Gen Xers are particularly irritated by millennials, often resenting the changes they demand in the workplace and finding their expectations and behaviors unrealistic and unprofessional.
In this post, we’re going to take a look at the value millennials bring to our companies, and what we need to do to keep them around. Because frankly, we need them.
Alright, so now that we’ve looked at a bit of the value millennials bring to the workplace, let’s talk about how to keep them. Millennials are known for changing jobs more often than previous generations, which can be frustrating when you’ve invested time and resources into training and developing them to be a good fit for your organization. The good news is that if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably interested in continuous improvement - giving you some inherent advantages over your competition to attract and retain millennial talent. Continuous improvement software provides some valuable tools to keep your millennials engaged and attract new talent to the company.
In a recent study by the Intelligence Group, a division of the Creative Artists Industry, they found that:
Kaizen gives everyone the opportunity to examine the world around them, identify opportunities for improvement, and enact change. Sure, you probably can’t give millennials the opportunity to end world hunger or solve global warming, but you can empower them to improve the goods or services they provide in order to bring greater satisfaction to their customers and colleagues. With detailed reports and gamification awarding badges at key milestones, millennials can keep an eye on the impact they’re having on the world around them for increased job satisfaction.
Obviously everyone can’t be their own boss, but you CAN empower millennials (and everyone else) to manage their own improvement work. By giving them a platform to capture their ideas for improvement, track KPIs to test changes, and record the impact of their work, your team can be empowered to make improvements without a complex hierarchical structure slowing progress. Continuous improvement software gives you the visibility you need to ensure all is well in their improvement projects, without needing to micromanage the process.
Continuous improvement software makes it easy for millennials to build teams around their improvement ideas, pulling people from anywhere in the organization to collaborate virtually at any time. Active alerts and digital boards keep the team in the loop, so that everyone is working together rather than competing individually. Millennials will love being able to pull information regarding past improvements to learn from the organization’s historical knowledge, and knowing that their improvements make a valuable contribution to that database for people to use going forward.
It’s hard to allow millennials the flexible schedules that they increasingly come to expect, when you need them present for daily huddles. Continuous improvement software helps keep people connected even when they’re working odd hours by keeping them in the loop between meetings with smart notifications and digital boards. Millennials can submit ideas for improvement whenever and wherever inspiration strikes them using an app, so that it doesn’t matter if they’re on duty or in the building at the moment.
Millennials bring a different set of expectations and skills to the workplace that can require some adaptation on the part of managers. I truly believe, though, that making those adjustments are critical to establishing a continuous improvement culture that attracts and retains millennial talent, which is essential to remaining a competitive, agile company in today’s economy.