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5 Ways To A Millennially-Friendly Workplace

Someday in the future people will look back on all this and laugh, but at the moment many managers are tearing their hair out trying to supervise Millennials, those people born between 1980 and 2000.

“They feel entitled. They don’t want to work. They don’t respect their bosses,” and on and on. It’s kind of like what previous generations said about their new hires, only with a techno-twist.

Well, they are the workforce, now and for years to come, so it might help to know how to work with them.

In their book “Managing the Millennials,” Chip Espinoza and Mick Ukleja lay out a few tips for building a millennial-friendly culture.

* Identify all-stars and give them a platform. The authors claim that HR systems are set up to deal with problem people and not all-stars. They advocate going at it a different way. This also means sharing information (by managers).

* Involve managers in the conversation. If a program is going to be implemented at the organization-wide level, make sure that the people who manage Millennials directly are at the table and given a voice.

* Ask Millennials. Observe them outside the workplace setting and ask them what they like best about their manager. Remember Millennial intrinsic values: work-life balance, reward, self-expression, attention, achievement, informality, simplicity, multitasking, meaning.

* Suspend organizational bias. This means rethinking: “We are not changing what has worked for us for more than 50 years.”

* Promote the core competencies for managing today’s workforce. They are incenting, cultivating, engaging, disarming, self-differentiating, broadening, directing, motivating, flexing.