Millennials: Burden, blessing, or both?
Companies
often complain about the unrealistic expectations of millennial workers, but
heeding their call to action can improve the work environment for everyone.
We recently came across the following quote about the
younger generation:
Because all the peoples of the
world are part of one electronically based, intercommunicating network, young
people everywhere share a kind of experience that none of the elders ever had.
. . . This break between generations is wholly new: it is planetary and
universal.
Cultural anthropologist
Margaret Mead wrote these words in 1970. They are an important reminder that
older generations often see stark differences between themselves and
up-and-coming ones. We’re seeing that same pattern play out today: a barrage of
articles and commentators has stamped today’s youth as “millennials”—workers
who are said to be difficult to manage and likely to quit at a moment’s notice,
and to make needless mistakes as they forge ahead blindly without permission.
The research we’ve
conducted suggests a more complex reality. Yes, the youngest generation differs
from the older ones. But this has always been true. Can you
define everyone born between 1980 and 2000 by a handful of generalized characteristics?
You know the answer.
It’s time for leaders
of organizations to stop debating the millennial problem, hoping that this
supposedly exotic flock of sheep will get with the program. Instead, they
should see how questions and challenges from their youngest employees can spark
action to help their companies change for the better. It’s easy to say that
young people haven’t matured enough to resign themselves to the reality of
what’s possible. Yet they are asking an important question: “Why does it have
to be this way?” In the process of listening, leaders will soon realize that
young people want the same things we all do.
This past year, Joanna
conducted 200 in-depth interviews with high-potential young professionals and
an additional 60 with talent professionals looking for ways to engage younger
employees effectively. We’d be the first to acknowledge that this research is
qualitative, but it covers 120 companies, including 55 of the Fortune 500,
across many industries. The sample primarily draws from millennials in the
United States but includes multinational perspectives: more than 40 percent of
those sampled were immigrants from over 40 different countries or
first-generation Americans. The emerging themes were consistent enough to make
us feel comfortable sharing our observations and early conclusions from them.
For starters, these
interviews underscore what shapes this generation: even high-performing young
professionals acknowledge the harsh economic realities they’ve seen and the
stress they experience. Many in the United States continue to bear the burden
of thousands of dollars in student-loan debt. Coming of age amid the global
financial crisis, they have also observed firsthand the weakening of the social
contract as corporate scandals stripped workers of their pensions and companies
cut costs or closed their doors, leaving committed workers and their families
financially vulnerable. This has understandably influenced their decisions to
join or leave companies and sharpened their desire to find meaning and purpose
in the chaos of the world in which they’ve grown up.
Millennials also speak
of themselves as hyperconnected globally—always on—with resulting work behavior
that seems peculiar to some of their managers. But this natural affinity for technology
provides them with unique skills and insights that managers can use. They’re
efficient, and they also see patterns not always evident higher up the
hierarchy.
We don’t want to
belabor this familiar ground or the obvious ways in which young employees are
important to companies: at a minimum, they’re needed to replace aging baby
boomers and Gen Xers. Let’s focus instead on the actions that companies are
taking to adapt. If these seem relevant for most if not all employees, that’s
because they are. Young professionals don’t want to be patronizingly singled
out; they just want to create the kind of environment that many older employees
have longed for but never found. Any one of these actions would be a
significant shift from business as usual. Collectively, they represent a new
workplace dynamic spurred by the high expectations of young employees but
meeting a larger need for more thoughtful relations between all workers and
employers.
·
Build
bridges with data. People analytics
has been gaining momentum in a wide variety of organizations, but few have
thoughtfully used research to understand their youngest employees better.
P&G has deployed its consumer-marketing expertise to learn more about them
and to generate ideas that help middle managers to shift their own mind-sets
and adapt their management approach. They’re far from alone; some companies are
gathering data to understand not only their youngest workers but also the
entire workforce—tracking tenure, movement, performance evaluations, and
attrition, as well as qualitative data to gauge engagement and find ways of
increasing it.
·
Put
communication on steroids. Many
companies have learned that employees are eager to hear from top management.
But the young ones in our research expect this to happen at hyperspeed:
real-time, two-way communication that accepts input from everyone, followed by
fairly immediate action. Here, tech firms are leading the way. HubSpot, a
marketing-software company with a recent IPO, conducts surveys of its mostly
millennial employee base every 90 days and reports the raw findings, along with
analysis, to all employees. In addition, they use anonymous microfeedback
platforms to ask questions about specific topics and to engage on follow-up
feedback requested by supervisors or senior management. This approach provides
unprecedented visibility into issues and solutions—and changes the rhythm of
continuous improvement.
