Baby Boomers instilled the tradition of keeping one’s head down, staying with “the Company” for 20+ years, and collecting a gold watch at the end of their career. But Millennials anticipate collecting many watches much, much earlier. Forbes reports that “91% of Millennials only expect to maintain their current job for 3 years or less,” as they move on to opportunities that accelerate their career advancement.
Why are Millennials so unique to the workplace, and how can you keep them from moving on?
What Are Millennials and How Do They Work?
This extremely tech-savvy generation is primarily motivated by intercommunication. They seek to:
- Continually educate themselves and actively inspire others with messages and issues they find important.
- Create rapport with everyone within their work environment, because they view the impressions of everyone in an organization as essential to transforming an enterprise into an influential force.
- Enjoy creative freedom, since they feed off of the challenges of change.
So the real question is, how can you attract and maintain a Millennial’s interest?
What Millennials Want
Everyone wins when your organization creates and supports opportunities for Millennials to perpetually learn and absorb your organization’s culture. It provides them with a clear understanding of their purpose within your culture and how they can personally create impact. Your organization benefits, because Millennials want spread the word and enlighten others with relevant information that intrigues them. Which means they’ll encourage others to experience your messages as well.
With this kind of enthusiasm to contribute, your compromise is dispensing advise, encouragement and incremental feedback on a continual basis just to maintain an open communication as well as balance their goals.
Avoiding A Millennial Crisis
The use of gamification in training and other tailored learning tools are very familiar to the Millennial. Their viewing habits cover consuming a number of videos and information in small increments of time. This methodology inspires their involvement, evolves their skill sets and encourages stronger motivation to complete their tasks.
Mobile responsive training also builds incentive in their developmental strengths with consistent and time-efficient learning approach any time or any where on their iPads and Smartphones.
PricewaterhouseCoopers’ report “Reshaping the Workplace“ (as summarized by Mindtickle) proposes that the best ways to guide your organization’s Millennial platform are to:
Provide mentoring and coaching – Millennials respond well to mentoring from more experienced employees. They would like to see their manager as a coach who supports them in their professional development – just keep in mind that they generally prefer to learn by application than by being “told what to do.”
Set clear targets and offer regular and structured feedback – Millennials welcome and expect detailed, regular feedback. 51% of those questioned said feedback should be given very frequently or continually on the job and only 1% said feedback was not important to them. That’s huge!
Cultivate an environment of continuous learning – Millennials expect ongoing learning as they enter the workplace and spend a high proportion of their time absorbing new information. 35% said they were attracted to employers who offer excellent training and development programs for this reason and saw it as the top benefit they wanted from an employer.
Invest in learning technology – Millennials respond well to a range of digital learning styles and delivery methods, including online learning modules, webinars, and interactive gameplay. They are innately collaborative and accustomed to learning in teams and by doing.
Offer training in workplace behavior and culture – Human resources leaders have found that Millennials often require training in fundamental workplace behavior and culture. For example, because they are accustomed to instant responses when they chat with friends via text, they may not realize that older workers do not always treat messages with the same urgency.
Encouraging your staff is always great business. This is especially true in regards to this generation, because for Millennials every direction is “up.”
Ready to engage your Millennial workforce with online gamified training. Visit our LMS page.
If you’d like to learn about game based learning from Digitec Interactive, visit our eLearning page.
Ready to find out what Digitec can do for you?
