An operation manager was hired for our call center. Previously, the person was with a manufacturing company with impeccable credentials to get work done. A conversation that took place a month into the job.

• Manager: So you made up your mind to leave us after a short stint of 2 months? Why?
• 19-year old employee: Well, yes college will begin soon so I can’t continue!
• Manager: (silence)... So why did you join us in the first place?
• 19-year old employee: See, I wanted a Sony handycam, but my dad said go and earn it. So I did. I saved up two months’ salary about 60k and that want I’m going to do, buy a camera!
• Manager: ??

Fast forward to today in a class leading ITES firm

• Manager: I hear you have big plans after leaving XXYY Company?
• 22-year-old Coder: Yes! I want to start my own video recording outfit.
• Manager: Wow that’s too cool...Let's see, we have lots of work on that front and we don’t have the bandwidth to get done in time. You still go ahead proceed with leave formalities. We’ll provide you a desk and a conference room to record videos. We’ll swing some work to you in the bargain. How does that sound?
• 22-year-old Coder: You just made my day!

 
Maturists, Baby boomers are a hardwired to plan, organize and execute. Folks tied up to habits like having face to face meeting, comfortable with telephone conversations. Unwind with television. Jobs for life with formality in the heart and soul of it. An automobile defines them. To a GenY, it’s a smartphone! A movie is a best watched on a bus!

Habits: Maturists and baby boomers can make to make hay of this trend and remain relevant.

Reverse Learning

Don’t start everything with a policy, formal sign off. Start by making your peers and leaders across the board learn off new employees from habits, tools to use, hot topics of conversations. A formal set up could help you! But tick the newbie off. So keep it simple and Award them for coaching you. Gone are the days of ‘mature in age’=great leaders. That died the around the time before Facebook became big.

Buy that Gadget

Classroom is old, e-learning still needs to be more exciting. Certifications and titles are still crowd pullers. What will last is Micro-learning, micro-teaching. Break a 1-hour class into 1-2 minutes. Virtual Reality will rule.  And yes, your traditional booking system and nomination procedure need to go. Will just not survive.

Reality works

Reality is what Millennials relate to. The like to work without the need to have the qualifications for first. Having grown up using Google and Youtube from mending a laptop to playing Minecraft. A digital entrepreneur is just not going to remain switch on if you talk business case, financial proposal and feasibility analysis. They want to check viability by really doing a pilot right away.

Cloud sourcing

This is the best one. After a tech conference I realized how IP/ content and process conscious we are. We have YouTube with more and even larger spread of content. Google docs it easy to make and share notes. Dropbox and virtual cloud almost for free and we spend millions of dollars creating the same solution in house without tapping into a ready source. All we need is some brilliant coding and listing (curate) to only bring the relevant content to an accessible link. We would rather spend 75k USD to buy an LMS that does all that for us.

Gadgets

3D printers, VR goggles, free Wi-Fi have been around for some time. Yet not a single MNC I know of provides this to employees just to play around and use.  3D,! even a color prints need to  be give after endless email and verifications, how do you expect millennials to experience if you won’t give them tools to create and play. 

(The views expressed are the author's own and not those of the company he works for. These views no way relate to Infosys' positions, opinions or strategies)