The number of millennials entering the workplace in Singapore is increasing rapidly, presenting a new challenge to employers in the region.
It is impossible to bury your head in the sand and ignore it—by 2025, three out of four workers in Asia will be from that generation. While managing a workforce made up of workers across multiple age brackets can seem like a headache, the reality is that research has made it easier than ever to be a positive influence on them.
Getting to grips with it now will give you a great head start when it comes to retaining the talent that you desperately want to keep within the organisation.
As long as you’re willing to use that data to understand the expectations of your employees, and can adapt to try and accommodate them, then you can be reassured that you’re already winning the battle.
Understanding the starting point
It is worth being aware that millennials are, generally speaking, an unsettled group. Growing up around their data being misused, media frenzies predicting the worst for the world’s future, as well as dealing with the aftermath of a global financial crisis, has resulted in a generation who are sceptical about everything.
Whether their goals are owning a home or seeing their career prospects being fulfilled, the bottom line is the same; their overall optimism is low, and according to Deloitte, Singapore’s millennials sit slightly below the global hopefulness average.
Their expectation is also that the responsibility for improving this scepticism lies at businesses’ feet rather than anyone else, which makes it essential that you do your bit to address it.
Also Read: The millennial force: changing the workplace and its culture
Look at what they want from you, understand it and act on it. If you don’t, be aware that this disrupted generation will move on: in a recent survey we carried out amongst AWS professionals, 26 per cent of millennials said they were actively looking to change employers in the next 12 months, with less than half being satisfied enough that they see themselves staying where they are.
What makes them leave?
The most common reason any member of staff leaves will always be around salary, which can be the most difficult thing to control.
Your resources are finite, but as millennials have an eye on more than just their paycheck, it is important to ensure you are doing the most you can to hold onto them. At the heart of it all is company culture.
Millennials place the greatest importance of any generation on their work-life balance, meaning that offering benefits such as flexible hours or working from home will help go towards them facilitating this.
The digital age is making it less essential that your staff are based permanently on-site, so if you can allow your employees more flexibility, then you’re going to be more valued as an employer. An environment that allows a better mental headspace will result in a more productive workforce as well as a more loyal one.
Also read: Startup pointers: essentials for aspiring millennial entrepreneurs
Catering for staff development is also essential. Paying for relevant training is an investment that makes your staff more valuable—both to your own organisation as well as to others—but it’s a vital spend if you want to foster a culture of loyalty.
Millennials may be sceptical about the world, but having an employer placing that much importance on their development will always pay dividends. When your workers trust that you have their best interests at heart, why would they look elsewhere?
Talking to them
Ultimately, regular and direct communication is never a bad way to manage if you are unsure of what it is you need to be doing. Regular 1-to-1 meetings, away from the shop floor, will give a safe space for an employee to tell you their concerns that will not always happen in front of their colleagues.
It also provides you with the opportunity to ask them for any issues that they have, giving you a chance to address them before they spiral into something that can result in them looking at alternative employment options. The easiest way to find out what’s happening inside your employees’ minds is to ask them!
Different trends emerge and will continue to do so as the digital age progresses. Within our own business, we’ve found that a younger workforce doesn’t want to be provided with devices to work from, and would far rather use their own.
We’ve invested in software and security measures that make that possible, but without asking outright we’d have been behind on that. Asking for feedback isn’t a sign of weakness, and acting on it only puts you in a stronger position.
It’s down to you
You may not be up to date with the latest Netflix series, or have heard of the social media platform that everyone is using now, but that unfamiliarity doesn’t mean you are trying to navigate unchartered territory.
Understand that you are dealing with a pessimistic generation, but one whose needs are largely the same as any other part of your workforce. Communication is the way to overcome all of the hurdles that millennials may provide you with. And knowing what they want is easier than you may think, too!
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