Millennials Can Make Your Company More Productive, And Save A Ton Of Money Along The Way

Let's be honest for a second. Everyone who isn't a millennial loves to criticize them to no end, right?

Especially at work, millennials or Gen Y are stereotyped as lazy, entitled, and disloyal as younger colleagues, where grey haired seniors constantly question their work ethic and credibility.

However, this couldn't be further from the truth. Yes, millennials don't like to be constrained, but paired with the right technology and some amount of flexibility transform them into powerhouses of productivity. Don't just take my word for it, big technology companies believe this as true -- including senior Google executive, Diane Chaleff.

"When it comes to millennials, they often get a bad rap for being sort of demanding, but the reality is they're just asking for great tools, because they want to be able to contribute to the business and they really believe in the power of the work that they're doing," says Diane Chaleff, Office of the CTO, G Suite, Google. She's part of a group of executives at Google whose mission is to foster collaborative innovation between Google and its largest customers, driving customer transformation through technology.

Not just Google, but several academic studies and tech company reports on this topic reinforce this trend. Millennials are great for productivity, if empowered with the right technology.

A Bentley University study in 2014 on the habits of millennials throws up a lot of insight, so does a Microsoft survey from 2017. Millennials have grown up using technology and find happiness in being productive. They're okay with working late to compensate for social media surfing at work, and the line between work and play is blurred for them. All traits that hit the right checkboxes of hiring managers looking for potential recruits.

Offices and workplaces that don't keep up and modernize their ways through the right productivity and technology tools could fail to attract millennials. Worse it gives to the rise of a practice called 'Shadow IT', where a company's workforce starts sharing work-related information over consumer services -- for e.g. using publicly available version of Gmail, WhatsApp, Facebook, WeTransfer, etc. instead of company approved communication and cloud data hosting tools.

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This is a common scenario at most offices who are behind the technology adoption curve, according to Diane Chaleff, and it's a dangerous trend. "The reason that this should be really concerning for a company is twofold. One is you have a whole bunch of confidential information, potentially floating under consumer Terms of Service, you don't know that the information is out there, you don't know what's happening with it. Secondly, as an IT organisation, one of your goals, or the company, rather, one of your goals, should be bringing to should be to bring all of your information together so that everyone can have access to it to help them make smart, right?"

For a lot of companies, "attracting these type of millennial workers is impossible without modernising their technology and productivity tools, just to showcase how much their business is looking to the future," according to Diane Chaleff.

Modernising technology is cool, but does it have any impact on the company's bottomline? According to Forrester Research, an economic impact study found that average businesses that move to modern productivity tools -- like Google's G Suite -- see a 1.5% increase in revenue.

Not just that, there are also important savings in terms of time, according to Diane Chaleff. This is everything from setting up a meeting to getting projects done faster, and communicating in real time to remove any productivity hiccups and bumps in the road. "We see that the average worker saves 21 days a year, in terms of their processes and the way they work," she says.

And just like in the pre-cloud era of PC apps, where we all grew up using Microsoft Office and Windows operating system on our home, friend's or school PC, don't be surprised if millennials demand or naturally gravitate towards Google's productivity tools, having grown up using Google search, Gmail, Google Chat, Google Docs and more in their personal life -- it's just the way the wind is blowing right now.