Businesses need to harness millennials’ focus on social sharing

Millennials are often maligned for their constant technology use and obsession with the social approval signalled by likes, shares and retweets. But organisations need to start recognising the benefits of such behaviour and harness it.

This generational cohort will, by some estimates, account for nearly 75 per cent of the workforce by 2025, and, according to a recent Deloitte survey of 7,800 people from 29 countries, only 28 per cent of currently employed millennials feel that their companies are fully using their skills.

How can smart leaders better leverage the talents of these future leaders? As organisational consultants, we tell our clients to consider what makes them tick and to see the value in those interests. Two points are of particular note:

– First: social sharing. Neuroscientists have shown that any kind of positive personal interaction lights up a part of the brain called the temporoparietal junction, which stimulates the production of oxytocin, “the feel-good hormone”.

Millennials, who have grown up interacting online, are able to get that same high, more often, through technology, by posting, messaging, forwarding and favouriting multiple times a day. They crave that connection and are, therefore, natural team players.

– Second: constant, complex data flow. Research tells us that multitasking is impossible: People can only do two things at once if one is routine. Also, those who regularly use multiple forms of media are more prone to distraction than those who don’t.

But, according to Nielsen Neurofocus, younger brains have a higher multisensory processing capacity than older ones. Millennials probably are not more effective multitaskers, in the strict sense of the world, but in their current stage of brain development, they seem better able to tolerate and integrate multiple streams of information.

Angela Ahrendts, the former chief executive of Burberry, recognized that she could turn these two hallmarks of millennial behaviour into an asset for the fashion brand. In 2006, she hired a large number of "digital natives", as she called them, to do what they do best: socialise through technology.

As she has explained, they created an expansive digital platform, which transformed the company’s image and dramatically accelerated its growth. One highlight was “Tweet Walk”, which turned Burberry’s traditional runway show into a live web broadcast.

While baby boomers might see phones, tablets and other devices as distractions, millennials use them to collaborate and innovate in real time. While Gen-Xers may view aggressive social sharing as an unhealthy mix of the personal and professional, millennials see it as a way to gather input and learn from others. Millennials understand, embrace and are evolving with our exponentially expanding digital world. Instead of judging their behaviour, we need to better leverage it. – Copyright New York Times 2015

Judith Glaser is the chief executive of Benchmark Communications and the chairwoman of The Creating WE Institute. Ashley Blundetto is a Temple University graduate who works at Benchmark Communications and specialises in neuroscience.