Max Nisen of Business Insider has pulled together a few interesting observations about millenials that are worth a quick review. Whether you love millenials, find them annoying, or are baffled by them, your business—to survive—will ultimately need to deal with them as customers and employees.
Parenthetically, I recently heard a Stanford professor talk about multitasking. He refuses to allow his students to text while they’re meeting with him during his office hours. “Turn off your cell and focus on our conversation,” he says. And he presented some pretty compelling research results proving that we really don’t do multiple things simultaneously all that well.
But I digress. Here’s the skinny on millenials (and Gen Xers) drawn from conversations with Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot, and Jason Cohen, a recent Small Business Administration Small Business Person of the Year.
- They expect products to be easier than ever before to use. (“Intuitive,” to use that overworked term.)
- They expect customer service to research and resolve issues and send them on their way fast. (Less than 5 minutes total, I’d guess. And all the while, hapless CSRS can hear those feet tapping in the background.)
- They’re focused on learning, change, advancement, and transparency. (Gen X may have started to think about “retirement,” but not millenials.)
Perhaps Mr. Halligan puts it best when he says:
“At some companies, I think the CEO spends all of their time engineering their product and their marketing and all that stuff, and they really don’t think much about their culture. Their culture is more important than they think. That is the key to pulling in great employees. In modern businesses today, your value is locked up in your employees.”
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