There’s a certain image of the type of workplace that attracts Millennials — fed by movies like the Facebook saga “The Social Network” — that emphasizes free snacks, beer on tap and great piles of pre-IPO stock options. It also doesn’t hurt if your company is named
I’ll admit that, until earlier this year, I bought into all of that. And it was troubling because I, like a lot of American executives, run a business that both needs to hire ambitious, college-educated Millennials and lacks the superficial glamour of a Silicon Valley start-up. But thankfully, I’ve since discovered that the conventional image of the spoiled, petulant Millennial is totally inaccurate and that industries like mine (and yours) can attract 20-something workers — so long as we demonstrate the right values and offer the right opportunities. Given the right environment, Millennials will happily stick around.
In fact, my conclusion is that if you’re struggling to get Millennials to work at your company, you probably just don’t understand them well enough. I know this because my team and I worked hard to figure out how to lure and keep Millennials at Jones Lang LaSalle, Inc. (JLL). As I said, we had to. We work in facilities management, which means we run buildings from the ground up, taking care of everything from the lobby to the elevators to the air conditioners on the roof. Like many American industries, ours is facing a Baby Boomer retirement tsunami that threatens to leave us without enough skilled workers to function. Knowing we’d need young professionals to fill the gap, we set about figuring out what would draw them to a business they might never have heard of. We learned six crucial lessons.
1. Stress intrapreneurship.
If you want to describe what Millennials seek in a corporate job in one word, it would be “intrapreneurship.” Behind this made-up-sounding word lies a powerful concept: Provide avenues for entrepreneurship within a large company by giving people the freedom to look at challenges in different ways. Some Millennials want to start businesses; many more want steady jobs with clear paths for advancement.
Those paths will be wide open for them as the Baby Boomers retire in droves and companies desperately seek to rebuild their talent benches. Nowhere is that problem more acute than in our business. The average age of a facilities management employee will hit 50 this year, compared to 43 in the overall workforce. Other industries that rely on skilled labor are also in a pinch. In the next decade, 18% of skilled trade workers are forecast to retire, yet apprenticeship programs to train their replacements have been cut by 45% in the last five years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
We couldn’t afford to sit back and hope Millennials would come to us. We need fresh faces to manage our clients’ properties, and we need them soon. So we went looking for this notorious group, defined as people born between 1980 and 1993. We started by commissioning a study by Kadence International, a leading market research firm. It surveyed more than 200 Millennials about their career preferences and ambitions. Half were students, ages 21 to 24; the other half were young professionals, ages 25 to 34.
2. Don't assume Millennials will job hop.
We discovered through research and our own learning that Millennials will stay put — if they like what they see. In fact, Millennials are surprisingly focused, and will be loyal to an employer who creates the right kind of workplace. Forget the notion that every young person wants to work for a scrappy tech start-up. In fact, 60% of those we surveyed prefer to be associated with an industry leader. And, just as Forbes readers have learned that Millennials crave security in their financial planning, we learned that they also value job stability: Nine of 10 Millennials have worked for only one company.
Autonomy is especially important; 54% said one of their strengths is the ability to work independently. They want access to mentoring, formal training (even if it’s online) and on-the-job learning. They want defined career paths, and to know that the job they’re in can lead to a variety of other roles. And, like all of us, Millennials want their ideas to be recognized and rewarded.
“Millennials stay when they feel like they have the opportunity to be innovative,” says Amy Lynch, president of Generational Edge, a Nashville-based consulting firm. For example, Lynch worked with a printing company — another gritty but important industry — whose owner required employees to submit an idea every six weeks for improving the business. The person whose suggestion received the most votes won an immediate $100 bonus, along with time and resources to pursue the idea.
Armed with this knowledge, we’ve refocused our business on the sweet spot for Millennials.
Don’t let a rotten economy spoil your goals. Use the career and money advice in The Millennial Game Plan to get and stay ahead for good.
3. Take your message to campus.
The first thing we had to change was our recruiting. It may surprise you to know that we hadn’t previously been active on college campuses — we’d ceded that field to sexy advertising firms and flashy finance shops. That had to change.
We now knew that if we wanted to attract Millennials, we had to meet them where they were, then show them they could find what they’re looking for in our company. So before this school year we reached out to our trade association, the International Facility Management Association (IFMA), for a list of 12 colleges with accredited facility management programs. Then we dispatched JLL facility managers who are alumni of those schools to attend job fairs and recruiting sessions, where they could speak directly to those kids about careers in facilities management.
Part of my team’s job on campus is to answer the question (from potential recruits who don't come from a a facility management program): “What the hell is facilities management?” And part of it is to show these coveted science, technology, engineering and math majors that they can ply their skills at JLL. We also armed our alums with career-development roadmaps, showing the specific steps a budding facilities management career could take, and which skills the Millennial will need to develop to advance along that path.
4. Focus on training and development.
That roadmap we now bring to college campuses reflects a complete overhaul of our employee development program. Previously, most of our training focused on compliance and safety procedures. Those are critical, sure, but ambitious young professionals want more — they want to learn. Now our program is 10% of that traditional training, 20% assessments and coaching, and 70% workplace experiences aimed at teaching.
And because our survey told us that 60% of Millennials want well-defined mentorship programs, we added a formal process that pairs young facilities managers with experienced leaders. I’m not talking about just supervising new employees. The key is matching mentors with mentees. We base our matchmaking on career goals — not where somebody went to college or other common traits — so that the young worker is brought along by a mentor who has a job they’d eventually like to have themselves.
We tell our junior workers to hold monthly, even weekly, meetings with their mentors. We tell them to pump their mentors for honest feedback on their performance and progress, and to talk about their career goals. All of that is formally documented in their annual review, so we can be sure they’re getting the support they need. We think this will give us a better shot at keeping Millennials once they’re hired.
5. Create lily pads as well as career ladders.
Tim Elmore, the founder and president of Growing Leaders, a Georgia-based nonprofit focused on youth leadership development, encourages employers to think less about an old-fashioned career ladder and more about providing “lily pads”-- a series of new experiences that answer Millennials’ requests for variety. “They want to do something different after a year and a half,” Elmore says. “If companies can offer a variety of lily pads, there may be a great commitment to staying at that company.”
In that spirit, we’ve organized job rotations across multiple client accounts, from Amazon to Autodesk, to broaden our employees’ skills and experiences. We also run an annual conference for training, collaboration and networking where our younger workers can meet executives who began as engineers and worked their way up. We are increasing our investment in mentorship programs, which Millennials say factors heavily in their career choices.
6. Stress technology and sustainability.
In our survey, 70% of Millennials said they want to work with cutting-edge technology. So now we make sure Milllennials know how technology is driving our industry.
With advances in smart buildings, which allow different systems to share data directly with one another, and integrated energy management, building managers are making tangible contributions to environmental sustainability, and we make sure they know that too. To take just one example, JLL recently completed a five-year project to dramatically improve the efficiency of the 83-year-old Empire State Building. We reduced the building’s energy use by 38%; it now ranks, by efficiency, in the top 9% in operation.
That’s the kind of thing that the kids want to hear — and that will motivate just about all of your employees.
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