In my last post, I asked readers to share how they would try to motivate me to do a task I find incredibly boring and tedious. Apparently finding ways to get me to work isn’t tedious - I got some incredibly insightful responses:

• One reader challenged me to improve upon the process - if possible by leveraging new technology - to really demonstrate my great qualities to managers.

• One reader suggested that I teach myself to make the best of it. After all, there will always be unappealing tasks in life, and perhaps this is as good of a time as any to learn how to get through them.

• Another proposed that we make a tedious process of sorting through clothes to look for ink tags exciting by providing rewards for locating certain tags, thus encouraging both excitement and attention to detail.

• One e-mail I received aimed to shift my outlook from “What does this audit do for me?” to “By doing this audit, how am I helping my friends at work?”

So, right there, you’ve got four different ways to encourage an employee to get involved and committed to a boring task. Which one would work best to begin motivating some of your young employees?

My huge thanks to everyone who took time to register a comment or send an e-mail!

Rather than telling you what to do, I’d like to take some time today to ask you what to do. There is ample talent, insight, and managerial skill in this audience, and I’d like to put it to work.

I work in retail loss prevention, and one of the tasks we are required to do on a monthly basis is an ink tag audit. Ink tags, for those who aren’t familiar with them, are the long pieces of plastic that are stuck through items of clothing. They are difficult to remove without damaging or ruining the clothing (due to ink inside), and thus provide a deterrent to theft. The auditing process involves hitting the sales floor and counting hundreds of items of clothing to insure that we are up to standard.

I did one ink tag audit, and it was one too many. It’s a task that I will avoid ever doing again for any reason. It’s boring and time consuming. And that would be fine if I could picture some sort of benefit that doing ink tag audits would confer upon me in the future. But I can’t think of a single benefit. I don’t anticipate a future in retail loss prevention, I’m already comfortable with my ability to count to 100 and beyond, and I’m comfortable with my ability to understand and execute a standard (when I want to).

So, readers, here is the challenge:

How would you get me to care about an ink tag audit if you were going to ask me to do one? What would you do to try to relate it to my world, to my goals, or to my immediate benefit?

Leave comments with your responses, and I’ll be highlighting the most insightful responses in my next post!

I occasionally work for a photography company, either shooting photos or as a “helper” to do paperwork and help with sales.

At one shoot, I was trying to understand why parents were willing to pay so much for the sports photos we shoot. They’re great photos, but I looked at them and wondered aloud if my co-workers would be willing to pay what we asked for any of them because I couldn’t fathom a case in which I could.

One of my co-workers looked over and said, “Yeah, I’ve thought about it, and I realized that it’s pretty different when it’s your kids. Plus, these folks like basketball way more than you do. Think about if it was a picture of you with your favorite band - you’d pay it for that, right?”

Of course I would pay that price for a picture of me with Led Zeppelin. (Well, the three who are left.)

After that, the whole thing made sense to me, and I was much more confident about our product, which any one in sales can tell you is essential to being able to sell it.

This was a case where the “why” of the situation was vital, and once I understood that “why,” I was better at my job.

The “why” that will motivate your Generation Y employees isn’t always going to be concerned with your processes. It could be about your customers, your vendors, your equipment, your employees, their co-workers, their families, their friends, or their place in the world.

Once you’ve answered that “why” for your Millennial employees, they’ll get focused on the “how” of it, which is what you’ve wanted them to do all along.

Difficult selection processes can include:

• Applying in person. If someone won’t get out of his chair to come apply for the position you’re offering, this is not passionate person.
• Writing a resume. So, you employ people who are applying for their first job? Request a resume instead of giving them an application form - you’ll see very quickly who is willing to take a little time for their job and who isn’t.
• Taking a test. One public relations position I applied for required a writing test after the first round of interviews. I really enjoyed the test, and it got me fired up about the rest of the application process. If it hadn’t, I would’ve removed myself from the applicant pool with great haste.
• An interview on steroids. It’s one thing to sit down and speak with applicants to see what they say they’re like, and entirely another to force them to act to see what they’re really like. Some managers use a walk test during an interview, where they simply have an applicant follow them for a tour of the facility and gauge applicants’ interest and passion by observing how the applicant keeps up with their brisk pace.

Difficult to use selection processes can include:

• Not knowing where to apply. It doesn’t matter how motivated I am, if I don’t know when and where to apply, you’re going to have a hard time getting me in the door.
• Tons of meaningless or unrelated paperwork. It’s one thing to take a test related to what I’m doing, and entirely another to fill out forms that don’t seem to relate to what I want to do. If you have forms that seem obliquely related but you know they’re intimately related to the job, explain to applicants how they fit into the big picture.
• Lame people. Whether it’s boring, rude, or disinterested people, the easiest way to knock passionate potential employees out of a hiring process is to have them interact with people they know they won’t want to work with. No matter how well crafted the rest of the process is or how passionate the applicant is, staffing your selection process with grouches and bores will cost you talent.

