Today every organization is faced with the same challenge of understanding what the new workforce wants and needs. Is it bean bags and coffee at the office or is it projects that take them to third world countries? "Working simply for the sake of work is no longer an option for a generation reared to seek instant gratification,” says Simon Bromwell, Managing Director of Robert Walters California.
What do then millennials and GenZs expect from organizations?
Here are some things that are appreciated and sought after by the new workforce:
- Learning: The classroom model does not work anymore; people are often distracted by their phones. Bring about the element of experimentation and don’t let the fear of failure cloud your decisions. This fear limits creativity. Build labs and encourage your team members to experiment.
- Engagement: Don’t wait for the right time to give opportunities to your new employees. Engage them with certain low-risk projects and assignments that will provide them with great exposure.
- Innovation: Conduct Ideathon, Hackathon, etc. that will get them thinking about new ideas. This will help not only them but also your organizations as they often go out of their way to build their brainchild.
- Career: Don’t let them hold on to one role; give them the opportunity to explore. Allow them to work on small projects that are not part of their studied course. Let them dedicate about 20% of their time in learning about things beyond their role.
- Purpose: Today, salary is not the selling point; most of them are purpose-driven. They are looking to make some change in the world through their work.
To build an environment that accommodates these future generations you need to bring about technological changes. There are a few simple steps that can bring about this transformation:
Steps to transformation
- Step 1: Eliminate: Too many steps just create hurdles. Expunge wasteful activities impacting time, cost, and efforts by eliminating all unnecessary activities by addressing the cause.
- Step 2: Standardize: Rethink the basics to limit customization by standardizing similar processes and actions. All your programs should be in sync that makes it easily accessible and discoverable.
- Step 3: Optimize: Optimize processes and limit customization by using the existing IT landscape to maximize its capabilities.
- Step 4: Automate: Automate standardized processes by using easily configured best of breed tools.
- Step 5: Robotize: Robotize repetitive and rule-based transactions. Robotic solutions simulate the activities of a human operator.
Organizations have a lot of challenges when it comes to implementing such AI systems, but one of the significant challenges is unclear use cases. Don’t focus on adopting AI but rather look at what are the services you want to offer then look at how AI fits in the picture. You may have five different systems, but if data isn’t smoothly flowing and captured between them, it is difficult to get the right analytics.
Today Artificial Intelligence has essentially become about shifting mindsets from bots to people, value tomorrow to impact today, experimental concepts to real-world application, etc. When it comes to the GenZs and Millenials, the three important things that are most appreciated by them are; respect, asking them what they want, and not being labeled into things that might create biases.
(This article is based on a talk on Exponential Technology- What’s ahead by Mukesh Jain, CTO - Insights, AI & Data India, Capgemini at Tech HR India 2019 organized by People Matters)