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KontikiMillennialGuide3
1. Lawrence Ragan
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an important message and wants
h video, to the ENTIRE COMPANY...
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Reaching the Millennial Workforce
Do’s and don’ts for choosing tools for employee communications
3. Introduction
As millennials join your organization in greater numbers—they’re now the largest generation in the
workforce—communications challenges are mounting. The monthly newsletters and CEO videos that
you’ve relied on for employee outreach may fall flat with millennials, because these tools don’t fit
into their socially- and technology-driven lifestyles. It’s not that millennials are averse to commu-
nications; it’s that they react positively to different forms of communications than employees from
other generations.
Your internal communications efforts need to match the various ways that millennials talk to each
other and with their work colleagues. In this guide, we’ll offer stories and advice from communica-
tors who’ve adapted common communications channels—including email and video—to connect
more deeply with millennial employees.
It’s helpful to understand what motivates millennials and drives their attitudes toward their careers:
They care about fairness and doing good. “Millennials care more about the companies they work
for than how much they make,” says Todd Johnson, president of Kollective, which develops stream-
ing video solutions for corporate networks. “They need to know that their company is doing good.
They’re driven by an innate sense of fairness.”
They’ll seek out what they need, when they need it. Krista Berlincourt, communications lead for
Simple, a Portland, Oregon, online banking company with many millennial employees, says this age
group is used to finding information on their own—not waiting for it to be delivered to them. “They’re
into immediacy and access to information,” Berlincourt says. “They’re aligned with the self-serve
culture.” While millennials are sometimes perceived as self-absorbed in devices and technology,
Berlincourt says she sees the opposite: “It’s just that this generation is so used to technology as a
driver of everything they do.”
They want access to news about how their organization works. “They need information,” says Dan
Hill, president of Ervin|Hill Strategy in Washington, D.C., where he helps develop employee commu-
nications strategies for clients. “Previous generations simply took on assignments and did their jobs
without worrying about overall strategy. Millennials want to know, ‘Why am I doing this? What’s the
purpose?’”
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4. They’re digital natives. They’ve grown up with smartphones and tablets, and sharing information on
social channels is no big deal to them. “They’re comfortable working digitally and collaboratively,”
says Becky Graebe, senior manager of corporate communications for SAS. “To ask them to work dif-
ferently would be a mistake.”
They value short-form communications. “You have to make information easily digestible,” says Steve
Crescenzo, CEO of Crescenzo Communications, which offers seminars and consulting services on
employee communications.
2
How millennials view technology
• As digital natives, they’re avid users of social networks: Eighty-one percent are on Facebook.
• They place themselves front and center on social networks: Fifty-five percent have posted a
selfie on a social media site (a much higher percentage than among other generations).
• Millennials are big users of chat and messaging applications: Forty-nine percent of smart-
phone-owning millennials use messaging apps.
• Millennials are more likely than all other age groups to post a message to someone’s online
profile during a 24-hour period.
• They also like curated-image sites like Instagram and Pinterest: These sites are used by 28
percent and 31 percent of young adults respectively.
• Millennials outpace older Americans in using the Internet and mobile phones. They’re more
likely to have their own social networking profiles, and to post videos of themselves online.
5. Video
Millennials love to watch video and create it themselves. According to the Pew Research Center, one
out of five millennials have posted videos of themselves online; they’re also more likely than any
other age group to have watched video during a 24-hour period. They’re heavy consumers of video
across social channels, according to Animoto’s recent survey on social video: Sixty percent of millen-
nials would rather watch a company video than read a company newsletter, and 76 percent of them
follow brands on YouTube.
Given millennials’ enthusiastic appetite for video, consider increasing your share of employee com-
munications videos to boost viewership among this age group.
Do consider replacing written communications with videos. Millennials respond well to videos, since
they’re a prominent fixture in the tools they use outside the office. “We’re doing three times the num-
ber of videos we created last year,” Graebe says. “We can tell from looking at the viewing numbers
that explanatory videos—for training, for example—are more popular than the printed versions.”
Do view videos as a way to break down barriers. “Millennials really care about how their companies
operate—they want to know why things happen the way they do,” says Kollective’s Johnson. “This
generation has a level of suspicion about what they’re being told. Video can create connections
between lower-level employees and executives in a way that written communications can’t,” Johnson
says.
