6 Tweaks to Motivating Millennials in the Workplace
Motivation is the core factor to productivity and performance. Without motivation, people will operate out of pure habits, good or bad, rather than drive. When motivation is brought up in the workplace, it usually is about “how to motivate…” One of the biggest struggles managers and business leaders run into today is motivating millennials in the workplace.
According Gallup’s How Millennials Want to Work and Live, only 29% of millennials engaged at their job. The other 71% are not engaged or actively disengaged. Motivation or the lack of motivation is a key factor to employee engagement. Businesses have a millennial motivation problem.
However, the problem with motivating employees typically lies on the shoulder’s of the motivator or business leader. Sure, in a perfect world, every employee is self-motivated. We just do not live in that world. So the responsibility lies on the leadership ability of managers and business leaders.
There are many articles out there about what motivates millennials, but it is more important to understand how you motivate people, specifically millennials. Honestly, it takes effort. Do not assume motivating millennials is the same as how you want to be motivated. You need to understand millennials. You must know where they are coming from, their personality, and their drivers.
The “what” motivates millennials is too varied to boil down to six or nine points. You must focus on the “how.” Sometimes your “how” motivation tactics just takes a few tweaks.
Here are six tweaks to motivating millennials in the workplace:
1. Be Authentic About Your Purpose.
Motivation with employees can have many purposes. As a basic, most business leaders need employees to be motivated because of work production. Then there are other business leaders who need more engagement from their employees. No matter what your purpose is for motivating millennials in the workplace, be authentic about your purpose.
Millennials are skeptical of business leaders and managers who do not seem authentic. Your purpose needs to be pure and real. You need your millennials to be motivated, but at least share the why with them. Needing all employees to be motivated is not reason enough to many millennials. Dig down deeper. Tie employee motivation to business objectives. Be upfront and real about your purpose to employee motivation.
2. Get Down to Their Personal Level.
Connect with your employees. Motivation is deeply routed in a person’s make up—it is personal. If you cannot get personal with your millennials who might not be motivated, you run the risk of failing to motivate. Get to a personal level.
When millennials understand you care about them personally, they begin to trust you and the company. This is when motivation can begin to ignite inside them. Sometimes millennials stay closed up until you show you actually care about them personally rather than just as an employee. Training and the development of millennials and the modern employee will become much more personal as time goes on. Motivation will be linked to how personal businesses and leaders get with their employees.
3. Make Clear Your Availability and Accessibility.
Millennials’ motivation can be closed off if they do not feel as though leadership is open and transparent. If you want your millennials to be motivated at work, then you must be available and accessible to your employees. Closing doors and excluding millennials will only close them off more. It is not good enough to say that you are open and accessible. You must show it.
Provide access emotionally and relationally. Often motivation is tied to emotions and relationships. When millennials are supported emotionally and relationally, then a well-guided motivation will follow.
4. Stay Patient With Change.
Changing from unmotivated to motivated can be tricky. Adventuring through the process of change must be dealt with care and patience. Leadership needs to have the patience for millennials to move into motivation. Do not expect an unmotivated employee to change over night. If they are currently unmotivated, there needs to be some work to get that motivation to turn in the right direction. This requires patience through the process.
Many business leaders will think it is not their job to be patient for employees to be motivated. However, if you want to turn unmotivated employees into motivated employees, it will take time. Whether you like that or not is irrelevant. You must be willing to invest time.
5. Provide Support Beyond Work.
Move beyond the work hours to support your millennial and modern employees. Today more than ever, employees are not disconnecting from work. Even after they leave the office or clock out, through technology they are still connected. This is why supporting modern employees and especially millennials in their whole life is in important.
When you can connect with today’s employees beyond the 9-to-5 hours, you have can access to a deeper level of your employees. The modern employee feels if they are constantly connected to work then work needs to care about their whole life. This is why we will see more holistic development in workplace discussions.
You do not have to go deep into supporting your employees outside of work, sometimes it is just about availability. You do not have to go to your employee’s family events, but you must have the willingness to support their whole life. When push comes to shove, millennials who feels that their boss supports their priorities in life, the employee will view their company as a valuable asset in life. Be the asset and support your millennials in deeper ways. Motivation is tied to much more than just work.
6. Fire Up the Passion.
Sometimes motivation needs a different angle. When you are still finding it hard to motivate your millennials, go deeper into passion. Finding a person’s passion could be the fix you have been looking for. Not everyone is motivated, but everyone has a passion. Inside of a person sits a passion in life. The job of a leader is to find that passion in others and help guide the passion into the right direction. When you can redirect passion, you will have the opportunity to turn the passion into motivation.
Passion can get cold in employees, but it is still there. Stoke the fire of passion in employees and watch the excitement follow. Finding that passion will help you as a business leader to know how morph the passion towards work and slowly graduate passion into a maintained motivation. To be honest, it doesn’t really matter where you find the passion, just find it. After you know about an employees passion, it will give you insight to what they get passionate about and also reveal how to use that passion at work. Connect personal passion to work passion and then move it into motivation.
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Motivating millennials in the workplace is not always an easy task. However, as soon as you tweak a couple of leadership tactics, you can find the way to motivate employees, especially millennials. Millennials want to be motivated about their work, give them a reason, a purpose, and a mission to their motivation. This will unlock the keys to tweaking your leadership to motivating millennials.
