Having engaged employees can increase profitability, improve sales, increase output quality, and slash absenteeism*. Millennials make up an increasing proportion of the Australian workforce and research shows that more than half (59 per cent) of them are aggressively looking for their next job opportunity **. This suggests they’re not engaged and that businesses are struggling to find ways to engage millennial workers and build loyalty.
Millennials seem to think that the grass is greener on the other side. When they move to a new job they almost immediately start looking for “better” opportunities. For businesses to prevent this from happening, they need to invest in building engagement with millennial employees.
This starts with strong leadership, and includes providing coaching and training to help millennials develop the skills that are important to them, as well as important to the organisation. According to the fifth annual Global Millennials survey, the main reason millennials move jobs is the lack of opportunities to develop their leadership abilities***. Providing these opportunities can help improve engagement.
It’s important to understand the current levels of engagement so managers can act to improve them. Annual employee surveys are uniquely valuable instruments to diagnose pockets of low engagement and identify drivers of engagement, however conducting pulse surveys are ideal to regularly measure ongoing engagement and sentiment. They’re short-form, regular surveys that are easy to analyse and can be conducted on a monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly basis, so a business can act on employee engagement issues as they arise, and measure improvements.
We recommend you follow four key pieces of advice when it comes to working with millennials.
- Make it easy
Great feedback comes when the process is easy for the employee. Companies need to remove friction from the process of providing feedback so it becomes richer. Rather than long surveys with a lot of questions, businesses should ask more open-ended questions like, “How would you describe your week?” or, “How well were you able to serve customers this week?” with selection boxes to simplify the survey process. Pulse surveys include simple questions, asked regularly, to help companies and managers gain immediate feedback and see trends.
Also consider the channel you are using to ask for feedback. We are now living in a mobile world, so it is important to ensure that your feedback channels are mobile compatible. Organisations should also consider other means than just sending surveys through email, consider SMS or pop up boxes via your internal intranet.
- Lifecycle feedback
Lifecycle feedback lets organisations identify trends in employee engagement throughout their time with the business, rather than once per year.
- Share and act
Organisations must put feedback into the hands of decision-makers and empower them to take ownership of their employee feedback with real-time, role-based reporting dashboards with closed-loop action plans.
- Show the value of loyalty and hard work
Organisations should aim to showcase the importance and results of loyalty. While it’s natural for millennials to want fast advancement, it’s more realistic to expect that they’ll achieve career progression over time and because of strong performance. By demonstrating that loyalty and hard work are, in fact, rewarded with promotions and other incentives, businesses can help millennials understand how to achieve their desired career path.
Millennials are a key generation in the workplace. They provide a fresh perspective and new ideas. It’s important to keep them engaged, challenged and interested, with opportunities to develop and advance where possible. It is also important to educate them about the need to demonstrate resilience and staying-power by working somewhere long enough to build up tenure and experience. By regularly measuring the experiences of your millennial workers, employers can get a clearer picture of how to work with millennials, and employees in general, most effectively.
*http://news.gallup.com/reports/191489/q12-meta-analysis-report-2016.aspx?g_source=ServiceLandingPage&g_medium=copy&g_campaign=tabs
**ManpowerGroup Solutions
***https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/About-Deloitte/gx-millenial-survey-2016-exec-summary.pdf
Bill McMurray, Managing Director – Asia Pacific and Japan, Qualtrics