“The old-style ways of letting the management team roll down messages—like giving managers a
slide deck and expecting them to pass it along to their teams—doesn’t work,” Johnson says. “We all
know that managers are terrible at that stuff, so the messages get watered down, or not delivered at
all. Videos let you put a face on important messages—you hear them and see them coming directly
from someone’s mouth. They’re as close as you can come to creating one-on-one relationships with
the CEO and the whole organization, especially in a big company.”
Do add some text overlays to videos. Text will help not only millennials but every employee under-
stand the takeaways—especially when English isn’t their first language, Graebe says. “We shoot
most of our videos at our headquarters using English-speaking employees, and the text helps global
employees understand the key points,” she says. “Adding text to video also makes it much more
scannable and searchable.”
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6. 4
Don’t go long on videos. “We keep them to two minutes or less,” Graebe says. “Millennials especial-
ly expect videos to be short and sharp.”
Do let employees create their own. Millennials are creators, says Sharon McIntosh, president of
employee engagement firm And Then Communications, and when that love of creating content
intersects with their affinity for video, you have the makings of a compelling employee communica-
tions tool. “Instead of hiring an external video producer for one campaign, we created a competition
and asked employees to send us their own videos,” McIntosh says. “The quality was unbelievable.”
Given steady improvements in mobile device cameras and the availability of editing software, home-
grown video looks startlingly good.
Don’t worry that employees will post inappropriate video. In larger, more conservative organizations,
this is the No. 1 fear, says Johnson—that employees will share videos that offend certain groups or
simply aren’t professional. This problem is easily solved by setting up a simple review process for ev-
ery employee-generated video. “When employees submit videos on the intranet or social networks,
they should first go into a holding pattern,” Johnson says. “You can create a simple workflow for get-
ting them approved and making them public within the company.”
7. 5
Email
According to the Pew Research Center, millennials haven’t given up on email: A 2010 study showed
that half of millennials were as likely to have sent an email in a given 24-hour period as members of
older generations. That said, millennials’ preference for the short and sweet means that employee
communications emails should be brief and infrequent.
Don’t make email your primary internal communications channel. Email is the workplace tool every-
one loves to hate. While it’s still a necessary evil, it’s definitely not millennials’ first choice. “Mil-
lennials look at email like they look at the telephones on their desks. They don’t use it,” says Cindy
Crescenzo, president of Crescenzo Communications.
Do send emails when you have specific questions, and when you need to reach certain employee
groups. “We’re still heavy email users,” says SAS’s Graebe. “But when we’re reaching out to em-
ployees, we’ll try to use email only when we know which experts we want to contact, and when we
need a response from them. That’s usually easier than waiting for an answer on The Hub,” which is
the company’s enterprise social network. On the other hand, if employees have a question and they
don’t know who can answer it, they’ll use The Hub to reach a broader audience, instead of sending
out multiple emails. “Use the right tool for the right job,” says Graebe.
Don’t overload emails. Given millennials’ preference for other tools like social networks, emails can
easily be ignored if they include volumes of information. Several short emails are better than one
long one. “Let’s say you have 10 things you need to tell employees about in each quarter,” says Hill.
“Space them out, with one action item per email, and include hyperlinks to make it easy for employ-
ees to respond.” Consider sending out regular emails on the same days each week, so employees
know to expect them.
Do control who can send out employee emails, and when. “You should have strict guidelines for
when and why broadcast emails go out,” says McIntosh; it reduces the chance that less-critical
emails will crowd employee inboxes. When she was vice president of global internal communications
for PepsiCo, McIntosh and her colleagues established an editorial calendar for employee emails,
ensuring that each message had a purpose. Even though people complain about email, “it’s going to
be with us for a long time—it’s part of many companies’ corporate culture,” she says. The challenge
for internal communicators, she says, is to look at email as a strategic tool, not a place to dump infor-
mation that doesn’t fit anywhere else.
8. 6
Intranets
Millennials are not hardwired to seek out information via intranets, since they’re more comfortable
with tools like social networks. Lead them to your intranet content by making it accessible through
other channels, like internal social networks.
Don’t expect millennials to simply show up at your intranet. “They haven’t proven to be as useful for
millennials,” says Hill, who’s helped build them for his public and private sector clients. “Sure, you
need intranets as a repository of information—but you have to drive millennials to them.”
To lure them to the intranet, use the tools millennials know, like texts or internal social media net-
works. Think of the process this way, Hill says: “Say you have cake in the break room. If you want
baby boomers to show up, send around a memo. If you want Gen Xers to show up, send them an
email. If you want millennials to show up, send them a text.” So, send texts that alert millennial em-
ployees to new intranet posts.
