After a charmed life at home, school and college, millennials are not happy being ‘just another brick in the wall’, doing ‘unexciting’ work. Organisations need to think out-of-thebox, employ new age tools to fire their imagination and challenge their mettle to transform them into a charged-up force
Ask anybody what you think of the twenty-some year old youngster you know in your family and a wave of positive feeling runs through the mind. Ask what you think of the recent entrants to an organisation and the adjectives suddenly change. Irresponsible, Impatient, Entitled and sometimes Lazy are some of the top ten words that came up in a recent nation-wide study by our investee company Skills Alpha about millennials in the workplace. Why is there such a difference between the bright kid at home and the sullen adult in the office? And in a world where more than half of the employees and entrepreneurs were born after 1985? Isn’t it time we did something about enabling them to be more productive and happy participants in the work environment?
To understand the real issues, one needs to understand the process of growing up for young folk from middle and upper class families. Typically, from single child families or at best having one sibling, today’s youth have grown up pampered and well cared for, with access to the best of technologies and multiple distractions. Their attention span is low and the need to balance work and life and be part of something missionary is critical to their thinking process. They come through school and college education with their ego and individuality intact and enter large organisations in a group of hundred or thousands of fresh recruits. Suddenly the world falls apart. “All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall” is the refrain that goes through their heads as they get bundled for induction and training, deal with impatient and extremely busy first-time managers, realise that the work is not as exciting as they had expected it to be and it’s going to be a long time before they are able to get noticed. This leads to low esteem, a sense of alienation from the workplace and sometimes early attrition from the first job. No wonder then that in many services firms, the attrition in the first year of joining can be as high as double the average attrition. The reality is that most Human Resource (HR) processes and systems were designed in a previous era and fall woefully fall short of millennial expectations. The acquisition process fails because talent comes in with low patience and average expiry dates of not more than a couple of years. The engagement process built around training and some event driven motivation attempts falls short of exciting young folks and the learning and development processes with a predictable set of classroom and e-learning interventions fall flat too. The systems in use-HR Management ERPs, Learning Management Systems and Performance Management Systems are designed for the average but loyal employee and have nowhere near the flexibility and adaptiveness sought by the millennials.
“The world of learning is being transformed by technology and organisations that do not embrace these innovations for their millennials− and soon for all employees− could well be left behind!”
Fortunately, new digital technologies and new thinking on motivation and employee delight are providing the push and the pull to create new and exciting employee journeys. In tomorrow’s world, the 24 year old millennial (let’s call her Aditi) will get her own personalised dashboard on her computer or smart phone when she settles into the company, with a Smart Bot who will become her digital friend through her voyage of discovery and learning. How does the partnership of the Smart Bot and Aditi evolve? First, Aditi will see the alternative career paths for her over the next two to three years in the organisation and get a sense of her readiness in terms of skills. She will also sense the relative skill levels of others in her skill group and will be suggested small courses and videos, games and other learning artefacts that will accelerate her journey. As she starts her voyage of exploration and learning and gets immersive experiences through virtual reality and augmented reality, the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence will enable the Smart Bot to adapt the learning tools and content served up to Aditi to suit her individual preferences and learning style. Learning portals like Skills Alpha become the bridge between the expectations of the millennial and the skills needed by the organisation and enable the power of choice to the learner. Clever use of technology will ensure that the crossover from organisation designed content to curated learning experiences from the vast ocean of content on the internet is seamless and all the skills data will be pushed back into the LMS, PMS and HRMS. To this journey of systems of engagement riding on new systems of insight without disturbing the prevalent systems of record, new features like volunteering and peer support credits, mentoring and coaching on demand can be added to suit the needs of organisation. The world of learning is being transformed by technology and organisations that do not embrace these innovations for their millennials- and soon for all employees - could well be left behind!
By Ganesh Natarajan
