Millennials are no longer the young generation in the American workforce. Now that Generation Z has come of age, millennials are now in their 30s and many have been employed with the same companies for many years. Unfortunately, businesses across a variety of industries still struggle when it comes to understanding how to best manage employees from this demographic. Millennials are often individualistic in how they approach daily tasks and can be easily disillusioned after living through multiple economic crashes and an incredibly unreliable job market. Still, there are ways for you to manage these members of your team.
If you’re looking for ways to get millennials on your marketing team invested in current projects, consider these ideas. With a little bit of a push, you might be able to get a lot more out of these workers.
Develop a Social Media Plan
The biggest mistake you can make with younger members of your marketing team is failing to understand social media. Sure, it is true that the millennial generation was raised alongside social sites like Facebook, but this group is also likely to be very discerning when it comes to content consumption. This means the people on your team who fall into this category are going to have a lot of opinions and insight on how to get the best results from a campaign on various social platforms. Engage with these ideas and formulate a strategy as a group.
By forming a plan as a team, you can easily avoid obstacles that would otherwise be difficult to predict in advance. For example, a member of your team might suggest moving focus on a campaign from Twitter to Instagram based on his or her own experiences with similar projects. Using this insight to your advantage might help you see better results from your marketing efforts in a more immediate way.
Hold Fewer Meetings and More Check-Ins
One stereotype that tends to prove true with millennials is that they often have their personal devices nearby. This is largely due to the fact that this generation was provided with an array of options in how to communicate with each other. It also means you want to rethink the way you go about internal meetings. Most millennials perform better when they aren’t inundated by constant meetings. In fact, you might want to do away with a majority of meetings and instead communicate major ideas via email and only come together for major announcements.
Marketing professionals like Eyal Gutentag have been able to see success by streamlining communication and focusing on what matters. Frequent check-ins with individual members of the team can have a more profound impact on how managers interact with employees than group meetings. Find a better flow with how you communicate with your employees and it might help you find the most rewarding way of managing millennials in your office.
Discuss Brand and Company Values
Another way to get the millennials on your marketing team to care about a project is by discussing the values of the company. Market research shows that millennials prefer to work for and shop from organizations with values that they share. When people on your team care about the environment and you’re trying to launch a new eco-friendly product, this is an easy way to combine the passions of the group with the mission of the company. While it might not always be this clear-cut, there are ways to blend individual and company values together.
In order for your business to stay successful well into the future, you need to take time to consider the needs of different employee demographics. Focus on getting better work out of your millennials and you might be able to totally transform the daily operations of your office.
