A Glimpse of The Next Generation 

The Notre Dame students are understandably curious, some perhaps more than a little puzzled, by the old guy who sits near the rear of the classroom every day. One of them asks another skeptically, “Is he actually taking this class?” 

Yes, he is. After my 30-plus years of working in and around the office furniture/workplace market, I was afforded an amazing opportunity, a fellowship at the University of Notre Dame to study for a year. My program, the Inspired Leadership Initiative, is crafted for “experienced executives” to explore how they would like to design the next phase of their lives. Complete with a student ID, the requisite backpack and AirPods, and with sufficient awe at setting foot each day on one of the world’s premier universities, I became a student again, at 70 years old. But that’s not the story I am telling. 

Wittland (center) meets with his cohort each month to go over what the group learned and to hear a speaker from the university. Photos courtesy of Bill Wittland

The students at Notre Dame are not exactly a broadly representative cross section. They seem exceptionally bright and most appear mature well beyond their years. Very much a selective sample, they are, in some ways, the cream of the crop. That said, my months among them, observing and conversing, have given me some glimpses of the future of the office workplace where a good number of these young people will arrive soon. I suggest to you that the habits and preferences of these university students might tell us a good deal about the sorts of workplaces and workplace features we might want to expect and even design for in the near future. Here’s what I’ve seen. 

The students of today who will be your workforce of tomorrow are comfortable, adept, and confident in working anywhere. They have moved past defining work as fundamentally when they are in a classroom, or an office space even. They seem to understand their lives as students in this very agile mode, whether reading or researching or completing assignments. In addition, and I think this is instructive, they don’t seem to see their dorm rooms as places to study and work. They have plenty of other options around campus, and they use them. Their dorm rooms are places to NOT work. What does this tell us about the work from home option? Should we be thinking more broadly — work from anywhere — as opposed to predominantly the home office? This might be an especially important issue for product designers and manufacturers. 

University of Notre Dame President Rev. John I. Jenkins addresses the Inspired Leadership Initiative cohort.

It may be an obvious assumption, but at the risk of stating the obvious, the students of today who will be the workforce of tomorrow have high expectations for their technology tools. They want the technology at their disposal to work always and work optimally. They are offended when it does not. In addition, they are more than comfortable with using a variety of technology platforms and tool-types, even concurrently, and in fact seem to value a palette of technology tools at their disposal to get their work done optimally. A warning of sorts… be ready with enough technology horsepower to satisfy their appetites and, more importantly, to capitalize on the contributions you want them to make in your organization. Don’t enable them to think your company is a Luddite.  

Here’s a stunner, based on my campus observations, stop right now all the anxiety and debate about providing private offices, owned workspaces, and extreme acoustic privacy for concentrated work. These students are exceedingly adept at working in noisy common areas. The campus is filled with what office designers would call “touchdown spaces” (skip the Notre Dame football jokes). They may, at times, seek out a quiet spot for a video conference, but they certainly don’t seem to need privacy for most voice calls. And when they do need privacy for concentrated work, their ear buds work nicely. In fact, they use them nearly nonstop, not just to retreat into concentrated work. 

Related to the above observation, the students of today and your workforce of tomorrow seem to regularly choose community over solitude and privacy. They may even have solitary work to do, but they want to do it among others, amidst visual contact with human activity around them. A very high percentage of the student body here seems to seek out a place to perch and work in very public, high-traffic areas. They seem to thrive on the energy of a bustling student center, even if they have headphones blocking out the noise and their laptop as a portal to focus on and get their assignments finished and submitted. Even in the quieter loftiness of the Hesburgh Library, the students seem to gravitate toward settings where they value a bit less noise but where they can preserve visual contact with their peers (even ones of their grandparents’ vintage). 

This generation soon to populate your organizations seems to exhibit a passionate hunger for what is truly genuine. The students with whom I rub shoulders each day have lost any appetite for some of the stereotypical superficiality that is too often presented as a feature of their worldview. Nope, these young adults are ready to be part of organizations with workplaces and workplace policies that are grounded in meaningful values; things like honest and transparent company policies, respect for diversity of origin and outlook, opportunities to contribute to meaningful projects, openness to their ideas and imaginations, and more. Our workplaces had better shun anything that smacks of being shallow or perfunctory. 

Finally, to those of you who will be selecting and welcoming this next generation into your workplaces, I suggest that you hire for maturity. The cream of the crop of these young people have honed a maturity beyond their years. They care about ideas and creativity and the potential significance of work. Look for them, interview to discover them, welcome them into your organizations, and create pathways for them to make longer-term contributions to your success. 

I could fill a book and beyond with the lessons I have learned in these initial months of being a college student again. But no lesson is as valuable as the hope instilled in me by my treasured days among the students at Notre Dame. Keep a keen eye peeled for the richness they will bring to our workplaces. That’s all, I’ve got homework to do and classes to attend.

Bill Wittland is an industry veteran who is at the University of Notre Dame on a fellowship.