Consulting Magazine - March 2018

Consulting® MARCH 2018 33

mentors should facilitate trust, feedback, an environment that embraces technology, as well as flexibility in both work schedules and location.

MENTORSHIP AND FEEDBACK

Millennials seek trusted professional relationships with support and meaning to help them thrive. To cultivate this workplace culture, enable meaningful mentorships by pairing young professionals and new hires with senior consultants. Mentorships can shed light on career advice, travel tips, industry best practices, reporting processes, effective workflow, and company or client work culture, while fulfilling millennials’ desire for connectedness. When millennials trust their mentors and management, there is a lower tendency for employee disconnect and turnover.

Millennials also thrive on feedback, more so than older generations. Accustomed to instantaneous response from technology and parental upbringing, they crave comment and assessment. However, only 19 percent of millennials say they receive regular feedback.

Annual performance reviews are not enough. Project communication and collaboration tools, as well as verbal affirmations of extraordinary job performance are essential. Millennials and overall employees in general should receive routine communication from managers at least once a week mixed with informal daily connects, such as emails, internal instant messages, phone calls or brief face-to-face interactions. Doing so improves employee morale, team mentality and the ability to proactively respond to client issues while transitioning from a culture of annual box-checking to real-time performance assessments.

EMBRACING TECHNOLOGY

Technology is intuitive to millennials, comprising a significant portion of their education and upbringing. They spend an average of 19 hours on smartphones each week and are even willing to leave a job if there is substandard technology.

Millennials will quickly adapt to any IT upgrade, often serving as super users to improve technology workflow and training. This is especially helpful when consulting in the healthcare industry as more physicians and health systems drive to increase patient engagement and optimize electronic health record systems.

Empower millennial employees by allowing them to
use their preferred technology for work when possible
with proper cybersecurity protocols in practice. Supporting
their technology choices can often lead to increased report-
ing and analytics capabilities for client work. At the same
time, give millennials a sense of purpose by having them
train others on the nuances of new tools and applications.

FLEXIBLE WORK STRUCTURE

In today’s advanced business world, technology frees employees to work more efficiently outside the traditional 9-to- 5 office environment. Now, the millennial workforce and new employment models push for flexible scheduling or remote work to maximize productivity.

Human resources trends are catching up with demand. Two-thirds of employers have adopted flexible work arrangements while the number of millennials conducting mobile work in 2017 increased by 21 percentage points over 2016. Contrary to initial management fears, schedule and location flexibility leads to improved performance and responsiveness. Seventy-seven percent of millennials say flexible work hours makes them more productive, while 89 percent regularly check and willingly respond to work e-mails after hours.

Flexibility can result in employer cost savings on overhead expenses, such as office rental, printing and utilities. Consultant turnover can decrease as well. Millennials are more likely to remain with firms granting flexible work hours instead of switching to a company that just offers a higher salary. Under flexible work hours, employees are less likely to take sick days, while reporting satisfaction in work-life and mental-health balance. Directly impacting project work, clients gain energized consultants who are driven by passion, not strict structure.

REVITALIZE THE WORKFORCE

Although millennials are mislabeled as an entitled and lazy generation, these young professionals are eager to bring value to their consulting roles and client engagements. By strategically utilizing their education, energy, ambition and consumer experience, consulting practices can elevate their workforces in the evolving marketplace. Facilitating meaningful relationships allows knowledge transfer across generations, bridging technology gaps while raising employee morale for a more cohesive company culture.