HR SPECIAL....................... WHAT DO MILLENIALS WANT?

WHAT DO MILLENIALS WANT?

Sriram Rajagopal





How can organisations create effective engagement frameworks for the millennial generation and groom them for success?

With millennials growing into manager and leadership roles in organisations, engaging them meaningfully for growth and success has taken on strategic importance and immediacy. As crucial as retaining the knowledge and skills that reside within the organisation is infusing new ideas and approaches into the workplace to keep the millennial workforce motivated and energised. How can organisations create effective engagement frameworks for the millennial generation and groom them for success?
Millennials already form the largest part of today's workforce. Studies show that a little under 30 per cent of millennials are already managers in organisations. This number is set to increase significantly in the coming years.

Millennials bring a lot of key strengths to their roles, including collaboration, team play, an innate understanding of new, digital technologies, and open team dynamics. These traits also resonate well with the teams they lead.

As millennials grow professionally and move up the ladder, HR teams and senior managers in organisations have a vital role to play -both as role models and mentors -in their development as managers. The growth framework has to be designed keeping in mind the personalities and strengths of the millennial workforce.

Create an inclusive workplace ambience:

Millennials are good networkers and thrive in a collaborative atmosphere. Organisations should leverage social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) technologies to build a connected work environment.Sharing of ideas is key and networking chan nels, both real and virtual, must be created to foster information sharing and communication.

Provide real-time feedback:

Millennials appreciate real-time feedback that highlights good work and calls out specific areas of improvements. For managers, the challenge will be to make the time for frequent feedback sessions. The HR team can enable this by creating digital platforms that facilitate realtime feedback and innovate on traditional performance reviews.

Institutionalise mentoring:

As they grow in the organisation and take on new challenges, millennials will benefit from the wisdom and mentoring of the senior employees in the organisation. Millennials look for mentors from not just their managers and seniors, but also their peer set. HR teams should invest in creating a scalable mentor-mentee culture within their organisations.

Digitise and gamify learning:

Millennials assimilate `gamified' concepts really well and today, thanks to technology, digital learning is proving to be more effective than conventional classroom learning.When properly implemented, gamification has the potential to make learning interesting, increase uptake of learning content, and catalyse more productivity at work. Gamification can also be applied disseminate information more effectively and innovatively.

Involve millennials in corporate social responsibility:

Millennials are a socially conscious demographic and want to actively contribute to community development and thrives on volunteerism.Organisations can benefit greatly by involving millennials in their CSR initiatives. The millennials, in turn, can derive a lot of personal fulfilment through these activities.

Understand and capitalise on their networking preferences:

Millennials are relatively superior users of digital technologies. Organisations must ensure that the company websites, blogs, and other internal channels are accessible on a range of on-demand platforms. HR departments can also introduce enterprise social platforms into the organisation to facilitate realtime conversations and interactions.

There is a clear need for organisations to support the millennials in their growth and development so that they can take on leadership roles with ease and effectiveness.

-The author is vice president, human resources, Cognizant

ETAS 7JUL15