How Millennials Are Shaking Up the Workforce in Unprecedented Ways

by Simon Hopes Author

Millennials are often blamed for the massive changes that are happening to corporations. This includes companies making shifts to a more employee-centric approach in a bid to keep their talent in-house and discourage them from exploring alternative job opportunities. This is wise – as young people feel less inclined to stick around a particular organization than any generation before them. Millennials don’t desire the 30 year brass ring – they are more interested in cultivating their skills and making sure they are getting the best opportunities from their work. As such, companies have needed to adjust to creating a more development-focused company culture that values transparency and work-life balance. With that in mind, here are the ways in which millennials have cause this corporate shift to happen.

Fluency with Technology

Being the most studied generation in history, millennials are well known to be the first digital natives. As such, they are able to use technology in the workplace in unprecedented ways. This includes the use of project management tools such as Trello and Basecamp to maximize the workflow and efficiency of the projects they are working on.

Millennials in the workforce are also able to use technology to make work less-time consuming. As a result of this, they often find sitting in an office for long hours tedious and unnecessary, as they are often able to complete their jobs quicker than their older counterparts at work. As a result, millennials desire to have flexible or remote working options, and expect updates to happen more frequently and be kept more abreast of changes in the workplace. This has had the effect of making millennials more reliant on feedback than other generations, and the expectations that they will communicate more with their managers on messaging platforms such as Slack.

Work-Life Balance

While corporations demand more than ever of their workforce, millennials expect to reap the rewards of the increased efficiency they bring to corporations via technology. As such, millennials have a higher focus on work-life balance than other generations, and do not expect to put in the long hours that other generations may be ok with. This is because millennials, as well as their younger Gen Z coworkers, are less likely to loyal to a company if they overwork their employees and do not promote work-life balance.

There are a number of reasons for this. For one, millennials are more cognizant of the management style of the companies they work for, and feel as though the people managing them should have their best interest at heart as well as the organization’s best interest. If that is not the case, and the company they work for appears to value profit over taking care of their workforce, then millennials are more likely to leave. This is particularly because most millennials came of age during the recession, and saw how the relentless pursuit of profits negatively impacted workers – as well as their early job prospects. As such, corporations that want to attract millennial workers need to focus on updating their technological structure as well as their employee structure and hierarchy to keep millennial works happy.