It’s a reality. Most people’s lives are touched by technology in some way, shape, or form, but for the Millennial generation, technology is their world. This makes managing Millennials a unique challenge that, ironically, technology and data can help solve.
Case in point: A Pew Research Center study found that Millennials are the first “always connected” generation. These digital natives are literally marinating in technology. Social media is more than an obsession; it’s a fact of life. Millennials are married to their devices, using them as constant lifelines to the world at large.
Now what if, through the use of data, we could better assess not just what Millennial employees are doing, but why they’re doing it? It’s true that companies have been leveraging data for years to customize their customer approach and product offerings, but enhancing the employee experience is equally important. With Millenialls that’s what they’ve come to expect.
At Qualtrics we’re experiencing hyper growth. We’ve gone from 150 to 350 employees in the last year alone, and a huge percentage of our workforce is comprised of Millennials. What’s interesting is that a huge portion of this growth is through surveys sent via our platform and used to gather employee feedback. So, we understand how to manage Millennials first-hand, and we know that they want feedback constantly, to be trained, and to be provided with tools to learn and grow.
And that makes sense, right? I mean, as CEO, I spend more than 30 percent of my time recruiting and interviewing, trying to build our organization. But really that’s only half the equation. It’s not enough to simply bring people onboard, yet this is where too many organizations stop.
Enter radical transparency
For maximizing all the potential hidden within your Millennial workforce, I recommend a development approach built on the tenets of radical transparency. This is the idea that everyone in an organization knows everything, and it sits nicely within the expectations of Millennial workers.
Here are a few ways to implement this practice in your organization.
Stay focused. Millennials thrive with focused goals. But we’ve also learned that it’s hard for most people to effectively plan more than 90 days out. This is especially true for Millennial workers. Address this by having every employee set measurable and visible goals at the beginning of each quarter, then have staff break these down into weekly objectives.
This approach helps focus individual employee activities and diminishes the external noise that can often overwhelm people. But it also helps you climb into the minds of your staff—to understand what they believe to be their greatest contributions. So, use this as an opportunity to communicate with employees and pinpoint how the organization can help them achieve these goals.
Lead with data or they’ll find it anyway. We’re in the middle of a talent war. As a result, organizations spend a lot of time and energy bringing people into the building, and not enough time endowing them with the training and information to excel.
At Qualtrics, we know that radical transparency intensifies corporate loyalty and empowerment, because we use data to measure it by explicitly linking employee data to performance. Every employee is benchmarked, all data are broadly accessible, and all employees are treated accordingly. In fact, for our hyper-social Millennial workers, we’ve found that socially sharing employee data through an internal scalability and execution platform, works beautifully to fuel increased employee engagement and heightened performance.
Remember, any good decision is an informed decision. So share relevant company and employee data or people will spend all of their time trying to find it. When they do that, they take their eyes off the ball and become too internally focused. This mentality endangers the whole organization.
Communicate information such as expense reports, paid time off, weekly and monthly goals, even meeting notes. This level of transparency allows organizations to promote the rock stars, but also to learn from the collective mistakes. It’s important to share mistakes and create an environment that gives employees permission to make a mistake or two.
Guide and grow talent: Millennials like to receive near-constant feedback to understand how their roles contribute to the organization. That’s why the principles of radical transparency work so well for this generation. Not only do employees receive continual feedback on individual performances, but they’re also in the loop on their co-workers performance.
We’ve found that making the accomplishments of top performers available for comparison against the company as a whole motivates others to excel. But even better is that staff will start to emulate the right behavior by shadowing the competent, not the confident.
Just ask. While Millennials like to get feedback, they also like to give it. They are accustomed to socially sharing opinions freely. Don’t believe me? Simply go and look at one of these employees’ Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram accounts. Here Millennials constantly broadcast opinions to the world. Point being, if your business isn’t providing a channel to capture this feedback then it’s a missed opportunity.
But be sure to gather employee insight in a way that enables staff to give feedback without fear of retribution. Ask the tough questions. Then, use the results to implement change. You’re likely to see common patterns by taking a data-driven approach. Use these insights to make improvements and provide better-customized training and communication initiatives.
Let’s face it; this isn’t 1985 and every person we hire needs to think independently. While we can’t control how employees think, we can influence their work environment. More important, we can give them the data they need to make informed decisions.
So empower your staff with the ability give—and get—data on anything. Use technology to over communicate and to ensure that all staff is involved and aware of internal activities, challenges, and milestones. For the savvy, connected, and socially enabled Millennial worker, technology is and will likely remain a central component of their lives.
Some claim that this technology-gripped generation is filled with entitled, short attention span creatures that are difficult to manage. But with the right technology tools in place, and by being radically transparent, organizations can nurture Millennial workers and harvest a breadth of fresh ideas built on the back of data.
