Understanding Millennials

I was invited to share perspectives on the mentioned subject at the 7^th Young Managers conference of National Human Resources Development Network (NHRDN) held almost a fortnight ago in Delhi. I was deeply honoured to have been invited and sharing the table with eminent personalities from the industry. I was accompanied by Sonali RoyChowdhary, Ashish Rajpal and the discussion was moderated by NN Akhouri.

The topic of discussion was Understanding Millennials , it could not have been trickier as 70% of the audience was Millennials.  It was a post lunch session and as a panel we had limited choices to keep the audience awake; we decided to change the format of engagement, we involved the audience from word go and asked their perspectives on the topic before sharing ours. This did the trick and we got a lot of questions and comments early on, and kept the audience awake.

From my perspective I diced the pie into 3 parts:

·         Societal

·         Organisational

·         Personal

Societal: Most of them come from nuclear families and both parents working.  Millenials are constantly being bombarded with new gadgets, new applications and more choices. They have the pressure to choose from these constantly. They have their friends across the world and can keep in touch with them instantaneously. If they want to know something then there is Google, their dependencies on other human beings is low. They have a constant need to be “Me”. The first person to be satisfied has to be “Me” in all transactions unlike the earlier years where parents’ came up first. Sacrifices were common and contributions to home were expected…all this is a past phenomenon.  Corporate have to leverage this by thinking of “WIIFME” equations in all that we do…whether for policies or for customers.

Organizational: In their working time most of the Millennials are surrounded by various kinds of digital instruments which keep them up to date on what is happening around them and they all like to respond to these demands on an ongoing basis. Most of them own an IPod, Smartphone, Laptop and now increasingly I pads. Hence the organisation, which is going to attract the best of them, needs to provide for such Distractions!! (Gen X thinking) and in fact perhaps help them in coping up with all of this. There is a need to listen to IPod while working on your laptop; we used to call this distraction. Gen X has to learn to keep up with all the gadgets and the shorter spans of attention from Millennials. Corporate has to learn to be able to engage the employee in spite of all this and consistently communicate with them in spite of all the devices. Many modern day IT companies have been able to this successfully while others are on their own learning path.

Personal: in our minds (or is this a marketing guys conspiracy?)  we keep on segregating people and employees into categories. Truth of the matter is that we are all human beings and most of the things which appeal to us are same. We value relationships, we value someone giving us time & paying attention to us, we value our opinions and someone agreeing to them, we value respect and we value someone explaining to us the reasons and the “whys”.  As managers we need to understand the above and keep these small things in our mind while dealing with Gen Y.

Some simple equations to deal with Millennials:

·         Give them space meaning give them work and direction, do not supervise

·         Treat them as equals shun the hierarchy

·         Give them respect for what they know (trust me they know a lot about a lot of things, we as Gen X have no clue about)

·         Expect them to be diligent and sincere not necessarily ones who spend 14 hours at work

·         When you hire someone, you hire the WHOLE being with his/her mind, heart and soul, provide opportunities to nourish all aspects in the organisation

·         Trust them

In the end I would like to sum up by saying that we are all humans, whichever generations we might belong to and if we treat each other like humans, we can go much further and faster than we are. We can grow to be more kind, respectful and yet abundant to create meaningful work and world.