How to engage and retain Millennial Talent?

Employees are vital to an Organization. They spend maximum part of the day at workplace. It’s important that they enjoy their work, work place and that’s how they will be connected to the Organization. Once they are engaged in a productive way – avoid conflicts, provide more opportunities internally; help for their overall development, reward them and provide feedback at regular intervals; retention happens automatically.

Retention is possible only through engagement and the term engagement is becoming more important as more and more millennial join the work force.

Here are few tips to engage and retain millennial talent in Organizations.

Employee experience is the key: Experience is the key defining factor for engaging and retaining an employee.

Internal mobility: Provide enough opportunities for internal movement – this may be vertical movement – a promotion or a horizontal movement – change of work/duties/responsibilities which contribute to improvement of overall skills of the employee

Use technology: Use technology to the core as this is the only age group who experienced the evolution of technology. They love to use technology. They love to see themselves in social media. People are more interested to see themselves, get more likes, shares overall social media of their achievements and successes rather than in a town hall conducted in a closed environment. Get your social media strategy in place not just to attract millennials but also to engage and retain them.  

Provide them with not so monetized Benefits / perks: It’s a proven strategy that benefits/perks play an important role in retaining employees. Though these may not be essentially monetized. Some of the not so monetized benefits / perks can be full stock of food available, yoga & meditation sessions, providing a pass for a conference, sponsoring a paid vacation for self/family, lunch/dinner with the leadership team, casual Fridays/early leaving on Fridays/late start on Mondays, an outing with the team – may be a movie or a resort and etc. One can be as creative as possible and can change these often to create more excitement and engagement.

Personalize rewards: Who would not want to be rewarded? Every employee want to be rewarded. Again these may be connected with money or not…Personalize your reward program based on the interests and priorities of employees.

Performance Feedback: Millennial are called a me-me generation and they love to hear about their work instantly. Adopt a continuous performance feedback system above performance rating system. Provide feedback on a regular intervals and help them to improve the work quality.

Professional Development: Provide professional development courses to improve their academic, technical and soft skills. These Programs should be designed to help and contribute the overall development of an employee. 

Well-being Schemes: Some of the well-being schemes can be - insurance for health, dental, accidental covering family members including parents. On-site fitness programs, financial education and etc.

Flexi-work options: Forget the rule of 9 – 6 schedule. With more congestion and more traffic, employees take more than 1 – 2 hours to come to office which leaves them stressed. Provide a flexi-work option like working from home, allow change in work schedule based on the travel time.

Encourage with personal projects: Allowing employees to work on their personal interest projects often can be helpful to Organizations as well. This gives a comfort zone to employees and helps them experiment, learn and gives more satisfaction.