Why you can’t retain millennials, or why you aren’t getting value from them
I read this article in Inc about why Millennials are getting fired. I’m not a millennial, I’m Gen Y on at least one of the scales (there’s differences of opinion about 1980 births), but I got angry anyway. To save you a click, millennials are apparently getting fired in unprecedented numbers because 1) they expect mentorship, direction and development which fed-up employers expect them to provide themselves, 2) rather than appear empassioned about the job, they exhibit an ‘anti-work’ mentality to things like flexibility (unpaid overtime), and 3) they expect happiness at work through perks and rewards, because they’ve been raised being bribed.
Perhaps this is why employers fire millennials or otherwise penalise them in the workplace through things like negative performance reviews, lack of advancement etc. but that’s not been my experience. As a manager in a few roles now the conversation has been about how to retain millennials who seem relentlessly “disloyal” and when they do stick around the value they provide doesn’t seem to be what it needs to be. “Presenteeism” has been a problem I’ve watched get discussed amongst management for several years, where employees are at work, but work still doesn’t seem to be done. I’d like to present the flipside to the Inc article. Here’s why Boomers through to Gen Y don’t get value out of millennials — spoiler: it’s our fault.
- Your core product and service offering is actually not interesting or valuable
The days of the Boomer securing a clerical or administrative position “in the mail room” as the tale goes, are over, and millennials get that. In businesses with contemporary western management styles at least, you will not get a job sorting or categorising things, and retire 60 years later as the CEO. The flipside response to that from modern employees starting from Gen Y is they don’t dedicate themselves to learning your business and relishing the value in your products and services so they can achieve internal development and growth. Instead their learning path focuses on developing a skill set which they use to synthesise a career across multiple businesses and even industries. Employees at your widget business do not care about your widgets, they do not buy the idea that your business is making the world better through widgets, they are growing their own personal brand to the point they can take their skill set elsewhere and earn more money and prestige (and increasingly, flexible working arrangements). 60 years of development of things like “salary bands” exacerbated this, where Boomers and Gen X knowingly placed fixed limits on what they’ll pay for a skill set, but didn’t reflect on what would happen if employees rejected the option to donate personal development in higher-banded responsibilities and instead shopped their skill set to another business that values it more.
Combine this with the increasingly ADHD prone product and service focus of (particularly medium sized) Australian businesses, and you’re left with an employee base that cares about your next idea only as much as you care about your last, and are wholly focussed on how they can build a more valuable offering to their next employer.
2. Millennials know you understand the value of labour only in terms of how much it costs
Every single business minimises costs as much as possible, and simultaneous with the development of HR engineering tricks like salary banding, terminology has crept into workplaces like “off-shoring” and “virtual teams”, where employers relish paying $4600 AUD to someone in India to do the same job as someone on $60,000 AUD locally. The message is clear, you do not want to pay for a skill set and will do anything you can to avoid it that will still get the work completed. You’ve been valiant at figuring out ways to pay 80% or less for the job to be done. So what have millennials done? Respond by pressuring businesses to accept 80% of the work. The millennial counter-offensive of raising 9 day fortnights in the interview, developing middle manager relationships that tolerate unrecorded leave to attend to personal matters, time-in-lieu where no policy provides for it and “homing from work” where low intensity/value work is encouraged in the wake of objectives being met, is a proportional response to downward pressure on compensation. “The market rate is X? What can I get for 0.8X?” Well buddy, you can get 0.8X. Write something for Inc about how terribly unfair that is.
3. The share employers have in an employee’s identity has never been lower, and is the highest now it’ll ever be
Coincident with the decline of the “work your way up” mentality of starting in a low value job and developing through the internal company to seniority and unimaginable wealth, is the shift of who someone is away from their role. A boomer will say “I’m an operations manager for Very Big Pty Ltd.”, a millennial will say “I’m all about red wine, jogging and I’ve just started an eight week Wednesday night course on app development. I creep other people’s dogs on Instagram.”
We are at a low point in how much the modern employee identifies their job as part of themselves. Put simply, you are the boss, and that relationship means less than it ever has. You rate below the husband/wife, you rate below the personal trainer, if Christmas card lists were still a thing in a modern world you would absolutely be neglected. In a hyperconnected world, people have the opportunity in the eight hours of a work day that they are neither at their desk or asleep (assuming per the previous point they’re not combining “at their desk” and “asleep”) to be defined by literally anything they want. They can learn anything through iTunesU or Coursera and add “software developer” or “nutritionist” or “coffee roaster” to their identity. They can form hobby communities, clubs, even businesses with $20 and a Macbook Pro. In the age where everything that’s required to hand-build a custom identity being easy, why would they in all honesty seek to have themselves defined by their relationship to you which is in all likelihood unfair if not exploitative or abusive? The “work to live, don’t live to work” moniker has taken on a truth that was never predicted the way it should’ve been, but it’s an astonishingly impactful truth.
You can retain millennials if you try. All you need to do is stop trying to sell inherent value in whatever middle of the road product or service it is you’re flogging this week and find out where common employer-employee value can be discovered. When you find it, set your teeth and pay what it’s worth for it— it’ll make you feel light headed at the potential catastrophe to shareholder value but the feeling will pass — and put some time aside to reflect on how you’re a boss and how that’s useful and valuable but has global context for a generation that doesn’t actually have living memory of a time where they couldn’t learn or be anything they want.
Then consider taking up golf or something. You worry about work too much.
