Vacation days, time off, and generally an intuitive, positive, supportive work environment attract the best job candidates. In all industries trying to improve their millennial engagement, corporate culture is the backbone of the company’s efforts. Nothing improves and builds a positive corporate culture like a fair, easy-to-use, time-off system.
Managing a time-off system, like managing your culture as a whole, is far easier than creating a new one from scratch, but in order to attract and retain young people, you have to create a fair way to stay on schedule while allowing your employees to take time off when they need it or want it.
For companies racing their competitors in millennial engagement, flexibility is key. If your company isn’t set up to handle time off well, you won’t be able to provide that flexibility, and you’ll lose your younger workers.
The counter argument to this is millennials don’t stay at one job for long, anyway, so why try to keep them? Millennials often don’t stay with a company because they find another opportunity elsewhere. If you create opportunities to grow and learn within your company, you’ll find yourself retaining your young rockstars more than losing them.
Why Care about Millennial Engagement?
We’ve been over this before, but I need to hammer home the importance of not only attracting and retaining millennials, but also beginning to reach out to the generation after us—Generation Z, the iGeneration, the “Digital Natives.” They’re graduating high school and college, and they’re looking around for companies that will help them reach their goals, just like every other generation ever.
Why should you care? Because eventually, your trusted baby boomers will retire and at the very least, you’ll need warm bodies to replace them. Not everything will be automated in the next decade or so. More importantly, though, every good organization is constantly breeding and creating new, exciting, possibly disruptive ideas that could improve their margins and even entire industries. New blood, new perspectives, form the engine of these ideas.
What Young Workers Want
When I graduated college, in 2010, I had just watched the economy fall apart, and with it, many of my job prospects, so what I wanted most was a steady paycheck. Over time, however, with more stability, I wanted more. I wanted not just stability but room to grow, opportunities to make a difference, and flexibility. Many young workers want these things.
All workers, especially young workers, want to be able to travel, to go on vacation, and generally be rewarded for good work. Creating and managing a time-off system designed to help them do that is a key retention and tool for all workers, especially young talent who could be poached at any time.
Where Technology Fits
There are many high-tech solutions to all kinds of office issues today. From signing up for health care to managing schedules, many companies are turning to high-tech options to help keep everyone happy and working together. Why can’t your time-off system follow this same path?