Millennials aren’t teenagers anymore. Most millennials were born between 1981 and 1996, meaning that they’re currently between the ages of 25-40. The vast majority of them have entered the workforce — but the way they interact with their employers sometimes differs vastly from the generations that came before them.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, millennial employees were pushing for increased remote work and greater changes in the workplace.
If you want to take your business operations to the next level, you need to meet your millennial employees on their level. As such, there are benefits to considering tweaks to some of your internal operations. After all, increased millennial engagement can have a positive impact on your company’s overall culture, the happiness of your staff at work, and your bottom line.
Strive for Flexibility
There’s nothing millennials appreciate more than flexibility. An initial idea for how to frame flexibility to your millennial staff is to enable them to have a flexible schedule. The drive to work from home is one way to offer employees a looser schedule. If you want to encourage engagement in your office, consider giving your team the chance to work during their preferred hours.
Some team members, for example, work best in the afternoon, whereas others will be the most productive in the morning. If you provide your team the chance to set their own hours — assuming they can maintain their productivity — you may see a significant uptick in the quality of work your team member puts out and their overall contentedness.
You can also encourage your team to continue to work from home if they wish, even if it’s on an abbreviated schedule. If you cannot do this, consider letting your millennial employees work from home three days a week while inviting them into the office for the other two.
When your team has the freedom to set their own schedule this way, they can still engage with the needs of your office without compromising their output.
Encourage Creativity
Millennial employees may also be quick to pose solutions to office problems that break from the status quo. Don’t shoot these ideas down. If you want to maximize your millennial talent, let them flex their creative muscles.
New solutions to old problems may take some time to get used to, but they can often prove to be beneficial for your company’s bottom line.
Request Feedback
One of the best ways to connect with your millennial employees is to ask for feedback. Requesting information about the ways your employees want to tackle new challenges can be beneficial for everyone. It also enables second-order conversations about how you, the company leader, can best support them. This will make them feel more engaged with you and your company’s operations.
Determining how best to gather feedback, however, can be tricky. As you first start reaching out to your employees, don’t single anyone out. Instead, offer an office-wide opportunity for your team to respond to recent decisions. From there, you can focus on individual recommendations.
Maximize Work Ethic
As of 2018, millennials made up at least 35 percent of the workforce. Those numbers are only likely to grow in the coming years. As such, a successful business needs to successfully maximize its millennial workforce’s drive to work.
Engaging with millennials effectively is an opportunity on multiple levels. Embrace industry flexibility, encourage creativity, and prepare to change your approach as necessary. You are likely to see benefits across more than just your millennial employees when you do. When you’re able to meet millennials and other staff where they are, your business is sure to prosper.