How to Engage With Millennials at the Workplace

Businesses are challenged to engage with a younger generation of employees due to a short attention span. Learn how to leverage digital marketing and animation to engage with employees, writes RS Raghavan, CEO & Founder, Animaker.

Unlike the generations before them who were raised at a time when mechanical and analog devices stood at the heart of the world’s productivity tools, most members of the millennial generation are digital technology natives.  For them, computers and mobile digital devices featuring sound with colorful moving displays, have been integral elements of their family lives since childhood.  And they have become indispensable aspects of their work lives as well. 

That said, workplace expectations of teamwork, diversity, and continuous feedback are also characteristic of millennials.  Those are laudable values.  But there are also some troubling elements to their mindset.  For example, their attention spans have become significantly shorter than those of earlier generations – likely a result of using technologies for which immediate gratification, response, and feedback have become expectations.  

Another, which is supported by a Gallup poll, is that millennials have earned a reputation for job-hopping – changing jobs at triple the rate of other generations in the workforce.  Even more disconcerting, the poll found, only 29% of millennials are fully engaged at work, with another 16% “actively disengaged,” which the study interprets to mean that they are essentially out to do harm to their company.  

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Even so, finding ways of engaging millennials by bringing them more fully into an organization’s mission and to embrace its practices is essential.  They are, after all, the backbone of today’s workforce as well as the customers for whatever products or services a company sells.  The ability to attract, retain and secure the engagement of younger workers has become an existential fact of business life. 

Among the challenges of onboarding any new worker is transmitting the organization’s essential policies in ways the employee will understand, remember, and apply.  Directing them to read lengthy policy documents, frequently written in a dialect of legalese, was probably never a good way of accomplishing that, particularly for millennials, even though it was standard practice in many places and it allowed the new employee as well as the company’s HR staff to check the appropriate boxes.  But there are better alternatives.

A growing number of organizations have found that video presentations of critical policy information – particularly when they include touches of humor – tend to be more memorable and therefore more easily applied to situations that actually arise in the workplace.  They are also a better fit for the ways in which millennials grasp the world around them.  Video is particularly valuable for conveying policy information that would otherwise remain locked away in a corporate library of seldom-seen documents.  

Corporate video, of course, is nothing new.  For many years it involved giving an executive a script to read while sitting at their desk.  But there were several problems.  One was that very few executives read the scripts well; instead, they came off sounding embarrassingly inauthentic, which made the executive look foolish and the script’s content a source of derisive laughter.   

Video – and before that, film – was also a fairly expensive medium to use.  In addition to the cost of the visual and sound recording equipment, it required hiring technicians who knew how to use and edit the recordings, collecting field footage, sometimes using actors to creating dramatic enactments, duplicating the finished program, and finding ways of distributing it to the right people in a timely way.  It took time, it cost money, and not everyone was impressed.

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Current technology, however, offers a faster, cheaper, better way of producing and distributing video projects. Drawing from cloud-based libraries of pre-packaged music, images, animated characters, and special effects, using desktop software to create instructional video projects and having fun in the process, has become a viable alternative to traditional video production.

Messages concerning topics as diverse as computer security, customer etiquette, workplace harassment, and burnout prevention can all be effectively addressed, without being heavy-handed, by using these kinds of services.  And doing so can be a way of reaching and connecting with otherwise marginally engaged or even disengaged millennials – employees that traditional communication tools simply don’t touch.

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