Importance of value and support.
Myer CEO Richard Umbers has outlined his strategy for embracing and incentivising ‘Millenials’ who are representing an increasingly larger number of retail employees.
A Millenial is born between 1980 and 2000 and is also referred to by demographers and social researchers as Generation Y.
“There is no point employing loads of capable millenials and then not having the capacity to be able to achieve through execution,” Umbers told Appliance Retailer in Sydney last month.
“What you need are capable people, you need a good culture that people are able to work in and you need good systems and processes to be able to support them. As it happens, a lot of the graduates who are now entering the workforce typically have very good digital skills and capabilities, but that on its own is not the only thing that actually matters here – you have to have a workplace that is going to assimilate those people and make them feel part of the future and give them a real voice within the organisation and allow them to make a difference.
“This is something that is very important to the millennial generation is the ability to influence and make change happen, so we are working not only on recruiting the capability which does have a strong millennial component, we are also working on the culture of the business to make it a good place to work for people who want to work in that way and what we do to support that is give them access to capital, access to the teams they need, access to the corporate wheels that help with execution of their ideas and initiatives.
“The only thing is that you need ownership by somebody, and more than it being ‘who has a great idea now let’s find someone to do it’, which is much more grassroots. What we are looking for is for someone to step forward and say ‘I believe in this and I’m prepared to make it happen, but what I need is something that looks like this and works like this’ and then what you need is the development guys to say: ‘here’s a prototype – is this what you are looking for?’
“Another very exciting experiment is saying: ‘you find a problem in the store, come and join us in the agile development team’, putting then an agile process around that individual that you have pulled out of their environment and use them as a nucleus of a team to build something, and what that means is that when you put them back in the business and they are the champion and they own it and they are going to make it work. These are new techniques I think, they are actually very powerful as they go to rapid adoption as well as the ability to do the development work and implement the technology.”