Microsoft is a content client. This is a sponsored post, but all thoughts and opinions are my own.
Is your organization millennial-friendly? Does it need to be? If you have any hope of having employees for the foreseeable future, that answer is a profound, “Yes!”
(There’s a great quiz here from Microsoft to find out if your organization is.)
Today millennials account for one-third of all employees and should hit the almost half mark by 2020 according to the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flager Business School. They are your future workforce, if not the one you already have. Yet creating an organization that welcomes and embraces this generation’s quirks and customs isn’t as easy as buying a Keurig and relaxing the dress code.
As you know from our discussion on the psychology of workplace collaboration, I’ve partnered with Microsoft Office to learn more about collaboration and productivity in today’s workforce. That means understanding the generational differences, too.
Would you be surprised that being millennial-friendly has a lot do to with technology and how you incorporate it into your organization? And no, not installing an X-box in the break room (though that would be very hip of you). A lot of millennial customization centers around how communication workflow happens from team to team, manager to reports and vice-versa.
Sure, flex-time, work from home, allowing for personal devices, creating a collaborative space at the office and more are techniques to deliver a more modern workforce payoff. However, tearing down the conservative IT policies and walls of old to allow modern project management and communications platforms to become your internal supply chain – especially allowing for mobile access – will get you a long way.
And stop thinking of millennials as entitled or spoiled. If you think about it, they were raised in an era of unprecedented wealth in this country and when parents started to nurture and empower children rather than make them conform to the way it was always done. They’re the first truly empowered generation. If you give them the opportunity to succeed, they will. Not the way you may have, but just sit back and watch them go!
To see how millennial-friendly your organization is, Microsoft has designed a quick quiz to give you a status report. Take it, then get access to an incredibly useful white paper called “5 Faces of Today’s Employees.” This free download looks at everyone from the Boomer aged manager down to the entry-level millennial with insights and ideas on how you can improve your structure to blend them all together.
I’ve given the link to three of my clients already. Srsly. It’s useful.
Ready for your score card? Start your organization’s millennial-friendliness quiz over at Microsoft.
Disclosure: Microsoft is a content client. This is a sponsored post.