What does the Millennial Employee Retention mean and what is the strategy to achieve it?
What are Millennials looking for when they start their career paths?
I’m a professional speaker, generational expert, and generational humorist.
I speak to groups, associations, and corporations like yours about the ever-changing generational dynamic that is blowing through our workforce, our corporations and our offices today.
The Generational Signposts
Recently, I had a member of an audience that approached me before the presentation and she said to me “Is your presentation going to be all about generational stereotypes?”, she said. “I do not like stereotypes!”
I have to agree with her, I don’t like stereotypes either.
I like generational signposts. Generational signposts explain how events, technologies and economic forces shape various groups of people.
People born during a certain time period or a certain timeframe have experienced similar situations and can be differentiated from other generations. You can use this information when you are working with multiple generations.
Well, let’s take the Millennial Generation everybody’s talking about.
The Millennial Generation
These are people born after 1980. When I have lots of Millennials in my audience and I ask the Millennials “How old were you in 2002?” and I get ages from 12-17 years old. Basically in 2002, the Millennials of today being in their late teens, they have influenced three to four hundred billion dollars of the family spending! Over 80 percent of the family apparel choices, and over 50 percent of the family car choices – that’s before they could even drive!
Baby boomers – you have brought teamwork into the family and you encouraged to have conversations with your millennial children. You talked about where to go out to eat, what type of electronics to buy, and where should you go on vacation. Not only did you have these discussions with your children but their opinion mattered.
And that is one of the reasons many Millennials are strong collaborators.
Millennial Employee Retention
74 percent of Millennials rank collaborative work environment as their number 1 or number 2 most important characteristic of a rewarding place to work.
So…What does that mean?
We need to offer Millennials multi-layered career paths!
Millennials really have turned away from that traditional corporate ladder. In fact, the corporate ladder has disintegrated and when we say things to Millennials like “You need to pay your dues before you climb the ladder” is a total disconnect.
Look for ways to be able to encourage your Millennials to have different experiences at your organizations.
Opportunities for Millennials to Grow and Experience
I recently spoke for the Association of Chiefs of Police in Colorado.
Here’s my own bias. I assumed that because these were law enforcement people, that they would be very rigid. Thinking, they’re not going to be very open to new ideas. I was wrong. See, that was my own stereotype.
In fact, one of the Chiefs said to me “You know, in the past, it used to be that someone wanted to be a detective forever. They became a detective and they were a detective. But that’s the old way of thinking and the new detectives that are entering the force today, a four to five-year stint, that’s about as long as they want to be a detective! So we’ve had to change and we move people out of the role of a detective after four or five years.”
Rules are like in burglary. They have even shorter stays – three to four months, the officer said. The drawback is that they’re losing a good person but the benefit is they have somebody new, with a fresh perspective coming on board.
They are offering these multi-layered career paths, different opportunities for Millennials to grow and experience.
Embrace and Intrigue the Millennials
An industry that can do this very well is the construction industry.
Ironically the construction industry is struggling to find millennial employees as the older employees age. An industry where you can have an apprenticeship or a craft training, this is an industry where you can learn.
You can hit the ground running and you begin your career with no student debt. It is opportunities like these that really embrace and intrigue the millennial.
In my next video, we will talk about the ever-changing generations in the workforce and what we can do to communicate and enhance our relationships.