How To Retain The Best Millennial Talent In The Creative Economy

Most employers would think that retaining the best talent, especially millennials, is all about good salaries, great perks and flexible work schedules. It’s true that all of those things are important, very important. Nobody wants to be underpaid or undervalued. But retaining the best employees goes way beyond what money and perks can buy.

It’s fundamental that companies have meaningful and challenging work to retain the best talent and keep them engaged. Boring work (and bad bosses) is a leading cause of employee disengagement and turnover. And, according to Gallup, 70% of the employees are disengaged, resulting in billions of dollars in productivity losses.

Companies want their best talent to stay engaged and committed. Those companies want to maximize the productive and creative output of their workforce. But they can’t achieve that with boring work. It’s one or the other. Not both.

The quest for challenge and excitement

One of the things millennials seek the most from their work is the excitement and adrenaline that comes from learning new things.

Assigning challenging tasks and projects is essential for millennials to achieve that level of learning and engagement. Millennials know that a powerful way to add value to their workplace and their own careers is by on-the-job type of learning. And that only comes when the projects at hand are challenging, meaningful and exciting.

If a company is truly interested in retaining the best talent, but also getting the most productivity and creativity from them, a challenging job is critical.

Millennials don’t want to do repetitive and routinely work.

Have you ever seen a millennial working? They have two or three computer screens with various programs running at the same time, listening to Spotify and singing, browsing social media, smartphone on, all while doing the work. Do you really think that repetitive, boring and unchallenging work will satisfy their hunger for interesting things to do, learn or read? Think twice.

I don’t think that in these times anybody want to do repetitive work. Repetitive and routinely work is a thing of the past (and it will be shortly fully automated). The creative economy is all about learning and having opportunities for personal and professional development while doing interesting work. All that accompanied by coaching, feedback and learning.

Unfortunately, boring and unchallenging jobs achieve exactly the opposite of what millennials (and most employees from other generations) want. Boring jobs don’t bring learning or development. They are easy, disengaging and meaningless.

In the creative economy, where humans not only compete with others humans, but also with robots, adding value in the workplace is all about unleashing creativity, curiosity, imagination and innovation.

And millennials are all about giving their full commitment to a workplace where they find an opportunity to voice and satisfy their hunger for learning and development.

Some things to consider:

A challenging job

A challenging job is one that stretches people’s current level of knowledge and skills. But “challenging” is not about setting people up for failure. It’s about helping them while they do something interesting, new and enjoyable.

Challenging jobs keep people engaged and curious. They force people to learn and seek more information and knowledge. They require people to experiment with ideas and see what works and what doesn’t.

For any workplace to be successful in these times (and the future), it’s fundamental to rethink their job designs. One thing I know for sure is that the current “job description” and “job design” doesn’t deliver the level of challenge and excitement that millennials look for. Start from there.

Coaching and development

A challenging work by itself is not enough. Millennials don’t want to be thrown in the middle of the jungle, without tools, and asked to survive. They want to have challenging jobs, as long as they learn and develop themselves from the experience. So, coaching and providing feedback is essential to retain the best talent in the creative economy.

Millennials are part of one of the most resilient generations. For millennials it’s ok to fail. Not desirable, but ok. As long as they learn from the experience and increase their knowledge, they get over it and move on. Take advantage of that, but offer your helping hand through coaching and feedback.

The current design of most workplaces doesn’t achieve a good level of coaching and development that allows people to stay engaged. Only a handful of innovative and fast-learning companies are doing it. A company that really wants to retain their best millennials employees has to break the barriers and silos that prevent people from helping and coaching each other.

Millennials are job migrants

It’s not a secret that millennials change jobs more often than previous generations (X or boomers). Unfortunately (and stupidly), employers think that this is equivalent to a lack of job stability, passion, commitment or even loyalty. So, those employers don’t give enough opportunities to their millennial workforce for fear of them leaving. Nothing is more ridiculous than that.

Millennials migrate from one job to the other in search of meaning and challenging work. Millennials are not unstable, passionless, uncommitted or disloyal. On the contrary, if they are appreciated, respected and valued, they give their full capacity and energy to their current job.

However, just like traveling to another city doesn’t mean that you don’t like the city where you were before, changing jobs is about the experience of learning something else and finding a more difficult challenge, not about not liking what you did before.

Don’t try to buy millennials out. Don’t get mad at them if they want to leave. On the contrary, do your best to keep them engaged while they are with you. Give them challenging and meaningful work, and rest assured that their creative output will be worth it. Whenever they leave, you want them to be the best reference for your company.

Final notes

Money is good. Perks are good. Work life balance is good. They are all good and important, but not enough. For how long do you think a company can retain good talent only by paying them well, but not by giving them challenging work?

More importantly, if a company pays their employees well, but only assigns unchallenging and boring work, is it really getting the most out of their best talent? Is it really maximizing the creative and productive output of their top people? Is it really getting the highest ROI?

Money pays the bills, but it can’t buy anybody’s engagement and commitment to give their best and deliver the highest levels of value to the company they work for. Having a good salary will keep millennials around… for a while. But in the long term, they will be able to find another company that also pays them well (perhaps a bit less), but where they find the opportunity to learn and grow personally and professionally.

Ultimately, what’s important here is that once a company knows that its employees are well paid and rewarded, the next big thing is to give them meaningful and challenging projects… and let them do and give their best.

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