The Change Agents

Millennials are ready to change the world.

By harnessing tools like social media, collaboration, and creativity, and leveraging their comfort with technology, they have high expectations not only of what they can achieve, but also what companies and business leaders can do, finds a new survey from Euro RSCG Worldwide, a global advertising agency based in New York.

“Millennials don’t see huge barriers between themselves and the companies with which they do business. They’re perfectly comfortable interacting with businesses and pressing them for information and change,” Marian Salzman, CEO of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, the public relations arm of Euro RSCG Worldwide, told Portfolio.com in an email interview. “They see what people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Richard Branson have been able to do with their millions and billions of dollars, and they want to see more business leaders follow that path.”

These findings echo the results of the Class of 2011 study conducted by I Love Rewards, an employee-recognition firm with offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Toronto, and Experience Inc., a college career-services website provider that reaches 4.2 million students and alums. One of the student respondents noted that, “If I were given the choice of picking my own employer, some of the things that I would consider would be…the moral values by which the company is guided and operates under.”

Millennials prefer companies that reward hard work with continued learning and position their brands to make lifelong connections with consumers. Their approach to brand awareness and the fluidity of the modern workplace makes Millennials uniquely qualified to handle the changing landscape of global labor. “We joke about this generation as having grown up with highly structured play dates and hands-on parenting rather than independent play and learning, but a consequence of all this group activity is that they truly understand how to work with others. As important, this is the first generation that is accustomed to working with people they don’t actually know in the ‘real world,’” Salzman explained. “They have contacts in other parts of the country and other parts of the world, and they don’t recognize geography or culture as impenetrable barriers.”

And speaking of overcoming barriers, 55 percent of the 3,000 Millennials surveyed said they expect that women will be key to shaping the future. But how does this generation reconcile their projections with the fact that women are conspicuously missing from leadership positions and the entrepreneurial ranks today? “We’re at a truly interesting stage in women’s progress. In one corner, we have the baby-boomer women who are seeing the fruits of their struggles—the enormous strides made by girls and women in academics and business, for instance—and have begun to worry that this new generation doesn’t appreciate what women went through to earn those rights and opportunities,” said Salzman. “In the other corner, we have Millennial women who have always considered themselves equal (at the very least!) to men and now are questioning whether balancing career and family are necessarily worth it. They want it all, but they want to be the ones to say what ‘all’ entails.”

Regardless of their gender, Millennials' new worldview can be enormously helpful to companies who are struggling to become—and stay—relevant today. “For businesses, it’s vital to maintain a dynamic [social-media] presence…to connect with stakeholders, conduct business, and build the brand,” Salzman noted.

That’s perhaps where Millennials have the most power. The businesses that understand that social media has become the arena in which reputations are being made and destroyed also understand the reason they need to trust this generation to battle against the traditional command-and-control corporate structure.

“Word of mouth is everything now that channels of communication have become so splintered…. For this generation, the choices they make at the ballot box are considered of less import than the choices they make at retail,” Salzman said. And they’re not afraid to use social media, as well as individual and communal actions, including making more conscious consumption choices, to let companies know exactly what it is that they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.

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