1. Managers have a direct impact on their employees’ effectiveness and creativity, yet most managers fail to implement the best practices associated with maximizing their employees’ innovative potential. Complicating this issue is the emergence of the millennial workforce.

   According to a panel held at a recent Bloomberg Business Summit in Chicago, 69 percent of corporate recruiters say that it is difficult to manage millennials (those born in the 1980s and 1990s and also referred to as Gen Y). As it is predicted that millennials will make up the majority of the workforce by 2025, managers must learn how to drive innovation from their younger employees if they hope to support their organization’s survival in the increasingly competitive operating environment.

   Before we get into the specific behaviors and actions that managers can implement to drive more innovation from their younger workforce, let’s take a look at the reasons why we need millennials in our companies in the first place.

   Why Organizational Innovation Depends on the Integration of Millennials

   Managers must drop the negative stereotypes associated with the younger workforce (it doesn’t matter whether they are valid or not) and realize that their success depends on the successful integration of millennials with other employees. As I have written about on my blog dedicated to enhancing learning and creative performance, innovation thrives in environments where people with diverse expertise and experiences can collaborate, share ideas with one another, and leverage multiple perspectives to solve challenging problems and create novel opportunities.

   Fortunately, many employees and managers are indeed shedding the assumptions that millennials are lazy, entitled, and selfish. According to the previously mentioned panel, 74 percent of non-millennials agree that millennials offer different skills and work styles that add value to the workplace.  

   The world in which millennials developed is a much different place than the world in which Gen Xers and Baby Boomers developed. Younger employees are more tech-savvy than their older counterparts and are more comfortable working in fast-paced environments characterized by loose schedules and multitasking.

   In addition, millennials are less resistant to change and better able to cope with extreme loads of changing information due to growing up with the Internet, social media, and mobile technology.

   The effective integration of millennials into the organization is critical in order to facilitate the diversity of ideas required for true innovation to emerge. This is especially so when most organizations seek to introduce and implement new technologies into their work processes or strive to bring new technology-based products and services into the market.

   The Workplace Values and Motivations that Keep Millennials Engaged and Creative

   Before one can hope to drive more innovation from their millennial workforce, one must first identify the workplace values and motivations of millennials. By understanding what keeps millennials engaged with their work, managers can then begin to leverage these elements towards innovative behavior.

   In essence, enhancing the creativity of millennials comes down to keeping them engaged, but managers should seriously consider these six key workplace values and motivations that are directly related to creative performance and innovation:

   Millennials want to be challenged. Research shows that millennials are confident, individualistic, and have a strong achievement orientation. This means that to keep them engaged, they must be given challenging assignments at work where the success or failure depends primarily on the level of effort that they put into the project. There is nothing more intrinsically motivating than being intellectually stimulated and forced to test the limits of one’s skills and expertise. The feeling of accomplishment after achieving a challenging goal is a primary driver that will keep your millennial employees engaged and committed to your organization.

   Furthermore, challenge is a precursor to flow, the state of “being in the zone” that is also linked to creative performance. Studies show that too little challenge relative to one’s skill level leads to a state of boredom, while higher levels of challenge (but not too high as to be anxiety-inducing) push people to become totally engaged with what they are doing and ultimately expand their skills and capabilities. As a person’s expertise and capabilities develop, so too does their potential to generate and implement innovative ideas.

   In addition, the flow state brings with it a rush of positive emotions, which have been linked time and time again to heightened levels of creative ideation. Lastly, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the world-renowned psychologist whose research brought flow into public awareness, conducted an intensive study of over 90 of the world’s most eminent innovators and found that the success of each one could be linked to the presence of flow in their lives from seeking out greater and greater challenges in their work.

   Millennials want to personally and professionally develop.  As mentioned above, high levels of challenge by itself will not ultimately lead to higher levels of creative performance— your millennials must also feel as if they have adequate skills to take on these challenges. This generation has a very strong drive to personally and professionally develop. In fact, millennials even view personal learning and professional development as more important than financial rewards or flexible working hours.

   With the rise of e-learning and mobile learning, there are more ways than ever to develop your employees; however, not all learning and development experiences are made equal when it comes to igniting innovation. Francesa Gino and colleagues found that learning-by-doing is more effective than learning through watching others at increasing creative performance. This has implications for the types of developmental opportunities that managers should provide to their millennial subordinates. Learning initiatives that help younger employees get their feet wet and jump right into the action, ideally with guidance and support from more experienced colleagues, are a great way to help facilitate creativity.

   Perhaps the most effective (and cost-effective) ways to provide professional development and enhance creative performance are simply to provide frequent feedback and openly communicate organizational information.

   Millennials want to receive frequent feedback and open communication. Millennials want plenty of feedback and information, and they want it in real time. One of the best ways to keep younger employees engaged is to give them continuous constructive feedback aimed at helping them learn from their mistakes and their successes. This type of feedback facilitates on-the-job, experiential learning and also demonstrates that others care about them and their contributions to the organization.

   Millennials appreciate transparency in the workplace and desire for communication to be open and honest. They can be turned off by communication practices characterized by the withholding of information.

   This openness of information sharing is characteristic of what organizational psychologists refer to as a “psychologically safe” work environment. When employees feel safe to express their differing ideas, they are more likely to present unique perspectives that ultimately can lead to novel ideas and innovations.

