Beware The Millennial March: Meet working parents’ demands or pay the price

Millennials make up the largest percentage population of the workforce. Research shows that nearly one in two millennials will leave a job within two years if their needs aren’t met. Businesses failing to take this seriously — and failing to retain their employees as a result — will pay a serious penalty.

With more and more millennials in the UK moving into mid-senior level management positions and starting their own families, what can businesses do? 

Know who you’re dealing with: 

Millennials are changing the future of work. They expect their well-being and career progression to be amongst their employers’ priorities. If they’re not, millennial employees will look elsewhere. Having grown up during the recession, they’re used to uncertainty. As employers can’t promise job security, millennials don’t see any imperative to offer loyalty in return. 

They won’t stick around if a better offer comes along, and it will, because as digital natives, millennials are constantly approached for new jobs and quick to accept if there’s money and a better work/life balance on the line.  

Younger parents are also less willing than their predecessors to absorb the sacrifices that we used to think necessary if you wanted to have children and a career.  

Make it add up: 

Issues like parental leave which were previously only grumbled about are deal-breakers for this generation. Talking Talent research shows that more than one in five (21%) millennial parents want the ability to take Shared Parental Leave (SPL), compared to only 13% of parents aged 35-44. Younger parents also recognise that making SPL more attractive to fathers is crucial for mothers to progress in their careers: one-in-three people under 35 believe this, compared to less than one-in-five over-35's.  

Over one in two millennials view becoming a parent the no.1 pinch point in their careers. Their worry — that juggling work and kids will hold back their career — becomes more pronounced with each successive generation. Only 10% of 45-54 year olds strongly agree that their careers slowed down after having kids. Amongst the millennials, it’s 29%. Amongst 18-24-year olds, 36% strongly agree.  

Prioritise your people: 

For businesses high employee turnover is a disaster, particularly among ‘rising stars’ where the cost of replacement can run to double the cost of the person who has left, making millennial loyalty worth its weight in gold.  

When employers adopt family-friendly working practices and support their employees in maintaining a healthy work-life balance, employees' engagement and well-being sky-rockets, and the company’s financial performance benefits too. More productive employees also demonstrate better mental health and greater satisfaction with their lives, so it’s a win-win. 

Fix the Millennial Crisis with the right support: 

When a young couple is juggling careers, the new responsibilities of parenthood and attendant stresses, offering a slightly higher salary may be welcome, but it won’t resolve the core real issues they face. The key is to provide support where and when they need it, by treating employees as people, instead of self-sustaining economic units of production.  

Our research has shown that millennial working parents are open to this and value outside support during the parental transition far more than their predecessors. Get the right support in place and your millennial parents are more likely to stay and more importantly, stay engaged. 

Talking Talent Online is a purpose made digital coaching platform designed to meet the priorities of a new generation of parent professionals facing a unique combination of unprecedented social and professional pressures.  

Happy employees are a well-run company’s greatest long-term asset. Helping them manage their personal life may not be a conventional starting point for a business, but intuitively it makes financial sense to provide a relatively low-cost support network at the point when your employees need it most, aligning their longer-term future with yours. By giving your valuable employees the support, they need, you’ll reap the rewards of retention and loyalty whilst attracting the talent of tomorrow.  

Millennials are telling us what they care about and what they want. Given that 70% of parents feel that they’re failing as parents due to work pressures, and dissatisfied millennials tend to jump ship, those businesses which refuse to take millennial's needs seriously will lose talent to savvier companies that do. 

Chris Parke, CEO, Talking Talent.