At the management training sessions I help run, people regularly make the same observation. Young candidates are asking about the company’s environmental and public-good policies in their job interviews.
Even at an event for investment banks and financial institutions, about half the room put their hands up when I asked how many were being asked to justify their environmental, social and governance policies to potential recruits.
Did I think, a manufacturing manager asked me last week, that the younger generation would lose its enthusiasm for the ESG fashion as they grew older?
Well, let’s look at what happened to my own generation, the baby boomers, I suggested. The 1960s, and 1968 in particular, were peak protest years. There were US demonstrations against the Vietnam war, the streets of Paris erupted and the Prague Spring struck back at Soviet repression. A year later, the Woodstock music festival took place.
None of these uprisings ended well. The Vietnam war eventually ended, but only after Richard Nixon, the demonstrators’ nemesis, was elected president twice. Charles de Gaulle, the French president, won an election by opposing the protests, although he stepped down a short while later. And the Soviets ended the Prague Spring.
I didn’t take part in any of this. I wasn’t in any of these places and had only just become a teenager. But I was part of the generation who, lucky enough not to be subject to any repression myself, reacted to the tenor of the time by wanting to do socially meaningful work. Eventually, the demands of parenthood, home buying and pension contributions dimmed this mood and saw most of us happy to have a job that paid the bills.
Will the same happen to today’s young workforce recruits? The first point to note is that while the 1960s discontents had disappointing political results, the ideals that provoked them had a longer-term effect. There were strides in racial justice and women’s and gay rights, which began to influence employers’ practices and still do.
Second, today’s young workers’ dissatisfaction is likely to be longer lasting because, for many, there is no chance of settling for their parents’ comfortable material compromises. For most, home ownership and decent pensions are no longer available.
Catalyst, an organisation that campaigns for women in the workplace, pointed out last week that the upcoming generation “grew up during the Great Recession, have witnessed the widening wealth gap contribute to greater income inequality, and have experienced a sharp increase in higher education tuition rates”.
But while their parents and grandparents’ goals of financial security may be out of reach, there is one issue that motivates them above all: climate change. A poll last year by the Harvard Public Opinion Project showed that among tomorrow’s workers — those born between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s — the environment is their overriding issue. Seventy per cent thought climate change was a problem and 66 per cent said it was “a crisis and demands urgent action”.
Companies know they have to respond to this. It is not just their workers and potential recruits that are demanding action from them. So are older campaigners and significant groups of shareholders. BP, which has been targeted by demonstrators objecting to the company’s art sponsorships, last week committed itself to net-zero emissions from its operations, including fuels burnt by its customers, by 2050 or sooner.
Bernard Looney, the company’s new chief executive, said; “The world’s carbon budget is finite and running out fast.” Older observers who remember the ill-fated attempt by John Browne, a predecessor of Mr Looney as BP boss, to recast the company as “Beyond Petroleum” may greet the announcement with scepticism.
Younger people will almost certainly do so. A Deloitte survey last year found that only 37 per cent of millennials — those born between 1983 and 1994 — believed that business leaders had a positive impact on the world.
There are still plenty of young people desperate for any sort of job. OECD figures last year showed youth unemployment rates in member countries averaging 11.2 per cent. But many employers still talk about the difficulty of attracting skilled recruits.
Those applicants able to choose between companies will carry on demanding to know their potential workplace’s environmental and social records. Only the most severe employment downturn is likely to change that.
Twitter: @Skapinker