·
Develop
a culture of mentorship. Many
young people thrive on collaborative work and support from colleagues, but few
companies have figured out how to build a culture that helps existing employees
to mentor new ones. Personal relationships are crucial for companies anxious to
stem attrition or hang on to their young workers. W.L. Gore’s use of this
approach is a classic example: all new employees are assigned a sponsor who
helps them to navigate the culture; to reach out and form other mentoring
relationships, based on work interests and chemistry; and to be successful.
More recently, Sodexo began to test mentoring circles of four people to help
onboard new employees: three experienced ones each form their own connection
with a newcomer.
·
Get
creative about professional growth. This young generation has grown up watching
entrepreneurs reach the height of success before age 30, taking on
responsibilities usually reserved for older executives and gaining
unprecedented wealth. Many young professionals want a chance to flex their
entrepreneurial muscles; they chafe at the lack of advancement opportunity in
today’s flat structures. Any kind of movement that promotes professional
development is a plus. For example, last year Barclays started up a young
leaders’ resource group called Emerge. Its primary goal is to help the
company’s most recent hires accelerate their careers through opportunities to
develop skills, to network, and to manage projects through “extracurricular”
initiatives inside or outside the company.
Temporary projects over and above the day job are
nothing new, but for millennials who thrive on challenges they are crucial. For
example, Synchrony Financial offers a spot in one of its Innovation
Stations—collaborative, cross-functional teams across the United States—to
encourage its young high performers to dream up and test bold ideas. Like many
tech companies, the teams host one-day Bolt Sessions that rapidly deliver
working prototypes of digital solutions to help solve business or customer
problems.
Finally, young workers tell us they are energized by
rotational programs, an old standby that’s fallen by the wayside at many
companies. Programs at Synchrony Financial and other businesses have expanded
the traditional model to include increased mentoring, exposure to senior
leaders, crossfunctional work, and community service—elements that millennials
value highly.
·
Make
flexibility more than polite talk. Young employees, more than their older coworkers,
value the genuine blending of their work and personal lives. Leaders may be
apprehensive at the prospect, but there are simple ways to make flexibility
work. Journeys, a leading specialty retailer where young workers make up a
large majority of the workforce, has created a core time block when all
headquarters employees must be in the office unless they are on the road for
work. In return, employees are responsible for their results, regardless of
their work hours, which they are otherwise free to choose.
Flexibility is also important to millennials starting
families: many young women, and a growing number of young men, cite their
families as a top priority and want more family-friendly policies at work.
Netflix has instituted an unlimited parental-leave policy allowing employees to
spend more time with their newborns and to choose return dates balancing their
responsibilities at home and at work. For many companies, paid parental leave
would be a long-overdue first step.
·
Shape
midlevel managers into leaders. Middle managers are the first line of supervision
that young employees meet. That encounter can be disastrous. But it also can be
edifying if the managers are prepared to handle pivotal scenarios, such as
giving (and receiving) more frequent development feedback, managing difficult
situations, and learning to adapt to challenges. It is not enough to create
management tools that sit on the shelf.
For example, Danone has created an innovative internal
training program that brings together leaders of different generations so that
each can better understand how the others work (and to stamp out stereotypes)
in this digital era. Citigroup requires every manager to undergo coaching and
training before working with an intern or a participant in a rotation program.
You might think training an intern is just a headache, but not so. It’s a form
of recognition for mentoring ability.
Young employees are
part of the solution. They can learn how to broach issues with the empathy that
comes from standing in the shoes of their managers, to pose questions that
foster solutions rather than more problems, and to pause and thoughtfully
engage with their elders before moving on to action. It’s crucial to encourage
this two-way dialogue between the generations. Given the right attitudes,
senior and junior leaders can bridge the cultural gap that divides them.
But that’s only the
start. We understand that implementing most of our recommendations will be
challenging. They change the nature of work, establishing a new standard for
the way leaders, managers, and employees interact. Companies will therefore not
only more effectively retain young professionals, who may eventually become
their leaders, but also increase the engagement of all employees across the
organization.
We’re also optimistic that young
people can help show the way, not because they are so different, but because
they are expressing common human needs and raising relevant questions about why
more progress hasn’t been made already. Leaders who listen, who have long-term
horizons and the courage to break new ground, can improve their odds of
building a lasting legacy that serves generations to come.
By Joanna Barsh, Lauren Brown, and Kayvan
Kian
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/millennials-burden-blessing-or-both?cid=other-eml-ttn-mkq-mck-oth-1612
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