Millennials and Gen-Z – potential target groups for coaching in the next 10 years!
Progressions in the population mix – In the next 10 years, Millennials and Gen Z will make up almost 40% of the global population. This graphic shows that the NextGen (for simplicity, this is the term we use for both Millennials and Gen-Z) must work with a larger portion of the population (more than 60%) who are not as digitally literate as them.
The immediate challenge – In proportion, the working population might have slightly more NextGen employees, due to retirements and other age-related restrictions. The key challenges are to build a stable working environment by leveraging multiple digital tools and embracing the diverse workforce across multiple generations to foster innovation. While there is a greater push by organizations to bring back their employees to office, from the recent Work-From-Home policies (adopted post COVID), the HR teams should bridge the gap between the multiple (WFH, Hybrid and In-Person) ways of working to ensure that organizations are able to retain talent and knowledge within.
Learning from the previous generations – While remaining hyper-connected to their fellow colleagues, the NextGen should also be encouraged to have the water-cooler conversations (virtual or otherwise) that help break down organization structures and build strong informal networks within an organization. This becomes more critical for the NextGen employees to understand the critical success factors from the previous era and use the learnings to build new tools for the NextGen enterprise (containing a vast majority of NextGen employees) that will adopt their entrepreneurial spirit, strong voices and preference for better work-life balance in the organization frameworks (even if they continue to get more agile).
The pressing need – The urgency becomes critical as the NextGen begin to get promoted to Leadership positions. Simple examples for improvement could be continuous learning, staying adaptable, building purpose-driven careers, incorporating better time management principles, introducing intrepreneurial ways of working (by tapping into their inherent yearning to work in a meaningful job). These have been achieved earlier but in very niche organizations under strong leaderships (from both HR and the Business teams) and perfect execution.
Building a strong foundation for the future – In the next decade, all employees will mostly work virtually with technologies that are “emerging” today. To build the “softer aspects” of the enterprise, these interactions should be facilitated in the next 2-3 years, to make it truly successful. I strongly believe that coaching the NextGen employees is the silver bullet to achieve maximum impact and design a strong agile organization framework for the next century.
PS: Definitions of the Generations can be found here
Madhusudan Rao
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Informative, insightful & topical piece Madhusudhan..understanding & supporting the needs of this emerging generation through coaching can help shape our collective future.