Millennials are increasingly coming to dominate the workplace, and unlike previous generations, they’re looking for more than just a paycheck.
Appealing to Millennials is something that most managers and business owners struggle with, which has predictable but unfortunate effects on the company, most notably in the area of lower retention rates. Since most managers don’t understand how to keep Millennial workers happy, they tend to lose them, which negatively impacts your bottom line.
Believe it or not, celebrating milestones is one simple way of addressing that, because one of the things the Millennial employee is looking for is some sign from you that they are appreciated. That their contributions are meaningful.
Once you know this, keeping Millennial employees happy gets a whole lot easier, and even better, it has beneficial impacts on the rest of your employees too.
Celebrating Milestones is Simple
Everybody likes to have their contributions recognized. Everyone likes to know that what they’re doing matters, and by recognizing employees’ years of service, you increase employee engagement, which improves morale and makes every employee on your team more productive.
Almost overnight and like magic, you transition away from having low morale and low retention rates to having higher morale and happier, more productive employees who will stick with you in the longer term. Those are good things.
Best of all, celebrating milestones is something that’s incredibly easy to do. In fact, all the critical elements are almost certainly in place.
Setting up Milestone Awards Programs
Whatever you’re working on, you’ve probably donned your project management hat, and broken the project into smaller, bite-sized chunks and incremental deliverables.
Each of those is a milestone and as such, worth celebrating.
Granted, you don’t have to pull out all the stops and throw a blow-out party for every little accomplishment, but it’s super simple to press pause for twenty minutes when you reach an important milestone, gather the team around and give everyone high fives for their contributions to reaching it. You can also, of course, take the opportunity to give a little additional recognition to the star performers who really helped move the ball down the field.
Proportionality matters here. The above works fine for small, incremental milestones, but when your team brings a major project to a successful close, it’s time to celebrate in a bigger, more impactful, more meaningful way.
If you’re not used to thinking in those terms, it can be a bit of adjustment, but honestly, as we said before, almost all companies already have all the raw materials they need to start implementing this right now, today. If you decide to do so, you’ll notice positive impacts in the form of improved productivity and morale almost immediately.
About the only thing you’ll want to add to the equation is a modest budget for gifts, awards, surprise lunches and the like, but the simple truth is, the money you make as a result of the improved productivity of your team will far outstrip the small amounts you spend on the items mentioned above, making it a fantastic investment by any reckoning.