Don’t rely on the intranet as a starting point. In many cases, you may not want to force millennials
to jump through hoops to get to content. “If you want people to watch a video, just send them the
video,” Hill says—perhaps as a link in a text or internal chat application. “Don’t make them consume
everything through the intranet. They won’t take multiple steps to get there—they’ll lose patience.
Find a way to share information in a way that’s native to the devices they’re using.”
Don’t cling to corporate-speak. If your intranet is heavy on dry company newsletters and town hall
transcripts, you’re guaranteed to scare away millennials (and maybe everyone else). “Millennials
have less of a tolerance for the corporate style,” says Steve Crescenzo. “They’ve come into the work-
force having already communicated on Facebook and Twitter for 10 years—so if you start slapping
them in the face with corporate material, they won’t even read it.”
Do adopt a storytelling approach to intranet content. “Your content has to be focused on people,
and it needs to be conversational,” Crescenzo says. Yes, slicing and dicing content into smaller
pieces is a way to make information digestible to millennials, but you can’t reduce all of your internal
communications output to bulleted lists. “Your No. 1 goal is to educate employees about the busi-
ness, and you do that through storytelling.”
9. 7
Do use tools that allow for feedback and opinion sharing. “Millennial employees count on one an-
other’s insights and perspectives to enrich their work,” says Graebe. “If we don’t allow them to share
that, it gets in the way of how they do their jobs.” At SAS, The Hub, the company’s internal social
network, is used heavily by employees to ask questions, get news about the company, and connect
to SAS Wide Web, the company’s intranet.
To foster idea sharing, SAS has a lively community of about 300 employee bloggers, who mainly write
for an internal audience, Graebe says: “We pull these into the intranet’s news section—we move this
content around so we can put good ideas in different places.”
10. 8
Chat/text
Pew Research Center reports that 49 percent of smartphone owners ages 18 to 29 use messaging
apps. Succinct employee communications messages delivered via chat or text may stand a better
chance of being read.
Do tap into millennials’ love of chat culture. In millennial-driven company Simple, Berlincourt uses
Slack, an internal collaboration tool, to exchange messages with employees. “The younger demo-
graphic appreciates immediacy,” she says, and tools with real-time messaging—where millennial
employees will spend most of their time—are natural places to start discussions about employee
issues.
Do replace emails with chats or texts. “We’re working with young software companies that absolutely
love chat, and think it’s much better than email—they think email is the devil,” says Cindy Crescenzo.
“Millennial employees will do anything to avoid reading long chains of email— they see chat as much
better for collaboration.”
Do use chat to bring remote employees into timely conversations. If you start conversations with
employees on chat or messaging applications, everyone can feel like they’re part of the discussion,
even if they’re not in the same location. “Our remote employees can be part of the conversation just
like people in the office,” Berlincourt says. “It’s social, but it’s still productive.”
Do use texts to deliver bite-sized information. If you need to share information about benefits or
company policies, it’s often in a long format, or requires a lot of disclosures. “Those long-format
messages don’t work for the millennial generation,” says Hill, so they’re likely to skip reading impor-
tant messages. “Make it easier to digest by taking out the five or six most important points.” Send
out these points as text or chat messages that say, “5 steps you need to take this month”—or even
send out five different messages with a different action item in each text. For the millennial audience,
Hill says, texts are viewed as the most urgent form of communications, so you’re more likely to solicit
responses.
11. 9
Face to face
Contrary to popular perceptions about millennials glued to Skype and Google Hangouts, they do care
deeply about real-world interaction, communicators say. But in-person encounters need to offer two-
way communication, so millennials gets access to top executives.
Do add in-person meetings to your internal communications plan. The common perception of millen-
nials is that they’d rather do online meetings from their desks—but that’s false, says McIntosh. “The
millennials on my team really want that time,” she says. Johnson agrees: “We’re living in a soundbite
culture, but don’t undervalue that face time,” he says. “Millennials want to be in touch with execu-
tives—they want to know where their company is taking them.”
Don’t create agendas for every meeting. Sure, everyone (millennials included) hates meandering
meetings, but younger employees love the idea of connecting with the higher-ups on a one-to-few
basis. “We have small meetings with our executives, old-school style, and they have no agenda,”
says Graebe. “We let the conversation go where it goes.”