   Furthermore, managers should encourage high levels of feedback-seeking, as a recent study conducted by de Stobbeleir, Ashford, and Buyens found that employees that demonstrated higher levels of feedback-seeking also demonstrated higher levels of creative performance. Managers, however, need not feel pressured to be the sole source of feedback. Instead, managers and leaders can help facilitate a feedback environment by setting norms of open communication and helping behaviors.

   Millennials want to make a real difference.  Whereas challenge may be the foundational driver of engagement among millennial workers, making a real difference could quite possibly be second on the list. Moreso than previous generations, millennials have strong values towards public service and making the world a better place. They are more comfortable with diversity, and thus better at perspective taking.

   This is great news in terms of driving more innovation into your team and organization. Adam Grant and James Berry observed that employees with higher levels of prosocial motivation (the drive to help others) and higher levels of perspective taking demonstrated greater levels of creativity.

   Millennials want to make meaningful relationships. Even though millennials are more individualistic, they ironically desire to work collaboratively. Millennials want to work in a fun, relaxed environment and make meaningful relationships with their peers and managers—as it helps make for a work experience that they are excited to get to each morning. Supportive relationships from coworkers lead to feelings of psychological safety, greater levels of positive emotions, and ultimately higher levels of creative performance.

   Perhaps the most potentially meaningful relationships at work are those between the manager and the worker. Millennials desire close mentoring relationships with their bosses—relationships characterized by the transformational leadership component, individualized consideration. Individualized consideration helps improve the leader-follower relationship and helps to both motivate and develop the follower.

   Millennials want to have work/life balance. A recent PwC report on millennials shows that work/life balance is a primary driver of work engagement and organizational commitment among young employees. At first, older generations may scoff at this notion and write off millennials as being lazy, but in actuality, higher levels of work/life balance can be quite conducive to the generation of creative ideas.

   In the aforementioned study investigating the world’s most innovative creators, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi unexpectedly learned that many of these creators’ best ideas that eventually led to their giant successes came to them while they were away from work.

   For example, John S. Reed, the former co-CEO of Citigroup, drew up his visionary plan to revolutionize retail banking while vacationing at the beach. This “Memo from the Beach” was one of many radically innovative ideas that stemmed while he was away from work.

   This phenomenon happens quite often among driven employees, especially ones working on challenging assignments that have high stakes and the potential to help make a impact on others’ lives. It is often the case that even though one takes time off of work, his or her mind is still actively engaged, albeit somewhat subconsciously, in processing the unresolved problem at hand.

   This is known in the creativity literature as “incubation,” when a person takes a mental break from deliberate problem-solving. This incubation period helps facilitate novel insights (ever had that Aha! moment when taking a shower or on a run?) by giving the person’s conscious cognitive processing a break and shifting the problem to the subconscious, where the problem may be more likely to form new combinations and connections with other pieces of information, thus inducing novel insights.

   8 Best Practices for Driving Innovation from Millennials

   Help them find their flow. Get them involved in challenging work on a regular basis. Research shows that the work activities of planning, problem solving, and evaluation are perceived as most cognitively challenging, and these activities are most significantly linked to flow at work. Task your millennials with these three activities to keep them challenged and in flow.

2. Provide regular and individualized feedback. Help them develop more rapidly from their mistakes and their successes by providing opportunities for them to learn on-the-job as they are working towards achieving challenging goals. When doing so, be sure to emphasize their strengths and help them identify work activities in which they excel.

3. Give them opportunities to redesign their jobs to cater to their strengths and interests. If possible, doing so can help drive engagement, and gets your millennial workforce involved in work in which they have the highest probability to make the greatest innovative impact.

4. Encourage them to suggest ideas for new ways of doing things. Create a work environment with high levels of psychological safety and transparency by demonstrating that mistakes and wild ideas are not shunned, but welcomed.

5. Recognize, support, and even reward millennials for working hard and achieving challenging goals. Research shows that support and positive recognition from coworkers and supervisors, especially for achieving goals under ambiguous and uncertain conditions, is a driving factor in igniting employee creativity and innovation.

6. Show them the impact they are making. Managers should find ways to actually show millennials the positive impact that their work is making on others, whether that impact is on external or internal customers. Use objective data and figures when possible to clearly demonstrate their impact. Look for ways to collect testimonials from customers or other employees within the organization. One possibility is to establish a workplace appreciation and gratitude program. My colleague and I at Outlier Consulting Group are piloting such a program to help increase meaningfulness and appreciation among leaders in a Los Angeles County non-profit.

7. Create time and space for them to develop relationships with their team members and other employees in the organization outside of work. Provide opportunities for trust, respect, loyalty, and support to develop and you will reap the benefits of higher innovation. By helping facilitate opportunities for millennials to mix and mingle with other employees from different departments and functions (and other generations), you get the added benefits of the meshing of differing perspectives and ideas, which is great news for your organization.

8. Encourage millennials to be take leisure seriously. Promote community events, professional and serious leisure meetups (for example, quantified self, machine learning, hiking, meditation, music-making meetups that can be found through Meetup.com) where they can develop close relationships and learn from others with similar interests yet different experiences. Your millennials will come to work with fresher ideas and different angles to problems they are working on, and yes, your organization will benefit in terms of greater innovation.

Bottom line

We need to keep our organizations alive so that we can all support our families and ourselves. Driving innovation from millennials is a challenging task, but one in which managers have direct control over. By shedding the negative assumptions about how millennials differ from other generations and implementing these 8 best practices, managers can help their companies experience the levels of innovation needed to truly thrive.