It’s popular sport for the old generation to bash the newest. At least once a week I hear that millennials don’t want to work. They have no loyalty to companies. They stare at their phones all day. They do not even show up for job interviews.

I am sure some of that is true.

The question for you as an employer is: What are you going to do about it?

It does us little good to pine for the “good ol’ days.” Supposedly in a bygone era, everyone showed up for work 10 minutes early and stay until the job was done. No one ever complained about pay or being bypassed for a promotion. And they got a job at age 22 and stayed at that company until retirement age.

I don’t think that was true then. And it is certainly not true now.

Workplaces have changed. Workers have changed. We have done a lot to destroy trust with one another.

Entrepreneur Mark Cuban backs this up. In an interview with the awesome Adam Grant he says today’s workers are different and they are treated differently by smart employers.

“Emotional health, mental health equilibrium is something that they place a premium on. And I think organizations will have to understand that more and more and more as we go forward. Not only for how you treat your employees, but what your customers expect as well. Boomers, aren’t your customers anymore, you know, the boomers are gonna go down in history as the most disappointing generation ever. From sex, drugs, and rock and roll to what we have today.

“It’s insanely upside down and unfortunate. Gen Z in particular, less-so so millennials, but gen Z in particular, I think is gonna go down as the greatest generation because they take all the ingredients into account when they’re making decisions. And I think that’s beautiful and it’s very analogous to when I was getting started and technology was just happening or the internet was just happening. You had to accommodate the expectations of digital generations, even if you know, their parents were technological dinosaurs, you just knew where things were going. And it’s the same now with that fiscal financial and personal health balance, right? Because either you accommodate for your employees and your customers where they’ll find somebody who does.”

Cuban is notorious for saying things that make him unpopular. Often, those statements are the truths we do not want to hear.

The best leaders in my Vistage group understand that these workers are different from their parents – different even from their older siblings. But they are our workforce of the future. So who is going to change first? You or them?