7 ‘Business Trends’ and How Gen Y Employees Will Help You Survive If You Let Them

Article #52

I’m not a futurist, but, if you ask me to look through my plexiglass ball – I see 7 Major Trends that will impact most companies over the next ten years.

More importantly, I believe there is a link to those trends and 7 Ways to Engage Gen Y Employees to help your organization succeed better and faster at making changes to survive, even thrive in the future.

Based on a nationwide workplace study of Gen Y employees, here’s my prediction and extrapolations…

7 Ways to Engage Gen Y Employees to Help Your Company Survive Better and Faster

Endless Efficiency. Business must find ways to streamline everything possible in order to be more productive, increase competitiveness. Gen Y has a penchant for finding ways to improve everything, reinvent, downsize or utilize technology better, faster, cheaper. Involve them early in the idea stage versus waiting until the plan is ready for implementation.
Urgency in the Culture . Business must get employees on board with needed change, quickly, by turning energies and efforts loose on solving competitive threats and pursuing opportunities. Change is moving from periodic to continual and Gen Y employees want to be engaged. They are wired for ditching the status quo and instituting changes fast, switching direction altogether, or altering embedded processes to make things better.

Going with Technology. Business must go with technology not against it. To compete in the future, innovation must be a core discipline for any sized business, especially when ‘all’ organizations will be lean or be out. As competitive advantage lifecycles get shorter, innovation could be a cornerstone in the ability to compete profitably—and Gen Y employees are hard-wired for technological advances, let them help lead this change.
Trust is a Must. Businesses must become comfortable with more transparency—with customers, employees, stakeholders. Gen Y employees place high value on trust in a new era of mistrust toward government, society and leaders. They will demand increased transparency and trust—a value that will impact retention of your best and brightest.
Idea Tolerance. Business must be tolerant of new ideas and provide environments where employee input is regularly gathered and applied. Gen Y loves to be involved, and they have a voluminous supply of ideas on how to improve anything. Cultivating these new ideas, sorting the good ones from the not-so-good ones, then executing effectively can be a definite competitive advantage. Stimulate ideas from your Gen Y workers, regularly engage them in open communication.
Customer Enthusiasts. Business must focus on customer retention in the future. Every customer must count, not just the largest. An environment where everyone’s job is linked to the customer’s loyalty is desperately needed. Gen Y can be especially helpful in improving a company’s responsiveness to customer requests, solving customer problems or deepening customer relations. However, Gen Y will need clear guidelines and standards to follow. Empirical evidence suggests that Gen Y employees aren’t entering the workplace with the greatest customer service acumen especially compared to their predecessors, and many lack the requisite convictions. They will need training and/or coaching, but they should be quick learners and quick adapters if the standards are clear and cultural to the enterprise.
Collaboration and Connectedness: Business must find efficient ways to improve communications across the company, or suffer the consequences of reduced satisfaction by customers and employees. Gen Y is geared to make and maintain connections, as well as work across departments in order to help the organization achieve its goals. Utilize this proclivity by engaging Gen Yers in cross-functional teams and offering more opportunities to do joint problem solving.

NOTE: From 2008 to 2009 over 400 online responses from employed Gen Yers, answering over 40 questions on my Nationwide Workplace Study survey, provided numerous insights. That data, along with nearly 100 interviews I conducted personally with respondents, formed the major conclusions for this article. This topic stimulates as high an interest level for employees of all ages as any I’ve seen in my 25 years of giving keynotes and seminars. Motivating and Utilizing Gen Y Employees To Increase Your Company’s Success — might make a great topic at your business meeting. If you have some interest let me know.