Managers, make peace with your millennials

Young workers have a different view of the world and bosses must work with it.

Rewarding staff in today’s millennial-employee driven world is not easy. Their desires, attitudes and needs have changed vastly from workers’ needs from even as little as 20 years ago.

In the 22 years of my working career, the nature of workers’ needs now seem to be more diverse than ever.

If you have built the right culture you can refer to your younger line managers to see whether the incentives you have put in place are fulfilling the needs of your employees.

Sales will always be an incentive-driven industry and how you scale your incentives, on what timeline, will always vary from industry to industry.

But the one constant in any of this is that if staff can relate to your management style, understand the focus of the business and have a general desire to achieve their best each day, you are on the right track.

Building that atmosphere is no easy task. After all, the millennial employee is no longer as dedicated as Generation X or baby boomers.

A recent study by US research company Gallup found 21 per cent of millennials changed jobs in the past year and 60 per cent were open to new job opportunities, which was 15 per cent higher than non-millennials.

Millennials are also the most willing to act on better opportunities. Thirty-six per cent said they would look for a job with a different organisation in the next year if the job market improved, compared with 21 per cent of non-millennials.

This puts a lot of pressure on employers to find the right incentives to keep millennials focused on the task at hand. It also means you have your work cut out trying to secure long-term loyalty.

The key is to create an environment that combines open learning and where opportunities are apparent.

Of course, not everyone can be promoted and not everyone can earn a pay rise. The latter can’t be used as your only bargaining tool every time an employee threatens to leave.

The essence of teamwork and team building should not be underplayed or undervalued in any organisation. If you can create great teams to work together, help one another and set realistic goals, you can generate harmony and a place where people will want to work.

Not everyone will jump at the first opportunity when a rival firm offers them extra money.

If you create a culture where people can learn from each other, find their job fulfilling and actually enjoy coming to work, you will go a long way to keeping your employees longer than your competitors and taking the business to the next level.

Your ability as a chief executive or managing director to relate to your employees will also help enormously.

If your staff know you started at the bottom, are happy to talk to anyone at any time (within reason) and can relate to their day-to-day challenges, they will feel considerably more at ease in the workplace.

Wherever you started in the industry — at the bottom or top — it is up to the chief executive to be able to show compassion, empathy and goodwill to all staff. This will go a long way to ensuring loyalty.

Managing millennials isn’t easy but finding the right way to communicate with them isn’t as difficult as people make out.

People will always be on the hunt for opportunities but sometimes that opportunity is right in front of them and all they need to do is speak to the chief executive.

If your door is always open they will happily enter.

Darren Lord is chief executive of The Smart Group.