some recent research on 'Bookend Generations' from the US-based Center for Work-Life Policy suggests it may not be so bad after all (phew).

Just like the Baby Boomers (folk in their 50s and 60s), they "crave flexibility, personal growth, connection and opportunities to 'give back'." That sounds just like the sort of person I really like working with!

Ashridge also has a fascinating Generation Y research project which tested peoples' ideas of the stereotype Gen Y'er with the reality - see the picture below for the alleged characteristics that were found to have strong, weak or mixed support in their research findings:

Some tips for communicating with Generation Y

So given all this stuff I've been reading and thinking about, I thought it would be worth sharing with you a few lessons I have pulled from the research regarding the art of successful communication with your Gen Y employees:

1. Guess what. For the most technologically-savvy generation who spend their lives on Facebook, they actually prefer face-to-face communication to emails, texts or phone calls. In that respect, they are the same as... um, let me see... 100% of the rest of the population. Get out there and walk about. Be visible. Your accessibility, your personal connection with staff and your willingness to chat seriously but informally on a wide range of business issues are very, very important.

2. They crave frequent and honest feedback - and quickly. They're not as much 'impatient' as 'immediate', according to Tammy Erickson, author of Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide To Thriving At Work. So good communication means talking about issues promptly and decisively, or at the very least managing their expectations explicitly about how long it will take before you can have that conversation. Don't let things fester.

3. They have little interest in traditional corporate rituals. So if your internal communications systems are all based on a staff newsletter plus monthly team meetings to cascade information in a structured way, expect to see Gen Y'ers looking for ways to short-cut the system so they can get the news much quicker.

4. They love the chance to offer ideas and suggestions, and expect these to be taken seriously. But look for faster ways to capture and move on these ideas - the old-fashioned 'suggestion scheme' or postbox in the corner of HQ won't really cut it. Be aware they may need coaching and support to learn ways to put forward their ideas in a constructive and positive way. Be open to learn from their ideas and their understanding of the potential internal communication uses of new technologies and social media.

5. All the research points to a clear need to communicate your corporate vision and values clearly from the start. Corporate responsibility and reputation really matters to Gen Y'ers, as do things like community involvement.

6. Unfortunately (she says with an old-fashioned sigh), English grammar has not been taught well in schools for some time. So don't be surprised if your Gen Y'ers also need your help to improve their writing skills, and to learn the need for professionalism in even casual communications. They will take their lead from you on this.

The best employee communications advice for the construction sector

My colleague Paul Wilkinson at pwcom 2.0 has also written an excellent blog post about Generation Y. He points out that the current construction industry, faced with a deep recession and the return of adversarial behaviours, will not be an attractive industry for these young people. To attract them, we would need to achieve "a committed change in culture... and any change shouldn't be reversed simply because of a worsening economic climate." 

These are wise words - already I see communication suffering as doors close. Across the industry managers are retreating into their offices, huddling in secretive Board meetings, emerging tense and taciturn. Swift, open, relaxed employee communications is rarer than hen's teeth right now.

However, the recent Channel 4 'Undercover Boss' programme gave me more cause for optimism.

Last week's programme showed Stephen Martin, the boss of the Clugston Group, a medium-sized civil engineering company in Humberside, go undercover for a fortnight - posing as 'Martin Walker', an ordinary co-worker learning the ropes.

In doing so, he got the opportunity to listen purposefully to what his employees really thought about the company and to learn what their communication needs are.

"Our key messages were just not getting through to people... People working on shift on a large site do not have time to read newsletters or log onto websites. You have to communicate with people on their terms, and it is different for every location. One size does not fit all," he told the FT (an interesting article to read also for tips on how best to deal with staff anxiety in recessionary times, by the way).

Stephen Martin has published his own '10 tips' sharing online what he learned from the experience. Everything is about communication. It is the best advice for businesses in this sector that I have seen in a long time. There's also a good podcast to listen to.

By the way, one of the other excellent things Stephen Martin did, in my opinion, was to link up the old-timers (Baby Boomers like Dick Sutton with 36 years' valuable experience) with the youngsters (Generation Y new recruits like Les Parker). Thus Clugston has established a scheme called 'Bridge the Gap' to promote communication, mentoring and knowledge transfer between the generations.

This is everything that the Center for Work-Life Policy, Ashridge and other researchers highlight as a vital way to get the best from Gen Y - and all our generations of workers.

The FT has started another of its excellent Mastering Management series this week. 

