At the end of last year I was lucky enough to attend a global organisational change conference in the UK. One fascinating topic discussed was the impact that millennials will have on our organisations, when it is predicted that 75% of our workforce will be millennials[1] by 2028.

But there’s a significant challenge looming – just 29% of the younger workforce are engaged in their jobs[2]. The problem will be exacerbated when we add the complexity of multi-generational workforces and “young ones” coming into our post-industrial organisations, expecting organisations of tomorrow.

Towers Watson Global Workforce Study from 2012 defined engagement in two manners. They undertook a study of over 32,000 employees across 30 countries and recognised a difference between traditional engagement and sustainable engagement which they defined as follows:

Tradition engagement is the willingness to invest discretionary effort on the job
Sustainable engagement is a work environment that more fully energises employees by promoting their physical, emotional and social well-being.

These definitions are particular useful when thinking about what motivates millennials - nicely summed up in the Gallup diagram below.

The question was posed, do we need to change our approach to meet the engagement needs of this young cohort of staff?

The answer is obvious. Yes! The harder question is how do we change how we engage our new workforce.

I think the current focus of most off-the-shelf engagement tools is too narrow and fails to engage people in the very process of building engagement. Many organisations follow the standard process:-

Ask staff to complete the survey
Review the results
Have a team meeting to decide the top three areas to work on
Report back to management and the Board

They are then able to “tick” the engagement box until next year.

In my view we must invest our resources into finding out exactly what it is that stops our employees from connecting with their work, asking them for suggestions on how it could be made better and co-creating an environment which meets their needs and empowers them in their engagement. We need to know who we are working with, understand the engagement profile of our workforce without putting people in boxes, and remember, for employees to be engaged they need to understand, and personally identify with, the purpose of your organisation – they need to feel emotionally aligned to this.

Current processes don’t do this well enough.

We must urgently shift to using a sustainable engagement model rather than a traditional engagement model, and how you measure that engagement, must be specific to your organisation and your employees.

[1] Business.com. How Companies Are Changing their Culture to Attract (And Retain) Millennials August 19, 2015

[2] Gallup article “Millennials Improving in Key Areas of Health, Dan Witters and Sangeeta Agrawal

A New Approach is Needed to Engaging Millenials