There’s a lot of speculation online about what makes Millennial’s tick, but when it comes to knowing what this generation is all about, teachers who spend five days a week with millennial students are the real experts.
Anyone who works with young people can tell you that today’s connected world is both a blessing and a curse. One of the drawbacks of being plugged in 24/7 is that today’s students are hyper-aware of the biggest problems in our world, and being on the receiving end of so many gloomy messages can be exhausting.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise as it’s been on the horizon for years, but are businesses truly prepared for the rise of millennial’s in the workplace?
This new wave of people coming through office doors near you are not just tech literate, but accustomed to being connected anywhere, at any time. They’re a generation that can’t recall life before the Internet, they’ve always had a cell phone, and they share their photos via Instagram and communicate with friends and family via Facebook and Twitter. Thanks to the rise of mobile, cloud and social, millennial’s are used to flexibility, openness and instantly connecting with people regardless of their location. What they’re not used to are constraints and being restricted by an IT department when it comes to using technology.
Having grown up with technology at their fingertips, millennial’s won’t put up with poor enterprise technology. Legacy systems that have been rolled out by businesses, more often than not, mirror the hierarchical structure of traditional organizations, which the millennial generation simply won’t stand for.
Rather than being able to communicate, share and work on files and content with everyone involved in a project, they could find themselves working in silos. Knowledge is trapped on people’s desktops and in their inboxes and, while there may be communication across departments, working with colleagues beyond the firewall – whether customers, contractors or partners — could be their biggest challenge.
“All of the above issues can be solved by effective technology services. But the generational split in the workplace doesn’t stop at general frustrations with poor ICT systems”, advices Candice Du Preez, COO at VastraTech.
In order to keep up with this fast moving generation, don’t slow them down. If you notice your Millennial employees looking for more advanced opportunities give them more challenging work or encourage them to keep moving. Sound crazy? It’s not.
Millennial’s have a drastically different outlook on what they expect from their employment experience. Millennial’s are well educated, skilled in technology, very self-confident, able to multi-task, and have plenty of energy. They have high expectations for themselves, and prefer to work in teams, rather than as individuals.
“Creating engagement strategies is one of management’s big goals. But managers who have developed successful strategies for retaining boomers are going to have put those strategies in the corporate archives. Creating strategies to engage millennial’s requires a whole different approach – and strategy”, concludes Candice.