Smaller, shorter get-togethers are appealing, agrees Steve Crescenzo: “You might not get millenni-
als to pay attention during an hour-and-a-half town hall meeting. But a brown-bag lunch with a few
managers, yes.”
Do offer regularly scheduled opportunities for millennials to talk to senior people. Assure employ-
ees that there will be ongoing chances to hear from the higher-ups, and the same information will
be discussed each time. “We have weekly all-hands meetings,” says Simple’s Berlincourt. “They’re
meant to be an open forum—we share our performance with the entire company every week.”
Do get buy-in from top executives. Face-to-face meetings won’t work for millennials if the bosses
simply stonewall questions—or don’t hang around to hear feedback. “It’s very important to millenni-
als that they be heard,” Hill says. Because Silicon Valley companies have large millennial workforces,
they’ve become good at this, he adds. “The CEOs engage with employees, and are very matter-of-
fact—they don’t just speak from talking points,” he says.
12. 10
Do offer meeting follow-ups. Millennials want to see what comes out of their interactions with senior
people, Hill says. Talk about outcomes in your follow-up communications.
Do create spaces that foster in-person get-togethers. Millennials may somewhat favor online meet-
ings, but if you carve out comfortable places to socialize, personal interactions can become more
frequent. The three newest buildings on the SAS campus in North Carolina include coffee shops.
“Meetings just happen” when you’re waiting in line for coffee, Graebe says. “Some of the changes
we’ve made to our physical environment lately are in response to this next generation of workers,
who like to meet outside of conference rooms.”
Layered approach to communicating with millennials
If you believe that millennials might not stop in at the intranet to read your carefully crafted
story on the latest fundraising drive for a local charity, should you give up on them ever
reading it? By integrating the various channels you use to reach millennials (and indeed, all
employees), you can create a path to content. You can also use more enticing forms of com-
munications, such as videos, to attract millennials to content.
For example, SAS links its intranet, SAS Wide Web, to The Hub, its internal social network.
“We’ll post articles to The Hub in the same way we post them to the intranet,” Graebe says.
“We have an easy link between The Hub and SAS Wide Web.” The company also links internal
communications content to its SharePoint site.
“We want people to feel like they don’t need to check multiple places if they want to stay up
to date,” says Graebe. If an employee comments on an article on The Hub, that comment will
also be visible when the article appears on SAS Wide Web. “Regardless of where you go to get
your news, you see the same conversations taking place.”
Steve Crescenzo recommends a “layered” approach to integrating communications channels
as a way to draw millennials deeper into content. “If each layer is good, they’ll want to keep
going,” he says. If you use Yammer or Slack or a similar internal social messaging platform,
send out a compelling message about a new story. That message could lead the employee to
a short video—and if viewers are attracted to the story, they can click through to the actual,
long-form article.
13. 11
Not just for millennials
Attracting millennials to your employee communications content is all well and good, but what about
the rest of your employees? Tossing out the old tools, while forcing everyone to use the new ones, is
probably not the way to win hearts and minds. While it makes the communicator’s job tougher, em-
ployees need many ways to consume content. “You can’t abandon your other tools,” says Hill. “You
still need bulletin boards and employee newsletters. People digest information differently.”
Offering several “ins” to content can be a way to familiarize non-millennials with tools that might
seem intimidating at first. “It’s about offering a variety of ways to get to the end result,” says SAS’s
Graebe. “Some people might not want to use [internal social network] The Hub for business.” On the
other hand, non-millennials might check out the company’s photo enthusiast group on The Hub, and
get comfortable with social networking that way, Graebe says.
Likewise, delivering content in several formats can avoid creating walls around material that you
want all employees to absorb. Where possible, SAS creates transcripts of podcasts and videos. “Mil-
lennials might want to download podcasts to listen to when they go for a run,” Graebe says. “Some
people just want to skim a transcript. If you can provide both, so much the better.”
Rather than alienating older employees, a shift toward the styles and content that attract millennials
may bring a breath of fresh air to employee communications programs. “It can force communicators
into better habits,” says Cindy Crescenzo. “Whether the audience is millennials or not, short content
in a conversational tone is always better than long drawn-out corporate-speak.”
While millennials and non-millennials may be separated by the technologies they prefer, they share
ideas about what they want from their employers in terms of communications, says Kollective’s John-
son. “Millennials want more directness and honesty from their employers,” he says. “Other genera-
tions wouldn’t have a problem with this.”
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to your entire global workforce.
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