Attracting Millennials to your workforce

Many businesses are offering sleek smartphones, tablets and laptops in their eagerness to attract young talent. Even though this is a positive trend and a smart strategy, some organisations forget the software that will ultimately run on these devices. What will happen when young professionals, reared on Instagram and Snapchat, encounter the non-glitzy reality of business software?

Who are these Millennials we keep hearing so much about? Depending on what source you consult — and there is a huge number of articles, books and studies on the subject — the Millennial Generation is the group born between the early 1980s and 2000.

According to these same sources, the Millennials are typically characterised as being demanding, recognition-craving, self-absorbed and entitled. So comparing these coddled selfie-stick-wielders to their grandparents or great grandparents, who were famously dubbed ‘The Greatest Generation’ by legendary US journalist Tom Brokaw, is ‘Millennial Generation’ a polite euphemism for ‘The Worst Generation’?

Absolutely not. Millennials are hard-working, tech-savvy, goal-oriented, flexible and thrive on change. They are often described as civic-minded with a genuine appetite for contributing and making a difference. They value work-life balance over cutthroat careerism and they engage with managers and employers to revive and energise the workplace in ways that would have been unimaginable for previous generations.

Setting the workplace agenda

Transitioning from adolescence into the workplace, the relatively small Generation X had to see itself outnumbered by the Baby Boomers (born 1940–1960), who were quite comfortable dictating the terms of the workplace. Being a larger group, the Millennials are well positioned to set their own agenda — a trend that is already starting to transform the workplace.

So what does this new batch of workers want from an employer? According to media reports, it seems Millennials want tools that can maximise their sense of flexibility. More often than not, this translates into flexible work hours, smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and their choice of software. For example, try finding anyone under 30 who has not changed the default browser on their work computer from Internet Explorer to Chrome (if indeed they haven’t managed to persuade the IT department to provide them with Macs).

Millennials and work flexibility has also given new fuel to the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend. Today’s employers must make sure that its employees’ software expectations can be effectively fulfilled by the hardware of choice.

Granted, smart devices add indispensable opportunities for simplifying one’s life, enabling access to email, social media and even, in some cases, the company’s back-end business system for impromptu time and travel reporting and more — at any time and in any place.

But offering slick, handheld hardware is really only effective for attracting young talent. It won’t help employers retain them in the long term. In other words, shiny objects won’t win the Millennials’ loyalty, especially not if the software running on those shiny objects doesn’t live up to the user’s expectations.

Business software and the Millennial

Millennials are the first group in history to have grown up with computers and the internet as natural, ubiquitous parts of life. Through the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat, this generation has lived in a digital age with technology intertwined in every part of their lives.

This is good news for makers of consumer software as they have a huge pool of early adopters eager to be the first to get on board the latest thing. For businesses, however, whose software is exclusively designed to support work, it is a quite different story.

In fact, the combination of the high expectations placed on software usability by Millennials and the often cumbersome and unattractive enterprise applications that employers are offering (albeit on shiny devices) has all the hallmarks of a perfect storm.

This is a storm that will likely cast many employers as ‘tyrants’ who force young workers to use slow, DOS-esque business systems in which the company is heavily or irreversibly invested.

But it would be too simplistic to limit this discussion to mere design or layout preferences. It is the very manner in which Millennials communicate and consume content that is profoundly different from older generations.

For example, Millennials do not email friends asking if they want to go to the movies. Rather, they send PMs via services such as WhatsApp. Similarly, a Millennial does not primarily turn to traditional media to find out what is happening in the world. Instead, the Millennial consults his or her social media feeds for the latest news.

Ensuring employee retention through business software, then, does not seem like the obvious way to the Millennial’s heart. And for any company whose attitude to ERP can be summarised by the tautology ‘it is what it is’, that is certainly true.

For organisations that are more agile, however, the business system could be fashioned into something elegant, intuitive and personal.

User experience is the answer

So here are some points for decision-makers to consider:

Hardware isn’t enough to retain young talent. If you want to appeal to the Millennial Generation, don’t forget to complement hardware investments such as smartphones and tablets with similar investments in software.

Speak with your software vendors about the possibilities of lifting out commonly recurring processes (for an ERP system, this might be something like time and travel reporting) from the back-end system to mobile applications.

Usability is king. This point cannot be overstated when talking about the Millennials’ expectations on their work tools. It is clear that offering an intuitive, appealing and highly configurable work environment plays a major role in user satisfaction and, in the long run, employee retention.

Active engagement with the ERP system. Millennials have developed their own way of communicating and consuming information. Why fight it when this instinct can be harnessed within the bounds of the business system? For example, notification features that actively alert the user when a change happens in an item or process that relates to the employee’s work.

Tap the potential of social. Millennials gravitate towards teamwork rather than independent problem solving. Nowhere is that observation more apparent than in social media, where all aspects of life are posted, photographed, tagged and shared. So why not harness this instinct to improve internal communication and cooperation in your business?

Don’t worry, they come in peace

Despite some of the more alarmist accounts of the expected havoc the Millennials will wreak in the workplace, they are the next wave of workers and their pragmatic approach can offer more opportunity than harm. Like most generations before them, they will work hard for any organisation that works hard for them.

And like any generation, they want to work and prosper on their own terms, using the tools that they trust. In the context of business, this entails quick and easy access to data, visually appealing, fully customisable interfaces and — if at all possible — a way to communicate with colleagues in a social media setting.

Given the sheer size of the Millennial Generation, that seems like a small price to pay if it means happy and loyal employees.