Are You Ready to Manage the Millennials in Your Team?

Millennials, also known as Gen Y will make up much of our workforce over the next few years. As a specialist in Accountancy Practice and Insolvency recruiters we have noticed this trend increasing over the last few years. 

The fact that you have found your way to these posts suggests you might have a few questions on how to motivate and manage this interesting group. 

Looking at the population data from the National Office of Statistics, the Millennials could be holding all the key management and business critical positions quite soon. 

Therefore, if you want to be a great leader in your organisation, knowing and understanding this group will be vital. To do that it’s important to find out what makes them tick. 

Millennials Want Variety and Interest in Their Working Lives 

They thrive on lots of different tasks and seem to shift among the various skills sets quickly.   

Therefore, it’s important to give them diverse and stimulating projects to keep them engaged.  

Communicate the Bigger Picture 

They want to be involved in the bigger picture when it comes to your company goals; they also want their ideas considered too. 

Ensure you sit down and communicate what both the company and team goals are. Then importantly help them understand what their part will be and how vital that is. 

Make time to listen to their ideas if you want them to remain a loyal and engaged member of your team. 

Team Work Is their Middle Name 

An endearing and incredibly useful part of this groups personality is their teamwork focus. They love working in teams.

Networking Ninja’s 

Facebook was born for the Millennial age with their ongoing need to connect and interact with friends, acquaintances and people they have never physically met! 

Not only comfortable with teams and group activities, your Millennial employee likes to network around the world electronically. If their role in your company involves any element of networking then encourage them and watch the results pour in. 

Offer Advancement Opportunities Based on Merit 

Contrary to popular opinion  your Millennial employees want to achieve and then receive the awards fairly and squarely when it comes to being compensated for performing well. 

Ignore this one at your peril. If you promote the longest serving candidate over the best; Millennials will lose respect and motivation, and potentially could start looking around with the outcome of developing their career with your biggest competitor. 

A Generation That Wants Feedback 

Hoorah, for once a workforce generation that wants developmental feedback. Millennials want feedback and lots of it; especially if it’s positive. 

We all prefer positive to developmental (negative) feedback, but Millennials have grown up with so much praise that it’s recommended you talk about development feedback rather than negative feedback. 

Developmental feedback is purely about a behaviour and not about them as an individual. How to manage it: factor in regular feedback on top of scheduled performance reviews. Of course, it’s important to adapt this to the individual too. 
 

Flexibility 

The advent of the World Wide Web has opened possibilities for remote working and for Millennials this is all they have ever known; consequently, they want flexibility. 

A strict 9-5 working week might be reasonable for you and me however for this group it can be stifling. 

We are not talking about individuals that want to shirk work here, rather a group that wants to work from home one day a week or come into the office from 10-7pm. 

If the work still gets done does it matter; a question only you can answer. 

Where possible allow flexible hours, some remote work, or half-days occasionally in slow times. Millennials count these concessions as convincing reasons to stay in a job. 

Millennial bashing is standard, and yet this group aren’t genuinely difficult to motivate or manage; provided you value both them and their contributions.