Win-win solutions for teen workers, small businesses
Let’s find ways to address frustrations of two groups that need each other, Gwyneth Edwards says.
Teenagers have always gotten a bad rap. These days, we accuse them of being lazy, phone-obsessed and distracted. Our own parents had similar concerns about us. In every generation, it seems, adults just forget. We forget the struggles we had to find a way to fit in, to find a job, to please or defy authority. Over time, what remains are memories of a successful transition into adulthood.
As parents, forgetting is not such a bad thing. When we see our teenagers slipping, we nudge (push?) them back on track. Our authority may grate, but it establishes boundaries and expectations. And we know that, eventually, our teenagers will grow up.
The small-business employer, however, has to persistently deal with the reality of the teenage condition. Small businesses, like teenagers, are precarious things: they are highly dependent on outside resources, making them fragile and sometimes erratic in their behaviour. They make most of their money at specific points in the year and are desperate for help that can hit the ground running — capable, quick-thinking and always-available help, often only available in the form of the teenage student.
The teenage student, however, is also like a small business. Demands on their time ebb and flow. Start of school brings anxiety on what courses to take, adjusting to new schedules, and sometimes adjusting to new institutions. Midterm exams follow quickly, sometimes leading to changes in courses or even programs. In rushes the final exam period, the crunching of MELS averages, R-scores and GPAs, and fears of failing. All the while, the student-teenager is encouraged to play sports, blow off steam and … get a job.
And so the teenager, sometimes defiantly, sometimes eagerly, goes on the hunt for employment, knocking on the door of those small businesses. Teenagers complain that it’s
Teenagers complain that it’s impossible to find a job, while businesses complain that there is no good help.
impossible to find a job, while businesses complain that there is no good help and parents, well … we just complain.
On the surface, it appears that small businesses and teenagers are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Businesses are frustrated with the lack of employee commitment, reliability, learning — and respect. Students complain about the business’s lack empathy, inflexibility, rewards — and respect. As a result, the student workforce churns, and frustration persists.
As a society, therefore, we need to help small businesses and students in a way that can allow both to flourish. We need a meeting of the minds, at the community level, whereby businesses, students and parents collaborate in establishing processes that will provide the help that small businesses so desperately need, while respecting and encouraging the growth of our teenage population. We need standard hiring and training programs, along with transparent rules, that ensure our teenagers are provided a work environment that respects them as individuals and contributing members of society, with truly awkward schedules that demand flexibility.
And we need student training to begin long before they are of hiring age, where they learn the skills that small businesses have no time to teach. We need experts, such as small-business professionals, human-resource professionals and educators to look at this problem jointly. We see pockets of success throughout communities, of small businesses that have created excellent environments for both themselves and their teenage employees, along with high schools that try to tackle this problem as early as Grade 7.
But we need more of this and we need, as a community, to change the narrative. We need to celebrate both our small businesses and our teenage population. We need to raise them both up, and to find ways to ensure that they succeed — for both small businesses and teenagers are essential components of our society and, possibly, the leaders of tomorrow.