Keeping the millennials in your work team engaged requires some special attention

There are so many shifts and transitions going on in today’s workspaces and business teams. I have noticed this both in my meetings with clients and observing their work processes as well as in youth mentoring projects I do where I talk to younger generations about their careers and ambitions.

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A poll from Gallup recently caught my eye in this regard. It reports that the younger work generation, the millennials, tend to change jobs or career paths more often. They are open to exploring new roles and looking for different work when they feel that a company’s mission or values do not align with their priorities and broader worldview. Gallup calls them the job-hopping generation. That company’s research notes that 21% of millennials in the US market report having changed jobs in the last year: this is three times more than the number of non-millennials stating the same. The report goes on to estimate that these career moves, job-hopping, and lower levels of employer loyalty cost the American economy 30.5 billion USD annually. This stems from expenditures for worker replacement, money invested into training and onboarding, and additional overheads related to administrative work processing hires and dismissals. So the big question is the following: what can we do to make the millennials in our teams want to stick around?

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Create a work culture and company culture millennials will want to join and stay with

The Gallup survey noted that only 29% of millennial are actively engaged in their work and their office culture. A further 16% report to be actively disengaged, meaning they have no emotional ties nor concerns for any damage they might do their company. Bearing that it mind, it becomes important for businesses to find ways to change this trend and make the workplace and job a meaningful place for millennial hires. In most cases this involves values and the company mission. A survey from HCM Technology Report notes that millennials respond to and thrive in businesses with a purpose-driven mindset. They are a generation that wishes to make an impact and change things for the better where they can. So it is critical that HR teams and the business’ leaders state their mission and values clearly to millennial hires to ensure they understand how employees from that generation fit into the company’s change-making equation. Building on that, millennials are very savvy about the quality of interpersonal relations. They understand when connections are genuine and real. So their employers not only have to bring to the table the opportunities for engagement mentioned above, but they also need to create a space where the millennials in their teams feel safe to be creative, to experiment, and to be themselves throughout the work process.?

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Make openness and transparency workplace standards

In line with their views on genuineness and honest interactions, millennial workers are more likely to stay and thrive in work environments that promote openness and support transparency in communications and idea-sharing. This creates a specific responsibility for senior, non-millennial managers as they work with their millennial peers. The younger generation welcomes feedback. They are said to want to know what worked well in their project delivery, while also asking what improvements they can make. Be careful here though. Feedback is important but so is how you deliver it. Millennial employees, while welcoming constructive criticism, will expect this to be done in a positive, supportive way that makes them want to accept and internalise lessons learnt and work to do better on future tasks. This can mean senior managers of millennial teams will want to seek training and counsel on how best to deliver work appraisals and feedback.

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A further effective aid in achieving top performance by millennial teams members and building team cohesion is to put for greater sociability in the workplace. Millennials are described as wanting to feel connected, so a number of networking technologies can be used to make this happen. After all, this is a generation of digital natives and they are regular users of tools like chats, messaging systems, collaboration tools, etc. Encouraging use of these comms channels helps boost the above-mentioned transparency and creates a sense of trust across teams. People feel they are in the loop and are willing to perform and deliver their best work thanks to clear, open communications and guidance.

Of course, there’s no 100% guarantee that all these efforts will resonate with all the millennials in your work teams. But they are a good place to start. Millennial employees are increasingly advancing into more executive roles and their buy-in to a company’s mission and values is critical to ensuring the business’ longevity and sustainability. Make the effort to keep your millennial peers engaged: or suffer the consequences.