What is the most important thing you can do to improve your relationship with your millennial employees? Understand them and work with their strengths. Today, millennials make up a huge percentage of the workforce, and so it’s essential to both appreciate how to effectively manage them and understand how to encourage their leadership skills.
If your company isn’t effectively managing millennials, then even the most impressive list of benefits won’t keep them at your company. They will be looking elsewhere—and will leave as soon as they find something better.
A strong company needs strong management practices that play to the strengths of their employees. Here are some tips with easy-to-implement practices that will help your organization get better at managing millennials.
First of all, it’s important to make sure that you understand who your workers are and what matters to them most. Millennials play an increasingly large role in the workplace, and they bring unique attitudes, experiences, and perspectives.
Managing millennials is like managing anyone else—you’ve got to find the tactics that make it easier to drive their development and enhance how you communicate:
Be sure to establish and share clear and consistent goals for individual employees, teams, and your overall company.
Millennials can be strong team players, but like anyone, they like to feel a sense of team spirit and want to feel like they are part of their company’s success. This means that as part of managing millennials, you need to offer them opportunities to work as part of a group with others.
Millennials tend to want to make a statement with their lives and with their jobs. They need to feel that what they do is meaningful and actually makes a difference in the world. This also serves to increase employee engagement—which in turn improves employee retention rates.
Most millennials grew up in an environment where they were almost constantly tuned in to electronic devices. This has impacted their overall skill set in both positive and negative ways.
Do your employees feel that their job allows them to utilize their strengths while improving on their weaknesses? Send them a survey to find out! Create survey→
Millennials, with their interest and attention to social media, are in the perfect position to become excellent brand ambassadors for your company. Job seekers today still turn to family and friends, as well as a company’s current employees for information—and so do potential customers.
Millennials want more out of their life than simply sitting for eight hours behind a desk. They care most about jobs that offer them flexibility, a sense of autonomy, and a better life. In order to motivate millennial employees, offer flexible benefits that will ultimately lead to more productivity. Here are some ways that they prefer to work, based on our research and that of Gallup’s:
Whatever changes you choose to incorporate as you continue managing millennials, remember that employee feedback is essential to improving performance and job satisfaction. Consider using a management performance survey to find out how your employees really feel about their supervisors and the job they are doing.
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