We all know that Millennials (Middle-class members of the workforce who completed high school and college in the first ten years of 2000s) can be a contradictory group to manage – from social media use in the office to expectations around office ‘face-time’, millennials can switch from having ‘high-touch’ employment expectations to wanting a ‘low-touch’ workplace experience.

How can Boomer managers reconcile Millennial expectations into a smooth management philosophy?

High Touch Employees

The millennials on your team have expectations about interaction and feedback based on their environment: their schools valued collaborative teaching methods, frequent communication with professors, and learning through experience and positive reinforcement. These can all seem quite foreign to a manager who has never encountered them, but they boil down to a few straightforward needs:

1. Frequent Management Input. These workers are used to being able to ‘check-in’ regularly with authority figures, to ensure that everything is going according to plan. Don’t mistake this for a lack of confidence – this is a team-building approach to projects. Manage it by scheduling regular 15-minute check-ins, and don’t save all of your feedback for annual reviews.
2. Frequent Evaluation and Reinforcement. Have you seen the rubrics and assignment structures involved in college assignments? For your fresher millennial employees, this is going to be something they expect to encounter at work, too. These can be delivered through an HRMS, by scheduling regular reviews of ongoing deliverables, or through testing in an integrated LMS.

Low-Touch Workplaces

For all of these expectations of management engagement with their work, an office that employs many millennials may feel like a ghost town much of the time! Experience and comfort with working remotely means that it can be confusing to have an employee with the desire for so much contact, as well as so much telework time.

1. Workplace Flexibility. Remember Dr Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham? That’s Millennials, with places they’re comfortable getting work done. Your employees may work from ‘home’ in some surprising locales. Have a system where it is simple to communicate with employees when they’re needed in the office, and when telework is fine.
2. Communicating over Text. These employees grew up with Google, and they have friendships built entirely through text communication! This can be a frustration if you insist on phone conversations and meetings, rather than email. Many of these employees will be very skilled at organizing and recalling communication done over text. Make this a strength, by recording call and meeting minutes, keeping them in a centralized location, to bring these communication preferences together.

Benefits Expectations

These two qualities can really come together in how your millennial employees engage with the benefits you offer them, from required health insurance coverage to voluntary benefits like life, dental, and vision insurance.

1. First-time Benefits Users. Thanks to the ACA, many of your employees may be covered by their parents’ health plans to a much later age than you are accustomed to. These older ‘first-time customers’ need the same coaching and resources as employees in their early 20s.
2. Independent Researchers. To complicate the benefits conversation, the combination of high-touch employee, low-touch workplace means that your millennial employees would consider an HRMS benefits tutorial a great resource, and a meeting with Human Resources ‘old-fashioned’.
3. Gig Economies and On-The-Fly Technology are part of every day life for these younger employees, and they may not understand the nature of benefits election and open enrollment. Underscoring the deadline, and the locked-in nature of benefits elections, is going to make life much easier for everyone.

Bringing it Together

How do you combine such contradictory expectations? The same way your millennial employees solve most of their other problems: technology.

A fast, robust HRMS allows organizations to build training modules, schedule regular review meetings, and evaluate productivity and work quality. A talented HRMS management team can help you integrate payroll, workflows, benefits, and LMS functionality into a central system, to encourage employees and managers to use the system as efficiently as possible.

If you think this is the key to bridging the gap between your millennial workforce and boomer managers, give us a call at CorpStrat.

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