Right off the bat, I can assure you that he does NOT play the piano. But he does wake up every morning, and within five seconds, he is on his phone connected to all of his friends, representing his brand on social, and starting his day.
By the way, if you haven't drilled down and labeled how the young people in your life experience social media as Brand Management, we've got to talk. And soon.
All of that connection, empowered by technology, and he hasn't even had a morning bio break yet. Seriously, consider that for a moment.
Millennials are considered an activist generation, and Gen Z shares similar values around environmental sustainability, social justice, and corporate ethics.
Now consider, within milliseconds of landing on your company’s website, his generation scores you for modernization, sustainability, and corporate ethics, and instantly makes a decision about you.
Milliseconds.
Are you scoring your company with these same metrics?
And the thing to note is that this modernization score also shows up in your benefits. Remember, my nephew and the coming generations are “always on;” they don't need to work out complicated math to get a sense of how you operate.
They just know.
And, if you haven’t caught on already, the next generation of entrepreneurs and employees is already focused on solving these problems. People entering our workforce care deeply about the world around them.
And connection is everything!
Millennials have been dubbed “Generation Why” because of their strong sense of purpose. Similarly, Gen Z care about work that matters.
Our data shows that millennials are already the largest segment in the workplace and are the biggest users of social media–by the way, by 2025 they will make up an estimated 75% of the workforce.
They are the Generation Why.
So when close to 38% of millennials feel that outdated collaboration processes damage their company's brand, we need to take notice. That's a BIG 38%.
And the race for us is on. To remain relevant, we must learn to grow revenue effectively and at scale while addressing the evolving needs of our people.
Let’s wrap up our Empowering Employees conversation with a story.
Sasan Goodarzi, Intuit CEO, said, “Good news, everybody! The pace of change will never be as fast as you experienced it today! The bad news is that it will never be as slow as it was today again either.”
As a result, training and education become a part of our collective DNA. Yesterday’s success is no guarantee for tomorrow’s; we must incentivize innovation by the employee. And how do we celebrate innovation?
We elevate those individuals and say, ”Hey, we, as an organization, as leaders, want more of that!”
I believe that many of these challenges can be overcome if we just do a better job of dashboarding our metrics. By the way, many of these callouts would be a terrific metric to measure for your business!
Try it now!
- Have you mechanized training and education? Example metric. Training completion % rate
- How do you incentivize innovation? Try booting up a quarterly or annual, Innovation Days
- Do you celebrate innovation? Consider how it is measured and talked about.
