By next year, Millennials are expected to comprise 36% of the U.S. workforce, and by 2020, Millennials will be nearly half of all workers. According to Forbes Magazine, Millennials are both “the most educated and culturally diverse of any generation” and “notorious job-hoppers who dislike bureaucracy and distrust traditional hierarchies.” Given this, it is crucial for manager to understand how best to motivate and engage Millennials.

In a recent article, Forbes Magazine described seven ways to motivate Millennials:

1. Explain The Company Vision: Millennial workers are more likely to look for meaning and impact in their work and aren’t satisfied simply punching a clock. Helping them understand their role in a larger plan gives them a clearer sense of purpose.

2. Prioritize Community Service: Millennials place a higher priority on helping people in need (21%) than having a high-paying career (15%). Allowing employees to form committees and use company resources or time to organize their causes meets their desire for social consciousness.

3. Develop In-Between Steps And Titles: Millennials are especially eager to progress in their careers and less willing to wait three to five years for a promotion. By developing in-between steps and titles, managers can meet their desire for career progression.

4. Give Encouragement And Regular Feedback: This generation responds well to encouragement and immediate feedback. Make it clear from the beginning that you reward good work, and then keep an open line of communication to let them know how they’re doing and how they can improve.

5. Offer More Flexibility: Work-life balance is one of the most significant drivers of employee retention among Millennials. This tech-savvy generation is essentially able to work anytime from anywhere with an Internet connection. Thus, seemingly arbitrary work hours or having to sit at a desk all day is less appealing to them.

6. Provide Education And Professional Development: Most Millennials are hungry and want to advance. Assigning stretch projects, bringing in speakers or sending employees to leadership conferences will be especially helpful for those millennial workers interested in learning and growing their skills.

7. Give Them Time For Personal Projects: Offer employees time to work on a project of their choosing. This will help Millennials feel more engaged and in control and also can boost innovation within the company

For more on each of this steps, click here for the full article.

In 2004, Best Buy began its Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE, program, which gave employees control over when and how they worked, so long as they produced results. Earlier this month Best Buy announced a plan to end the ROWE program. Inc. Magazine recently ran an interview with Jody Thompson, the creator of Best Buy‘s ROWE program, on why the company’s move to eliminate it is a bad idea.

As Jody Thompson says:

A results-only environment works for every single person on the planet. It’s not a flexibility program. It involves thinking about your work and how to accomplish it, and then being where you need to be to make that happen. Now, you might say, “What about a bus driver?” Well, if the bus driver doesn’t give you his route, and the people aren’t happy, then he hasn’t achieved his results. There’s always a measure of results, and you hold people accountable to that outcome. We’ve worked with companies in child care, manufacturing, a nursing home, education. It works anywhere.

For more, click here to read the full article.

The infographic below, entitled “How Do We Spend Our Live Online,” was created with data from comScore, Pew Internet, The Digital Life and Nielsen.  Some interesting top line data points include:

We spend a typical hour in the following way:

• 22% on social networking sites
• 21% on searching for information
• 20% on reading content
• 19% on emails
• 13% on multi media sites
• 5% on online shopping

Social networking activities win a clear lion’s share of people’s attention, with this set of data suggesting that Facebook captures an average of more than 465 minutes of people’s time each month.

Highest growing trends of online usage:

• 27% Location based services
• 27% Time shift TV
• 19% Internet Banking

Least growing trends of online usage include:

• 12% User created videos
• 12% Live internet videos
• 12% Professionally created videos

So here are three of my surprises after viewing the Infographic:

• With growth of internal social networks in companies, more employees will be encouraged and see value in creating user-generated videos. Is this really on the downward shift?
• Forrester predicts the social enterprise software industry will become a $6.4 billion market by 2016. What happens to email? How long will it be taking up almost 20% of our typical hour during the day? Will this go down to 5% and how fast? If you listen to what companies like Jive, Moxie say, the death of email is right around the corner.
• The Global online population is exploding with 30% of world’s population. If Chinese users spend five hours a week shopping online, what does this mean for emerging markets in Africa, Vietnam and Indonesia, will they follow suit?

Here is the How We Spend Our Time Online Infographic.
Share your surprises with me here on the blog.

It’s a fact by the year 2020, there will be five generations working side by side with Millennials representing 50% of the workforce.

Working on a multi generational team is already commonplace among many organizations and an increasingly number of managers should prepare for this and yes embrace it.

Here are five suggestions to keep in mind when managing a multi-generation team:

1. Offer coaching and mentoring opportunities to GEN X: They are often referred to as the “lost generation,” as a result of being sandwiched between the Baby Boomers and the impatient motivations of Millennials. Gen X’ers want to be recognized for their expertise while at the same time worry they may suffer from Prince Charles Syndrome: Being passed over with promotions and recognition going to Millennials There are several ways to engage and retain Generation X: mentoring, customized career planning, flexible work arrangements and having succession planning conversations early and often.

2.    Anticipate That Millennials will ask about social media access during a job interview and have an answer for this or risk losing a prospective new hire. Millennials to ask about social media access, choice in technology usage at work and flexible work arrangements. According to the Cisco Connected Technology World Survey of 2,800 college graduates and young professionals, One third of respondents would accept a lower-paying job that had more flexibility with regard to device choice, social media access, and mobility than a higher-paying job with less flexibility, Two thirds of respondents will ask about a company’s social media policies during the job interview and 56% will not accept a job from a company that bans social media access from work or the will circumvent around this policy.

3.    Offer Boomers and Traditionalists the opportunity to share their expertise as coaches, mentors or faculty at corporate training programs. After all, Boomers are now referred to as Generation Ageless since Boomers are redefining what it means to age and grow old. In fact, The World Health Organization predicts that if a male is 60 years old and healthy he can continue to work in a full time job until the age of 74 and a female can continue until the age of 77 years old. As our older workers either want or need to stay in the workplace adopt a strategic view of how to use their skills and offer them continued training to keep their skills up to date as well as the opportunity to be faculty in a company’s corporate training programs.

4.    Consider customizing benefit packages for each generation. We live in a mass customized world of customized blue jeans, music and newspapers. Why not benefits? In their book, Workforce Of One, Susan Cantrell and David Smith argue that companies should adopt a “workforce of one” approach meaning applying customer segmentation practices to employees. Using this approach, can lead to a personalization of benefits. For example, rather than offer a standard package of health, wealth and paid time off for all employees, more companies should consider segmenting benefits by generation. So, a company might consider offering Millennials benefits in “life skills,” training in areas of financial literacy and learning a new language while benefits targeted to Boomers may focus on elder care or financial planning for retirement.

5.    Be proactive in creating a multi generational team. This means deliberately involve employees from a mix of generations, cultures, and gender on a project team. They will each approach the problem at hand with their unique mental map and this will make team projects that much richer. Consider this: By 2030 minorities will make up 42 percent of the U.S. population;

In the end, a multi-generational and multi-cultural team will help a company better prepare and understand the needs of a customer base, which increasingly will mirror your multi ethnic and multi generation employee population.

Share with us what your company is doing to manage a multi-generation workforce.

So what does this mean for you in HR and talent management?
Read the full article here >

That’s our take … what’s yours? We want to hear from you – especially if you are a member of Gen X or a Millennial. Send us your comments, and we will continue the dialogue.