Engaging with Millennials

Millennials likely making up 50% of your workforce, that number is only going to increase to 75% by 2025 (reminder — that’s only 7 years away). We aren’t talking about teenagers and new graduates, millennials range between 22 and 37. 37! The news stories make it sound like they’re teenagers, none of them are — they’re your coworkers.

Millennials are no longer the outlier in your organisation, they are the norm. They are talent you are trying to attract, they are employees you don’t want to lose. Engagement does not mean having to throw money at the problem, on the contrary it’s about speaking their language and knowing their wants and needs.

Speed up your conversation

Millennials are used to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, the majority of information they take in is from social media. They are used to instant information. If you want to engage, speak on their level, do quick updates instead of a monthly bulletin.

Focus on short form content, images and videos that can be posted on internal boards, social media, teams, etc. Don’t shy away from email updates, but aim for regular and short emails to keep employees quickly informed. When it comes to communication think less about polished and more about speed.

Show Your Unprofessional Side

Millennials are loyal to their colleagues, not the business. If you want to increase employee retention through loyalty, build intimacy. It doesn’t mean sharing your deepest darkest secrets, but break through that cold professional veneer. It’s nothing new. Elon Musk likes to play Overwatch, Richard Branson is passionate about animal conservation, Brian Chesky likes to draw pictures of chickens — all information shared on twitter so that people can get to know the real person behind the persona.

Let the professional guise slip a little, be a little fun, be a little quirky. Are there causes people within your organisation are passionate about? Does your CEO have a favourite dessert that you can order in for the next team building event?

Intimacy is also a two way street. It’s not just about sharing some of the eccentricities of upper management, it’s about knowing your employees. A manager taking note of their team’s coffee orders and doing a coffee run is a great cost effective way to build intimacy as part of a team.

It’s hard to get quality information from the bottom up, but it comes from making managers accountable for connecting with employees, they can then inform the business of causes their team is passionate about with the business. The important step is to grasp that millennials like to know who they are working for, as a person, and are encouraged when it’s returned.

Move away from simple reward to recognition

That doesn’t mean to do away with bonuses — if this has historically been part of your program your employees won’t be happy if you take it away!

Why recognition? It’s not because they want a pat on the back. Millennials don’t tend to feel much security in their job. There is the prevailing understanding that it’s likely if the business doesn’t need them and can save money without their role, they will be without a job.

Recognition shows your employees that you have noticed they are doing a good job. It means they can feel more secure in their role, and more secure they are being noticed for potential upwards movement in the company. No one wants to be an unnoticed cog in the machine, especially when those are the roles that routinely are outsourced, cut, or have no upward momentum.

Recognition shows an employee that the business, and most importantly their manager, recognises their value as an employee.

Millennials Like Community

Of course with all the blanket statements in this post it does vary on the individual, but as a collective millennials are very mindful of how their actions can translate to benefit others. They often want to be engaged in causes that help the world or their fellow man. Millennials rate higher engagement with employers that are perceived as ‘doing good’.

Millennials also respond with higher engagement to group bonuses, where their success has positive effects for their team, compared to being individually singled out. Bonuses will make millennials happy for a short period of time, but often don’t translate to feelings of community or loyalty — it’s a transaction.

Millennials love to give and share. This is great news! Want to celebrate an achievement? Instead of singling one employee for an experience, create a team experience and boost the entire teams engagement. A millennial will routinely feel a higher sense of achievement if the rewards for their success ‘do good’ for those around them. An added bonus is that millennials will foster loyalty within their team and organically drive employee engagement, if you engage your millennials they will work to engage the rest of the business.

Look at group rewards and experiences. If your employees are engaging in a social/environmental cause, like the Ration Challenge, get involved and support it. If your business supports a charity, promote it, invite your employees to get involved. It’s not just good PR, it’s good HR!

Add Choice to Your Benefits

We talked about intimacy and recognition, you’ll notice a trend, millennials are engaged in a workplace that cares about them as individual. A great way to quickly build that trust is by focusing on a choice of benefits to tailor for an employees individual needs.

Think about your last choice in suppliers, like a CRM, often the company that wins is the company that understood your business needs and could cater to them. Employees want the same from their benefits. The worry from HR is that this will require work, but often it can just mean offering a range of benefits and/or a range of benefit providers — and they’ll cater to your workforce.

Build a choice of employee benefits, ranging from financial to lifestyle oriented. Choice can come from having multiple providers for the same benefit so an employee can choose which one fits the best, from gift cards, movie vouchers, novated car leases, mobile phones, laptops, etc. Employees get excited when they choose their own laptop, or can choose their preferred gift card. The costs are the same, the employee still only gets the one laptop, but by adding choice you have increased engagement for free.

Keep Testing and Get Feedback

If something works and you can see that employees were engaged and happy, do something similar again. If you can see that employees routinely take advantage of a program, see what you can to do expand on that program.

Importantly work to get feedback from your workforce to find out what is important to them. You can do this through managers, workshops, surveys, an ideas box — try multiple ways of getting feedback, why just do one?

Still stumped for low cost ideas to increase engagement with Millennials?

Do your employees have a long commute? Are they interested in flexible hours with a earlier or later start to avoid the commuter traffic? Do some teams routinely get held back late on a Friday afternoon/night and would benefit in a shorter Monday? — Flexible hours.

Do some employees like to congregate and brainstorm whilst others desperately need quite to focus on a detailed spreadsheet? — Breakout and quiet spaces.

Do some of your employees routinely commute for 1hr+ to get to work in their car? — Novated leases

Is there always a big line for the coffee maker/local cafe? Do your routinely see your employees filtering into the office in the morning with coffees in hand? — Monday breakfast sessions

Do your employees routinely complain about not getting work done due to being overloaded with meetings? Can you often see coworkers hurriedly scarfing down a quick meal as they bounce between meetings? — Meeting-free middays