Millennials Want More Feedback from Employers

A RESEARCH STUDY BY BEATRICE MANZONI LOOKS INTO STEREOTYPES ABOUT GENERATION Y AT WORK. NOT ALL OF THEM ARE TRUE

Millennials, also known as Generation Y, are generally defined as the generation of people born between 1980 and the first half of the 1990s. Managing Millennials is a pressing issue in organizations nowadays, because people belonging to this cohort are often considered very different from other generations in terms of workplace dynamics, attitudes towards, and expectations about work.
 
Federico Magni (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and Beatrice Manzoni (SDA Bocconi School of Management) have polled a sample of 1,500 Italian employees belonging to various generations (almost one in three were Millennials). They asked them what’s important to them about their jobs (work values) and which aspects can cause them to be unsatisfied, disengaged and willing to quit, if employers don’t keep their promises. 
 
A widespread stereotype (viz. Simon Sinek’s famous video on Millennials in the workplace https://youtu.be/hER0Qp6QJNUis) says that this generation is constantly unsatisfied, and has a nomadic loyalty to any organization, always searching for something new and diverse. Magni and Manzoni’s results, however, make you think twice about whether this is really true. They confirm that Millennials are more demanding with their employers than previous generations and expect more from their respective organizations, but also report the highest level of job satisfaction along all aspects of work (salary, performance-based pay, training and development, job security, career advancement, power and responsibility, organizational environment, work-life balance, feedback, meaning of the job). Another commonplace is however confirmed: Millennials very much care about feedback, but they consider they are not getting enough of it either from their companies, their superiors, or their colleagues. Feedback, in fact, is the only job area Millennials say they are dissatisfied with.

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by Claudio Todesco