What's Different with Millennials?
What should you be doing?
Research has found that the younger generation are 23% more likely to travel abroad than the older generation, and value travel more than paying off debt. Given the price of home ownership (with the average house in 2017 costing £218,255), cars and student tuition fees, this is hardly surprising.
The impact of this is that millennials are defying traditions by living in different ways, travelling more, prioritising experiences over buying things, house-sharing with friends and creating communities.
We should reflect these trends when developing campaigns targeted at engaging millennials. Rather than using vouchers and products, we should consider experiential rewards and travel, for example a trip to Vegas or scuba-diving in the big blue. Both are great ways to ensure millennials thrive in the workplace.
The Feedback Loop
'Real-time' instant feedback is a fact of modern life and is second nature to millennials. Write a whatsapp message and see if someone has read and is replying, see where your friends are on snapchat, message a mate when their exercising with endomondo. With such mechanisms in their day-to-day life, the work environment must keep up. Gamification incentive just that.
What is gamification? - It's a simple yet popular concept of making something more fun, with levels and stages to achieve, badges, constant feedback and peer input. In short, all the elements of a game.. It can still be a very simple incentive, with for example employees choosing their own Target Reward from a range of options. BUT, the difference is how we communicate and keep feeding back. Allowing peers to post comments, daily performance notifications, setting up lots of little challenges and crating an interactive interface will transform participation and engagement.
Let's Get Social
Millennials can teach you just as much as you can teach them. They have grown up with technology and social media, so it becomes second nature. Social Media is an important tool in the workplace today from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and more. Most millennials are social media savvy and beyond the status updates they use it to interact with products and services. The introduction of social media has created hundreds of new job titles and can help attract even more custom by circulating news from your company and enables customers and employees to keep up to date with what's happening.
If they can help you, you can help them too. Here are some tips on how you can create the right workplace environment and encourage them to beat targets at the same time:
- Create a goal – By creating a goal within the office you encouraging specific mind sets and creating healthy competition amongst employees.
- Keep track of change – If you want to introduce gamification, see what the work ethic is like before and after then you'll know if it works or not.
- Reward progress – If the accomplishment is big or small if you reward your employee it'll give them the encouragement they need to keep going!
- Public – Whether you have a leader-board in your office or an open social media space it enables your Millennials to share their accomplishments.
- Provide leadership – Millennials want to learn from you and receive daily feedback, so work with them to help boost their work-esteem.
Two Way Street
It is a mistake to assume that every millennial is the same, but we should certainly consider these important trends. So, help each other, guide, praise and learn. The longing for the new and the different is more relevant than ever.