Tags
gen-y, millennials, practices for gen-y, practices that work well on millennials, work practices for millennials
My line manager, at the previous company I was working for, did not like millennials/Gen-Yers. Once during the course of a discussion he made several accusations on Gen-Yers. Being a Gen-Yer it was hurting for me. When he finished speaking, I replied him “you do not really understand us”. He started his sermon once again as if I had rub salt into his wounds. I asked him what makes you think this way about us. He answered furiously that “it is difficult to manage you people”. After understanding his problem, I tried explaining him some things about millennials that certainly fell on deaf ears. Here in order to progress the post I am going to give a brief description of the things that I told to him about millennials. I told him we challenge things that do not make sense to us. We do not praise unnecessarily. We believe in progressing by performing well. We do not believe in short cuts but we do believe in the spirit of smart work. We like to be appreciated when it is due. We believe in making our own ways and defining our own rules. We anticipate before taking actions. We do not like to be confined in cubes because we have wings that latest technology has awarded us.
Being a Gen-Yer, whose present role includes: HR strategy development, advisory, guidance, business partnering, service providing and monitoring, I believe if right environment is provided to us we do our best in a smart manner to benefit organizations. I am going to discuss some of the strategies that work best in our case. Millennials need immediate and continuous appreciation. We believe if we do some-thing worthy we must be appreciated immediately and in order to keep us going we need continuous appreciation. The technology by which we are being surrounded allows us to stay in focus, thus along with personal appreciation from supervisors we prefer to be appreciated in front of everyone so that we can project our accomplishments among our connections on the web. We are not sycophants, thus do not expect us to wander uselessly around our supervisors and line managers. Do not judge us from our looks, views and faiths. We appreciate being judged due to our work only. We do not believe in the erstwhile concept of seniority on the basis of time spent in a particular field, we admire being promoted on the basis of our performance. Do not imprison us by putting the shackles of time and space; give us freedom by making our work connected with the mobile technology. Latest technology has enabled us to see our performance 24/7, make such arrangements that we can see our work related performance always and everywhere. Another reason behind this suggestion is that we give our best when our work interacts with us. Continues progress report is a way of making us feel that our work is an experience for us and we can see it. For making us learn do not use conventional methods of teaching. Make it interesting; make learning a real experience for us by involving us into it. We are well aware in every respect due to our continuous connectivity; thus, do not try to fool us by keeping us in dark.
Many organizations around the world are working on the above stated schemes in order to make work a real experience for millennials, Google, Microsoft, DHL and Deloitte are just few examples of such organizations. Companies are using such ideas that involve mechanics of video games to engage employees and make them perform well employees. Work is becoming a real experience not something that is superficial. Things are already out of the box and further efforts are in progress to make workplaces in alignment with the ideals of millennials.
Ahmed Bajwa 
Very well written and very interesting to read.