The focus of this special report, predictably, is on managing in a downturn. And I'm heartened to see the importance of internal and external communications highlighted so clearly. Here's an extract from Stefan Stern's intro (I've put bits in bold):

"... There are only so many ways you can tell a company to 'conserve cash'. It will probably turn out to be the business catchphrase of 2009. But while managers are understandably in a hurry to stem the flow of cash out of the building, in particular by reducing headcount, they risk cutting too deeply into the flesh of the organisation, and making future recovery much harder to achieve. Easy advice for an outsider to give – and hard for a manager to take for when survival is the number one priority – but sound advice all the same. Don’t get rid of the people who actually make your products and services worth buying in the first place.

"Second, the rumour mill is almost as big an enemy to senior management right now as collapsing customer demand. All the management gurus agree that leaders have to invest much more time than they might think is necessary into communicating with their staff. And “communicating” means listening as well as telling. In his new book The Leadership Code, Dave Ulrich estimates that a message may have to be communicated as many as 10 times, in a variety of means or channels, for it to get through and be understood.

"Offering as much certainty as possible will also help kill rumours. Binna Kandola, managing partner of business psychologists Pearn Kandola, argues that knowing you have lost your job is a better outcome for most employees than being in the dark about your future.

"Third, keeping your head down, retreating from markets and turning introspective, while a natural human response to bad news, is a terrible option for businesses. Now is not the time to abandon partnerships and joint ventures, or to close yourself off to other outside influences. Keep an open mind to new initiatives, remain an active networker and ensure the organisation is not collectively burying its head in the sand.

"Fourth, remember that recovery will come – eventually. Research and development needs to continue. Revenue streams that may have temporarily dried up will start to flow again. But capacity that you cut back on now may be hard to resurrect. And again, excessive redundancies – which carry a significant cost in any case – will deprive you of the talent you need to make the most of the upturn. You will only have to hire it back again, at great expense, in a year’s time."

We all have words we hate. I happen to detest the word 'tasty'. It’s a meaningless, lazy adjective. It gives me traumatic flashbacks to the “tasty, tasty, very very tasty” jingle for Bran Flakes in the 1980s.

There are more of my personal favourites also listed this week in the Guardian’s poll of hated words.

But it was the Today programme yesterday that really set me thinking about this again. Was it just me, or did anyone else squirm at the interview with Nissan’s Senior VP who explained that the firm had to sack a quarter of its workforce in Sunderland in order to “rightsize our operations to the market demand”?

'Rightsizing' first appeared as a term in the late 1980s, but took hold from the mid-90s as an alternative to the previous favourite 'downsizing'. I hadn’t heard it for a while, but the current business climate has obviously given it a new lease of life.

In fact, its more youthful cousin 'dynamic rightsizing' this week joins a prestigious list of management jargon celebrated by the FT's Lucy Kellaway in her 2008 Top Twaddle Awards.

Lucy is a wonderful voice of common sense in a world too full of management gobbledygook. Her awards include a hideous collection of new verbs to join 'rightsize':

• to 'sunset' products (ie. stop selling them)
• to 'upgrade' someone (ie. make them redundant)
• to 'cascade around' information (ie. share?)
• to 'ladder off' (ie…. actually, I’ve no idea what this means)

The IT sector seems particularly prone to this sort of twaddle, but I have to admit that I’ve worked with a few companies in the built environment who might be accused of similar sins.

One was a construction collaboration software company (ok, I guess that’s IT again really) that kept banging on about  'acting in concert' with the construction industry. Even writing that phrase again years later, I still get pictures in my mind of subbies in the strings section trying to keep beat with Egan…

Consultants and architects can be a bit prone to this too sometimes: facilitated dynamic and collaborative engagement forums, structured iterative consultation exercises, transformational change in placemaking etc. etc. I’m sure you will know of other gems.

But the good news is that plain English is back in fashion. There are good business reasons for this. For a start, it attracts clients and improves your working relationships. It inspires trust.

A few years ago one copywriting consultancy even tried to put a financial value on clear expression, noting a 14 percent higher share price among plain-speaking companies compared to the FTSE 100 as a whole, and the worst jargon-junkies underperforming by 16 percent.

As the Observer noted at the time: “While successful companies will have a bias to simplicity, allowing a good story to tell itself, failing firms will be more likely to disguise bad news with vagueness and euphemisms… an onset of jargon and obfuscation may be an advance warning of a company on the slide.”

So, if you find yourself drawn towards total twaddle and baffling buzzwords, remember that firms that spell it out in simple words fare better.

Get it out of your system on the Plain English Campaign’s Gobbledygook Generator instead.

PS. My sincere apologies if you now have that irritating Bran Flakes jingle stuck in your head. I know I will be humming it all weekend.