Chapter 5. How Am I Doing?
For Catherine Solazzo, there is nothing quite like the sweet sound of "This was a job well done." A fabulous performance review at work is the ultimate reward for the marketing program manager at International Business Machines Corp.
"Money is always important, don't get me wrong," she says, "but for me, a high performance rating means more than a check. Nothing makes you want to dedicate yourself to a job more than recognition for the work you do." She hates unpleasant surprises, so she makes sure that she not only receives a midyear review but also meets with her managers one-on-one weekly to monitor her performance.
Like many other achievement-oriented millennials, Solazzo values feedback so much because she saw its benefits as she grew up. "I was very involved in music and competed at a national level," she says, "so the feedback of my coaches and parents was how I learned where improvements needed to be made or where praise was given."
Even at IBM, she can still elicit particularly valuable feedback from her parents and please them with high performance ratings. Her parents also happen to work at IBM and understand the magnitude of a promotion or other recognition. "When I have been promoted or have received awards, it is more special because my parents can identify with my success on a more personal level," she explains. She has indeed given her parents reason to beam, with two promotions and three awards in three years.
Besides positive reviews from her managers, Solazzo also relishes IBM "Thanks!" awards from her peers for going above and beyond her normal responsibilities. They entitle her to a small gift, but more rewarding is the personalized note she and her manager receive explaining her contributions. "I love receiving that note from my peers in my inbox saying I have been recognized and knowing my manager has been made aware of how I have helped," she says. "I believe our generation craves recognition; it helps us become more motivated and productive."
It used to be that no news was good news in the workplace. That, at least, was the perspective of older generations, who figured that silence from their superiors meant they were doing their jobs well enough. But like Solazzo, many millennials expect regular updates on their performance and thrive on positive reinforcement. For millennials, the more feedback the better. An annual or even semiannual evaluation isn't nearly enough for most millennials. They want to know how they're doing weekly, even daily. Just as they can continuously see their scores and levels when they play video games, so they also want to keep a close watch on their ratings in the workplace.
Millennials can't tolerate silence. If they don't get fast feedback on their work, some will impatiently start e-mailing or text messaging their managers. If that doesn't generate a reaction, they try hunting bosses down. Some anxious millennials consider no response equivalent to a negative response.
"There's a bit of gluttony about wanting feedback," says Subha Barry, managing director and head of global diversity and inclusion at Merrill Lynch & Co. "The millennials were raised with so much affirmation and positive reinforcement that they come into the workplace needy for more."
Millennials contend that positive feedback builds their confidence and makes them feel more secure. It provides validation that their careers are on the fast track and helps them figure out how they can improve and advance even more quickly. "I feel very competitive," says Solazzo. "I always want to know that I'm moving toward a promotion."
In addition to more frequent and detailed performance assessments, millennials want companies to nurture their career development. They are clamoring for more coaching, training, and mentoring programs. After making job offers to college graduates, some recruiters are surprised when students immediately ask how often their company does performance reviews and whether they provide mentors.
What employers are feeling are the effects of all the praise lavished on millennials as children and teenagers. Although millennials like working in teams and sharing the workload and credit, they are still hungry for individual recognition, too. Their need for applause knows no bounds. Managers claim that some millennials are such praise junkies that they want to be complimented just for showing up at work and for simply completing an assignment on time, regardless of the quality of the work.
"This generation's sense of entitlement to feedback is mind blowing," says Deborah Holmes, director of corporate social responsibility at Ernst & Young. When she was a junior employee, she could tell what her manager thought of her memos just by the number of changes that were made to them. Now, she says, millennials want to sit down and discuss their manager's opinion of the memo in detail. "It can make a supervisor feel overwhelmed," she says. "But I am impressed by this generation's understanding of the value of regular feedback in calibrating their performance." In recruiting students, the accounting firm makes sure that it promotes its "feedback-rich environment" and promises them ongoing access to "peer counselors," as well as trained career counselors.
Ernst & Young enjoys a bit of an edge. Many millennials especially like consulting, accounting, and other professional services firms because they usually provide a thorough performance evaluation after each project. To compete more aggressively for millennials, companies in other industries also are moving to semiannual or even more frequent feedback, both formal and informal. Diana Bing, director of learning at IBM, encourages managers to provide as many appraisals as possible to help employees hone their skills and become more aware of their strengths and foibles. "We suggest to managers that at the very least, they do reviews a couple of times a year on performance and career development, and preferably even more," she says. "I believe millennials demand reviews not because they need stroking, but because they value their own marketability and want someone to honestly tell them what they need to do better."
To help retain talent, L'Oréal now provides employees with formal feedback twice a year through its talent development program. They learn not only about their immediate performance but also about their major assets and long-term growth opportunities. The assessment program lets employees know what potential the beauty-products maker sees for them in the next three to five years and which skills they must cultivate if they aspire, for example, to be a manager in Latin America.
The Conference Board, a business research organization based in New York City, also has decided to provide employees with two written evaluations a year. "We've found that our twentysomething administrators want feedback on a very regular basis," says Lorrie Foster, executive director of councils and research working groups. "They also want to know where they can go next. I recently hired a talent management expert to give them a lot of attention. He takes them out for coffee and lunch, and we have set up the mechanism to give them at least monthly informal feedback."
The Conference Board also has observed how much millennials crave promotions and other rewards. "We found that this group of employees likes to work in a collaborative fashion," Foster says, "so we put them into three teams. For each team, we appointed a lead. That gave our three hardest-working administrators a promotion and gives the rest something to aspire to." If promotions to higher management levels aren't readily available, companies may need to find opportunities for lateral growth in other business units or other countries in order to keep millennials engaged.
Some employers admire millennials for their persistence in seeking instructive feedback. Carol Calkins, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, sees the demand for "instant feedback" both at her firm and at colleges where she interacts with students. When she helps judge accounting competitions at business schools, she says, the losing teams "want a lot of feedback about what the winning team did right and what they could have done better. They are very intense and competitive and want to learn from the feedback."
Similarly, during the recruiting process, some millennial students who don't get hired feel compelled to know why they didn't make the cut. Career services directors say millennials badger them, demanding to get in touch with recruiters to learn why they didn't get invited for a second-round interview. When the directors explain that companies are likely to give a "vanilla" answer that isn't very revealing, the students ask the school to contact the recruiters on their behalf for more honest reactions.