Within the last decade, workplaces have undergone a considerable shift. At present, Millennials are the largest demographic of the global workforce. By the year 2025, this generation is expected to constitute a whopping 75% of the total workforce according to many reports, including Forbes and Entrepreneur.
There is a simultaneous growth in the number of people who prefer working from a remote setting, rather than going into the office. That is not a coincidence. According to a survey by Axios, a stark 84% of millennials prefer remote work over working in person.
Why do millennials favor working from home, and how does remote work affect their engagement? And more importantly, how can employee experience drive the highest level of engagement?
Let’s find out.
Why do 84% of Millennials prefer to work remotely?
It may come as a surprise, but many millennials would even consider leaving a company if not given the flexibility of remote or hybrid work.
There are many reasons why millennials choose working from home over going to the office.
- Increased Productivity: Working from home is comfortable and convenient. Stanford conducted a study among 16,000 workers that showed their productivity levels increased by 13% with remote work.
- Connectedness: Companies have integrated apps and online tools to streamline efficiency and collaborate with colleagues, without having to be present at the office space.
- Work-Life Balance: Remote working allows employees to properly maintain a work-life balance, thus helping them to avoid mental fatigue and burnout, and return to work the next day with a fresh mind and enthusiasm.
- Flexibility and Autonomy: This suggests that employees enjoy a certain freedom to do their work, something millennials seem to value largely. Due to all the benefits that remote work offers to employees and employers alike, many businesses have opted for a ‘remote-first’ approach – which makes working remotely the default choice for the majority of employees.
This technologically adept generation is here to redefine the norms of workplace culture, and for a multitude of reasons, is leaning towards remote working. The key to long term success, while maintaining a heavily remote workforce, is to boost the employee experience.
How can organizations boost employee engagement remotely?
For organizations, the challenge with remote employees is keeping employees highly engaged. Increasing engagement and satisfaction for your remote employees begins with Employee Experience (EX).
Let’s talk about employee moments. If you think about all the experiences on an employee journey, many things may come to mind (we made mapping these moments easy with our 11 phases of EX). Now if you select a single experience on that journey, how can you use it to drive toward highly engaged employees? Let’s take a look at 3 pre-built workflows that our team of EX experts refined and tested at Experience.com that drastically changed the engagement of our employees, across just 4 months!
| Engagement Opportunity | The Success Story |
| Weekly Team Acknowledgement | Nothing drives culture more than getting your employees to celebrate with each other. This template automates reward, recognition, and engagement. At Experience.com we deployed this workflow. Every other week our employees get an email and text message motivating them to share the way another employee WOW’d them. On each cycle we see 80% engagement from all our employees globally. Getting recognition and reward from another colleague boosts energy and seeing our employees excited to celebrate each other showcases how powerful this simple workflow can be. |
| Quarterly Survey | Winning on Glassdoor and Indeed while improving the work experience of your employees can be simple and powerful. We’ve templated both anonymous and non-anonymous quarterly engagement surveys. Collect standard employee feedback as well as specific-to-role feedback and automatically send happy employees to online platforms to share their happy sentiments. At Experience.com, our Glassdoor was muddled with nasty attacks from other employees and only our unhappy churned employees were talking about their employee experience. After deploying this workflow we gathered great internal feedback AND boosted our CEO’s rating from 48 to 84 in a single quarter. |
| Anniversary Pulse | Gathering employee feedback on the anniversary of their hiring date, not once a year at the same time for all employees, is a strong method for gathering pulse insights. We created a template that will give you a better sense of company sentiment on a consistent basis. One major issue with the usual pulse survey is that you’re sending a survey at a moment in time and no matter which date you choose, you’re asking for bias. Maybe it’s close to the holidays and employees are stressed. Or maybe it’s at the start of the new year, after bonuses were handed out and employees are feeling taken care of. Either way, your data will be skewed so take this approach and gather consistent and accurate feedback. |
Learn more about EX best practices or the EX Platform by Experience.com.
Proper employee engagement and a positive employee experience, is of utmost importance to any company and its growth.
