Winning the Next Generation of Innovators
How to attract, engage, and retain Millennial talent
As a generation, there hasn’t been an age group as disruptive as the Millennials since the Baby Boomers. They have different expectations of the world and use completely new platforms to mobilize, communicate, and create. Of course companies want to engage with a group that is about to outspend the Baby Boomers, even when only 20% of the generation has reached their peak earning years. And they aren’t just creating trends, they are creating entire new industries.
Yet, many established brands are failing miserably at sustaining Millennial interest. For companies looking to bring on the next generation of innovators, they will need to become more innovative and quickly prepare to attract this new workforce.
Innovation is imperative for revenue growth, but it’s also hugely important for attracting and retaining talent. The longer-term dimension of innovation is the need to maintain a culture of innovation by bringing new innovators in that can continue to evolve the business. To do so, companies need Millennials on their teams.
That “lazy, entitled, selfish” generation of workers is quickly becoming a company’s most important asset: attracting the rising generation of talent is necessary for businesses looking to stay relevant into the future. For established companies, this can be a daunting task: Millennials notoriously prefer startups to corporate environments, and appealing to their work culture would mean drastically changing one’s own.
How does a large company appeal to the Millennial workforce when 72% of Millennials already want to be their own boss? And with 78% of Millennials stating they are influenced by how innovative a company is when deciding if they want to work there, innovation has become necessary to attract and retain a talented workforce in the future.
“How does a large company appeal to the Millennial workforce when 72% of Millennials already want to be their own boss?”
Millennials grew up more connected to technology, are a more diverse group, are more educated, and are also starting out their lives with higher average debt than generations before them. A unique set of influences impacts their expectations and habits. It’s been easier for businesses to brand Millennials as spoiled and entitled than make the difficult changes that will be required to draw them in. But, Millennials have just become the largest segment of the workforce. The challenge has already changed from “what will we need to do” to “how do we get them here?”
The journey matters more than the destination. Despite the stereotypes, Millennials actually stay with their employers longer than Generation X workers did at the same ages. They are also more educated than any other generation before them. All of these factors have massive implications on their expectations of work and the role that work plays in their lives. They expect work to be more fulfilling, to help them grow, and for the company to give back to them the passion and dedication that they give to it. Stop defining careers by the next promotion and consider the entire journey required to grow them into that next role.
There is big value in learning. Only 12% of Millennials in North America put an emphasis on being wealthy in life. Yet, 52% of them prioritize growing and learning new things. They consistently prioritize personal growth and a successful career over being wealthy.
Companies must embrace this shift in prioritization and become teaching organizations. Provide constant training and leave room for personal development. Not only can this training make them more productive employees, but it can also teach them to better develop and support innovative ideas.
Amazon’s data-driven culture encourages employees at all levels to improve the company through customer insight. It is designed to avoid allowing “HiPPO” (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) to inhibit innovation while also providing employees with the tools and empowerment to share ideas. The results have included Amazon’s shopping cart recommendations, which was rolled out despite a HiPPO who didn’t believe in it.
Gone are the days of the suit, office, and regular hours. To Millennials, traditional workplaces stifle their creativity and sense of individuality. However, the workplace can also enable mentorship and guidance. 79% of Millennials want their boss (if they absolutely have to have one) to be a coach or mentor, which can set them on the path towards great leadership.
Unlike past generations, they also actively resist the suit-and-tie culture and that dreary 9-to-5. In fact, self-employment rose 24% between 2003–2013.
Not everyone can be making millions in a t-shirt in a Silicon Valley garage, but large companies can harness that spirit, that casual ingenuity, and collaborative work ethic in their offices. 88% of Millennials insist on collaboration over competitiveness in their work culture, which defies the very cornerstone of business culture built by Baby Boomers.
Collaboration is tearing down cubicle walls. Millennials want to be able to suggest new products to companies, and they should be given that kind of access with the proper nurturing. They want feedback, but they also want to be a contributing voice in the company’s future.
The Ritz-Carlton brings their hotel staff into their innovation process, providing each staff member a “preference pad” that they carry with them to write down observations from studying guest habits so that they can help better meet guest needs. One new service launched as a result was a debit card for children of guests to use in properties when they are not with parents.
