“We are now serving the trophy generation.”

One top exec says millennials expect more from their managers than ever before but thankfully, leaders have tech on their side.

Millennials are more demanding of their managers than any other generation before them but – according to one top executive – today’s leaders can live up to expectations because they’ve got tech on their side.

“Companies are now serving the trophy generation which is the millennials who always need a pat on the back and compliments of how great they’re doing,” says Jason Corsello, VP at Cornerstone OnDemand.

Corsello acknowledges the challenges that many HR professionals are contenting with on a daily basis thanks to the multi-generational workforce but says millennials are disrupting the status quo more than any other generation.

“The younger demographic has certainly changed the expectation of what management is and how we manage them so they’re changing a lot of what we do in talent management today,” he asserted.

Corsello says that young employees expect HR initiatives to be more tailored to their own specific needs rather than just suiting the interests of the business.

“Learning and development is becoming much more self-directed,” he told HRM. “Instead of the company saying; ‘Go take this training,’ the younger workforce wants to pursue the training that they care about and they want to be developed in ways that they care about – it’s not necessarily what the company cares about.”

He says the younger generation also expects performance management to be more continuous and convenient for them – “They want to know how they’re doing at any given point of time and they want to know how they can get better,” he told explained.

“It’s certainly becoming much more frequent, much more self-directed by the employees themselves so it’s definitely shifted from being employer driven to being employee driven.”
They’re high expectations that Corsello says HR professionals would struggle to keep up with if they didn’t have rapidly-developing technology on their side.

“HR technology has changed dramatically over the last 10 years – even the last five years – so it’s flipped HR upside down in the last decade or so,” he stressed.

“In the past, you’d have to reply on some level of expertise, some IT person to make changes to the system but today, any administrator with very limited technology skills can make changes to HR technology,” he explained.

“It’s another way to being more transparent – its helps facilitate some level of transparency and creating that level of engagement between manager and employee which you do in a little bit of a different way today,” he added. “Transparency is really the big driver that helps managers and employees get and stay on the same page.”

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