How to Capture and Retain Millennials

Millennials, GenY, Generation Next, Netgeneration: different names for the same generation, those born between 1982 and 2001. Birth rates in those two decades were almost as high as during the baby-boom of the 1950s and 1960s, thus Millennials are already present in companies in large numbers. HR departments have been observing and studying their behavior for quite a while now. In the language of personnel selection, a Millennial is a young person having a high level of education, sophisticated digital expertise, and a global perspective that derives from travel habits and acquaintance with different cultures and world regions. Millennials typically have high levels of self-awareness, need frequent stimulation, must see the results of their commitment in short order, and have low propensity to respect hierarchy and the formal dimension of corporate relations unless their value is acknowledged. A Millennial identifies more with his/her own professional capabilities and his/her professional network of reference, and less with the organization where they need to be utilized.

Millennials' focus is on the ability to learn and develop new skills rather than company loyalty. They are interested in preserving the control over their own path of career development, and prizes the quality of the work experience over job security, stability, and local dimension of employment. The quality of relationships with colleagues and superiors is critical and from their business leaders they do not expect an authoritarian attitude but support for their empowerment through a relation based on openness, transparency, and timeliness, frequency and informality of feed-backs. For them, the work-life balance is a necessity, not an option. What provides passion in life should at least in part transfer to one's work: social relations, the ability to compete, to see the impact of one's work and be acknowledged for the value generated. The distinction between work space and personal space should be minimal: at work, Millennials want also to feel a bit at home, with informal spaces for their personal belongings, work tools, even pets. The dimension of corporate social responsibility is important: directly or indirectly, every Millennial wants to change the world, at least a little.

The implications for the HR and staff are manifold. The most important is that you need to move the focus from giving a person simply a job to creating an engaging working environment, that allows employees to do best what they're passionate about. The company processes which have been most impacted by Millennials are recruitment and selection, as well as performance management, which is now understood not only as a moment of job evaluation but as a way of growing the manager-employee relationship to achieve excellence in performance and learning, leadership styles, which are now more oriented toward empowerment than prescription and monitoring, and managing the work-life balance in terms of contamination rather than reconciliation. An example? The possibility of being given a 3-month sabbatical for every 3-4 years of employment, to be spent on personal projects or, more simply, on delivering results without having to show up at the office. A final indication that takes its cue from current events: are we sure about the lack of attractiveness for Millennials of private pension plans? In a fluid and uncertain world, there is a chance for the financial industry to introduce itself to young workers at the beginning of their employment experience, by providing portable solutions and value propositions.