Managing the millennial curve

The millennials form a major and indispensable part of your workforce. By the virtue of facing severe competition in the academic domain, millennials have been triumphant in sharpening their survival skills for the corporates.They have fresh ideas and strong analytical abilities which impress the organisation and endanger the older generation employees. Thus, creating a huge difference between the expectations of the two. For instance, statistics clearly point out that older generation in India would prefer to stay with their current employer for almost seven years but the younger lot is planning to leave much sooner i.e. older generation would serve at least 4.7 years with the same organisation but for the younger one it is at the most 2.9 years.

Given that the millennials understand that their level of comprehension and contribution is somewhere equal to that of their older counterpart, they do not want to “wait” the age gap to reach the desired pay scale, thereby they have realised that their income can grow more rapidly if they switch jobs. The top most reasons as to why the millennials will be looking forward to quitting an organisation are: fear, job stress, a sense of unfair pay and a bleak or unknown future.

Acquiring, retaining and maintaining the millennial’s is the going to be the biggest challenge for 2016. With organisations across the board looking for the right talent to execute their strategies, brilliant millennial’s will be more in demand than supply – signalling an employer competition.

First and foremost, millennial goals need to be attuned with those of the organisation ( a difficult task which is easily malleable) and for organisations to drive performance, they need to instill a sense of purpose in employees while keeping up the basic promises – salary, appreciation, listening to opinions etc. Among the stated basics, salary plays a major role – as millennials suffer from a sense of unfair pay, a survey was conducted to get to the root of this problem, the reasons which attributed such thinking are:-

• job stress and workload not being directly proportional to pay
• despite delivering at par with experienced employees, having to “wait” for a decent pay due to age bracket and lesser experience
• organisations not going beyond the “limit” of their increment pattern but making millennials deliver beyond their job role limits; equalling to work exploitation from an employee

The above factors can be disappointing as basic needs of working for an organisation remain unmet. Additionally, certain traditional managers refrain from appreciating millennials giving the excuse that they would not consider their criticism. Whereas, millennials are open to logical discussions and criticisms, they do not believe in taking it personally. Moreover, criticisms from a manager who is appreciative are worked upon quickly and demonstrate that the manager is balanced.