Recap: The future of work from a millennial perspective

Did you miss our webinar on the future of work from a millennial perspective? We got you covered! Here are the biggest takeaways and learnings from the webinar to expand your idea on what the future may hold, from a millennial point of view.

Enjoy!

Innocent Mugenga:

The saying “work is the new school” is one of the things that has been repeated during the conversations in my podcast “learnability” where we’ve been speaking to a lot of entrepreneurs, the company builders of the future. What you want to do with your business is perform, grow and grow in order to stay alive. Your production capacity is based on the people that work in your organisation as your resources, which are also the driving force behind your business. This is also the place where we spend the majority of our woken time. So, what drives them? 

When I was younger, I spent the majority of my time in school. That’s where I learn to grow, that’s where I learn how to collaborate, that’s where I learned everything I needed to get into work later on. But learning shouldn’t stop just because I’m in an environment where we now have performance goals. If I am to perform better, I need to learn better, so work needs to be the place where I actually learn and continuously grow. 

How can we get there? By cultivating intrinsic motivation! What are the factors that stimulate your co-workers and individuals in your organisation? That can easily be done by first understanding. Do your employees have their ambition? Where would they want to go in the future?

And then aligning that once again with the organisation’s vision. As long as you’re in an organisation and keen on your personal growth, you’ll grow with the organisation. So, getting at that intrinsic motivation is key and the simplest way of doing that is actually asking.

-Where do you wanna go?

-What motivates you?

-What are your interests? 

Sissa Pagels

At Young Innovation Hub, we developed a 3 step process to better attract a young crowd.

1. We educate decision-makers on the municipalities in how to work with young people. Here we talk a lot about mindset – if your company/municipality really wants to attract new talents – you need to have the right mindset. It’s not enough by saying that you “want to” attract young people, you actually need to go further to involve, recruit and invest in young people. The first thing we ask is what their goal is? Is it to recruit young people for a 3 months campaign and that’s it or is it because you want to involve them in your municipality’s long-term strategy?

2. We help municipalities to recruit young leaders who will work to inspire more young people. When we recruit, we are looking for street smart young people, not school smart. And that means that we don’t check the young person’s grades, instead, we look for other drivers such as ambition, character, values, and past experience.

3. Emphasizing empowerment. So why is empowerment so essential when working with young people? If you believe in a young person, incredible things will happen. One example was Alfred from the south of Sweden. He was 17 years old when he got his first entrepreneurial idea to start his own personal training company. We saw his potential and empowered him when no one else did. Today, 5 years later he owns his own social media agency with over 17 employees – while still living in the same village.  

The younger generation doesn’t care about fancy titles and they’re not caring to be the best employee – but rather how to be an intrapreneur. So instead of micromanaging them, focus on coaching them, believe in them, and let them work remotely. 

Sofia Lindman: 

I believe that now is the perfect time to start questioning how things were done in the past. These ingrained habits of “how we used to work” were fundamentally shaken up this year and put many companies in a position where they were forced to quickly shift and create something brand new. We’re not going to work from home forever. But I do believe that we’re walking on a path towards more geographical flexibility. There are endless opportunities that come with this transformational time that we’re in – it gives us the opportunity to reimagine how we want work to look like and implement new principles and models that work in a remote setting as well.

Get the opportunity to create a new model for communication that enables us to connect, connect in a way that we haven’t connected before. In an office it’s usually the tech people over here, the marketing team is there and CS is right over there, we usually don’t communicate across teams, but in a remote setting, we are able to create virtual water coolers. Bring people together across teams and across hierarchies. It’s not so much about the physical space but more about creating that shared experience. And how do we create a great experience? 

By making sure we’re always adding the human element and starting our meetings with checking in, implementing virtual coffee breaks, and creating space for people to meet through the day  – find new ways of connecting from afar. Otherwise, we’ve implemented the technology but not the human aspect. When we’ve re-construct the way we socialize remotely, we are not only able to work more effectively from home, we have then built an infrastructure that enables us to work from anywhere.

Innocent: 

I don’t think you can find all the answers in evolutionary theory. If you look at evolution theory and the way humans worked for necessity. Since 100 years back, we’ve learned that it’s our main purpose, we’ve learned that we need to get a job and that we need to contribute. It’s the same in the conversations of human UBI (universal basic income) where one pushback against it is;  but what would people do? How would they find meaning? We learned to find meaning in the action of work but I don’t think work intriguingly has action in itself. Therefore, I believe that the individual pursuance aligned with work is the way forward.

Future generations are potentially moving back to a more human way of working. It’s the same thing if we look at our ecology. The world's ecology during the 18s when we realized that okay the way we producing and consuming is hurting the planet and we need to find new ways to go back to the old ways where we were in balance with the ecosystem 

Sissa:

I would say that it’s all about knowing your customer and target group as well as your employees. And, that’s very easy to say that you know your customer. For example, one year ago we made a survey with young people and used that in our daily work, but that’s the thing. These future generations adapt and change so fast so that’s not enough. Every day is an opportunity to update yourself.

Sofia:

To actually use technology to our advantage and as a compliment and find different ways of tracking without micromanaging and use that in order to empower your employees. Being micromanaged and feeling like you’re not trusted kills motivation immediately. Generally, I believe that the most important thing is not to remain stagnant. Either way, I think we need to continuously try and be brave and test new things and tweak, and fail and try again. The most important aspect here is the realization that we can adapt, that we can change things, we can rethink or change our culture to better fit the time we live in as well as the foundation that we’ve built our companies upon. 

Overall takeaways:

• We’re living in a fast-paced information age with over 1 billion knowledge-workers globally and a major need for constant upskilling & reskilling
• Insights from Learning Science shows us ways of enhancing social learning, alignment, memorization, motivation, and more in this digital world
• Use this work disruption as an opportunity to create an infrastructure that works for this new era of work
• When we put our efforts into creating a healthy environment where people can put in the best work on their terms – we rip the awards
• Make sure you know who the youths are and where to find them
• Empower the youths and make them believe in themselves