Recently hired and seasoned employees: motivation, purposes and what makes them stick to your company!

Today I share how I deal with my team’s motivation and which factors, according to my personal experience, make the most impact.

With Millennial bringing new needs and perspectives, after a long time of consolidated corporate rituals and habits (often bad ones), companies, small and large, are rethinking and redesigning their HR practices and guidelines, to retain workforce, attract talents and increase productivity.

In a time where long life loyalty to the same company is vanquishing, where the market dynamics require each employees to be always updated and skilled and with the increased pressure do too competition coming from different directions (traditional players, start-ups, within the same company), keeping the workforce motivated, enthusiastic and energetic is becoming a key priority and a fundamental goal for each company aiming to thrive and grow.

In this article I outline how different generations of employees are dealing with motivation factors and how, me as Manager, I am taking a tailored approach to meet each individual needs, according to the system of social values they adhere to.

Let’s start from Millennial and Z generation.

1. Learning opportunities. Help them to find internal and external learning opportunities leveraging both Company and external entities resources.

2. Exposure occasions: Help them to exit their comfort zone to make experiences to really build their soft and hard skills up.

3. Realistic and candid Growth and Career path: traditional old style and often blurred conversations around potential growth are not working anymore.

4. Salary expectations: assess salary expectation over a variety of factors and fight internally to ensure your employees are fairly paid for they work and even future potential.

5. Social and Volunteering work: provide, to whom feels it compulsory to his/her values, support for no-profit work, even during work time.

Let’s dig into how seasoned workers feels motivated:

1. Engage in candid and not rhetorical conversations: weather it is about a salary increase, a change of role, a discussion about the strategy of the company and frustration do too lack of results, be transparent, straightforward, but leave no space for negativity and skepticism.

2. The importance of feeling valued: being respected, acknowledged, and valued specially when companies look at younger generation to keep up with rapid changes, is key to increase personal engagement and thus productivity.

3. Provide genuine feedback: sometimes, seasoned employees are biased from experience meaning they might resist to think out of the box or embrace new way of working. Set therefore clear expectations about the new traits and factors are need to succeed in this ever changing world.

4. Cross coaching and mentoring within the team and to younger colleagues: establish a practice where the team will have the occasion to share experiences, ideas, and best practice and let them coach younger employees.

In a time where the traditional hierarchical vertical top down model is weakening, where the number of management levels is diminishing, where attitude is getting more important the number of years of service, where the traditional and often unhealthy corporate values and habits are being overridden, providing managers with the right set of tools and skills to keep teams motivated and engaged, is essential for all those companies which put employees at the core of their growth and thriving strategy.