In my last post, I said that you should make your selection process difficult. I want to explain that a little bit further, as there is a world of difference between “difficult” and “difficult to use.”

A difficult selection process begins with some barrier to entry that forces those with a real interest in the position to devote some valuable resource (time, energy, etc.) to be considered. The cost in time or energy is clear up-front.

A difficult to use selection process begins with a barrier to entry that makes it hard for even the most motivated applicant to understand how to apply. Nothing about the process is clear up-front.

A difficult selection process will include tests of relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities. Those who aren’t truly passionate and able won’t be able to complete them.

A difficult to use selection process will include irrelevant tests of patience and tolerance for B.S. Those who are truly motivated will be capable of completing them but completely unwilling to do so because they’d rather be pursuing their passions.

A difficult selection process will see the less motivated and qualified applicants slowly drop off as their ability and interest are exceeded by the tasks required of them.

A difficult to use selection process will see large swaths of people, both qualified and unqualified, drop out as they grow frustrated and confused by the process.

A difficult selection process will net you a motivated, passionate, skilled employee.

A difficult to use selection process will get you someone who can put up with a lot of crap, but wasn’t passionate enough about the actual work to seek out somewhere they knew they’d be doing something they love.

This weekend, my younger brother and I climbed Mt. Elbert, which is the highest mountain in Colorado. We dragged ourselves out of bed at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday and we hit the trail before sunrise. It’s not a technical climb, but it is a steep trail, and with the whole hike at an elevation over 10,000 feet, even slight exertion left us huffing and puffing.

So, aside from an excuse to write about mountaineering exploits and post a scenic picture, why am I telling you this?

It’s to illustrate a point - with the right motivation, young people can be convinced to do damn near anything.

Think about all the young employees you’ve had who struggle with getting into work at 8 a.m. What passions motivate them to the extent that they would climb out of bed at 4:30? I’ll bet you if you asked them, they’d tell you they have some. Maybe it’s biking or music or poetry or service or Shakespeare or any of the billion different human interests that exist.

We know that young people will get out of bed and hike miles and miles in thin air for the things we’re passionate about. But the real question is how to find the young people who will do the same thing for your business.

You have two options:

A. You can get them to start caring by relating their work to their passion. This is kind of like bringing the mountain to Muhammad. It’s not impossible, but it’s often more trouble than it’s worth.

B. You can hire people who are already passionate about your business. Don’t make your selection process easy - make it hard. When something is difficult, you know that only the passionate will complete it. If this weren’t the case, the top of the mountain would be a lot more crowded than this:

I’m sitting in the Gen Why offices on a sunny afternoon as I type this, drafting a document on providing feedback to teenagers, but right now I need a break. So, rather than continuing to think about the Teenage Feedback Report Card we’re working on, I wanted to write about something else: music.

I’m a huge music fan. When I work at the office, I listen to mp3s on my laptop. When I drive, I listen to mixed CDs that  I have slaved over. When I workout, I listen to my iPod. When I read in bed at night, I put on the stereo. Silence bothers me. And while I may be an extreme case, I know that music is an important part of life for most people found in my age bracket.

So, today, I wanted to take a quick look at a couple songs, and the lessons that those songs taught me about my bosses.

The song: “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” by Guns ‘N Roses.

(I know that this is originally a Bob Dylan song, by the way, but we were listening to Axl sing it.)

The experience: My boss came into the back of the house while I was washing dishes, shut the stereo off, and took it away because he was so sick of Axl “murdering a Dylan classic.” About ten minutes later, he came in, plugged the stereo back in, and apologized for being childish.

The lesson: I was initially pretty upset. After all, I was the one in the back of the house slaving over the sanitizer, so the way I saw it, I should be the one choosing the tunes. At first, I thought I was going to learn that my boss was  a jerk. When he came in to apologize, though, I learned that he was willing to do the right thing, even if it took him a few minutes. I ended learning a bit more about him because I saw him react to something that I’m also passionate about. He doesn’t get any points for style, but I commend him for being willing to share something about himself with his employees.

The song: “Ninja Rap” by Vanilla Ice

The experience: At my retail loss prevention job, we straight-up love the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. How much so? Well, in our office, we’ve got a white board with pictures of each of us drawn up as a ninja turtle and our statistics listed next to our turtle drawings. (I’m Michelangelo, if you’re wondering.) In spite of this light-hearted take on our jobs - or perhaps because of it - we’ve been excelling this year. We’ve held the traveling trophy for being the best store in the district for two months straight. So it seemed only natural one day when our boss downloaded “Ninja Rap” and we began dancing in the office to celebrate our performance.

The lesson: Two distinct lessons here: First, I find the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles highly motivational. They were a major part of the pop culture landscape of my childhood, and so it just makes sense to want to be more like one. Might not hold for my entire generation, but most guys my age are likely more into the Ninja Turtles than you’d think. Second, our relationship with our manager is excellent; he knows what would motivate and reward us. Think about this: with a $0.99 download from the iTunes store, he was able to provide an extremely cool reward to the entire office.