88% of Millennials insist on collaboration over competitiveness in their work culture, which defies the very cornerstone of business culture built by Baby Boomers.
New workplace demographics highlight lack of diversity. Millennials are more critical of layers of management and operational structures. They are also more conscious of lack of diversity because of their inherent diversity. Another major change is the role of women in the workforce: Millennial women have more education than men, and their rising professional aspirations have put their ambitions on par with their male peers.
As these changes in employee demographic become more pronounced, there is no more critical time to ensure that employers consciously address very real issues such as the gender pay gap and workforce diversity. Deloitte recently revealed that one out of five Fortune 1000 organizations still have no formal diversity efforts structured (nearly half of respondents saying they’re “too busy”); unsurprisingly, talent gravitates towards entrepreneurial companies such as Facebook and Netflix who are consciously addressing policies to reflect the realities of the modern workforce. With Netflix’s new unlimited parental leave policy for new parents, they are setting a standard that will see other forward-thinking companies follow.
“Foster a culture that mirrors what start-ups do best: Encourage ideas, empower employees, hire high-energy managers — be the kind of place that evaluates constantly and stays ready to react when big challenges or possibilities present themselves.”
- Nadira Hira, Fahrenheit 212 Millennial Culture Fellow
An entrepreneurial culture doesn’t happen by accident. Mature organizations that grew from startups have built themselves to be more flexible, creative, and collaborative. As they grew, that culture had to be purposefully maintained.
Not surprisingly, Google is the number one company that Millennials want to work in. The benefits that attract employees revolve around a great culture of innovation, including their 20% time policy.
Giving employees the equivalent of one work day a week to spend on personal projects may sound crazy to most business leaders, but the reality is that the flexible, creative time works to their advantage. Employees get 20% of their time to spend on personal projects that align themselves with the objectives of the company. A great opportunity for the employee, 20% time has also been equally as rewarding for the company.
Gmail, the email service that almost 1 billion people use, is a product that came out of 20% time. Rajen Sheth pitched the idea not after spending 10 years in the company, but at his interview. With the help of mentors and peers, Sheth was able to develop Gmail initially as a side project under the codename “Caribou.” The result is one of the most important and successful services that the company offers.
Incentives must go beyond the cash bonus. Like with other aspects of their lives, Millennials are looking for experiences. So while cash bonuses and fiscal rewards have worked well as incentives in the past, Millennials are looking for slightly more creative set of incentives and perks from employers. They want their employers to also offer them experiences, learning opportunities, and fresh perspectives.
Tony Hsieh, CEO of the billion-dollar online retailer Zappos has always been known for his zany office antics, but in 2013 he took things to the next level by establishing his company as a “Holocracy,” that is, a self-governing operating system where there are no job titles and no managers. His radical experiments with company culture may not be for everyone, but Zappos remains featured as one of Forbes’ Best Companies to Work and is projected to generate $97 million in profit in 2015.
Technology is a cornerstone for collaboration. For this tech-savvy generation, a Jetsons-like office isn’t necessarily the answer. However, technology has facilitated personal interaction and collaboration for a large part of this generation’s lives. Millennials have almost always had a way of being constantly connected to each other. In the 90s,it was AOL Instant Messenger and email. Today, it’s any combination of SMS, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Line, or Twitter.
These constant streams of communication are a basic expectation for the way they live the rest of their lives. This trend is hitting desks (and coffee shops and apartments) through new professional services that help streamline and enable remote workplace collaboration, such as Slack, WeWork, and Box.
Across fields, the move towards more lean and agile approaches is changing the ways Millennials prefer to work. Slack is being positioned as the “email killer,” which aims to take employees out of Outlook (and a range of other services) to focus on connecting with each other more efficiently and effectively. Looking to take on PowerPoint, Bunkr is a presentation tool that enables any visual content to be collected and simply organized through a web app. Even in the digital product development realm, services like InVision make it easier to show ideas and prototype on the fly; long gone are the days of doing a big reveal of the concept at the end.
A new approach to attracting, developing, and retaining this and future generation of employees is inevitable. But it isn’t impossible. Read more from Big Entrepreneurship on Slideshare.
