Trends

Gen Yes – the power of optimistic millennials in business

Reading time:  3 Minutes

In today’s race to the top, corporates must be able to attract and retain the most skilled employees. As the digital generation grows up, companies that utilise their talents will thrive.

By 2020, millennials will make up 50 per cent of the global workforce and begin taking their seats in senior positions across all sectors. With a little planning, these workers will be a great addition to existing teams and play an important role in future-proofing business operations.

Gain a competitive advantage

In just two decades, workforces have gone from hunching over fax machines to sending files from their smartphones to the cloud. By growing up with constant change, millennials aren’t just familiar with digital innovation – they’re wary of legacy technologies and actively seek to identify where the next wave of disruption will come from. In their spare time, they’re thinking about how to seamlessly pay for food delivery on their smartphone, and how digital interfaces could be more engaging in their favourite apps. This agile and iterative approach is a great asset in business.

Personal growth and career aspirations are important for millennials – 52 per cent say they’re attracted by employers that offer progression opportunities and PwC research shows that learning and development is their most valued employee benefit. This ambitious, self-improving mindset is critical when seeking innovative ways to surpass business goals.

Millennials swap between laptops, smartphones, TVs and other devices an average of 27 times per hour – 10 times more than the previous generation. This group grasps technical innovation intuitively, multitasking therefore comes quite naturally too.

Adapt your workplace for your new workforce

A third of millennials value flexibility and freedom over salary when considering a job offer. Jobs are seen as temporary projects for millennials, and they’re less inclined than previous generations to restructure their life around them. Companies that offer flexi-hours and a range of office locations can help them meet their responsibilities and their own needs.

A study at Bentley University found that 89 per cent of the younger generation check and respond to emails even after work hours have ended. And according to EY, 47 per cent of millennials say their working hours have actually increased over the last five years. Formalising out of hours activities with work arrangements offers a way for employees to avoid burn out and feel rewarded for their extra time.

Technology changes the way millennials communicate with their bosses and colleagues. Forty-one per cent say they prefer to communicate digitally rather than face-to-face or over the phone at work. Company leaders are enabling change by shifting towards communication tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams and Workplace by Facebook. These tools can encourage staff to contribute ideas spontaneously and outside of any chain-of-command restrictions too. Tech training and mentorship pairings also ensure that everybody is on the same page and open to collaboration. Baby boomers benefit from practical insights that bring them up to speed with the latest tech, while 80 per cent of millennials prefer real-time praise and feedback over formal performance reviews.

As millennials shift from being the minority to the majority in their workplaces, information will begin to spread conversationally through businesses, operating like a network rather than ideas flowing only from the top down.

Millennials see the tools they use for work as existing in a perpetual state of flux and have learned to adapt quickly in the face of disruption. Using this high level of adaptability they are beginning to transform industries and create new market opportunities. Not all digital natives are destined to be Zuckerbergs, but with the right digital infrastructure, businesses can learn a lot from their tech-savvy millennials.