At IBM a team of 4,000 employees focus' on millennial workforce

By 2020, research suggests that 50% of the workforce will have millennials as employees. IBM, the world's largest technology and IT services firm, wants to be clued into how the millennials think and work; to that end, it has created a global team of 4,000 employees called IBM Millennial Corps.

This global team (of all ages) is focused on improving millennials' experience at the company. This community of millennials are constantly interacting within themselves and actively contributing to IBM projects, such as Checkpoint, a quarterly feedback system.

D P Singh, vice president and head of HR (India/South Asia) at IBM, said millennials are extremely active and hence the company wants to focus on this group. This was evident when the company recently conducted a jam session on the new performance appraisal system that the company should have.

"At IBM we have a networking platform called 'Connections'. The millennial group, which is also on Connections, was very active. We figured this generation wants feedback constantly and quick. We realised that we need to create a culture of feedback that happens on constant basis. We developed an app called ACE-appreciation, coaching and evaluation. This is an application created by IBMers for IBMs. While the CIO office would look at what we had to create, the millennial team got in and said we will create an app that we think works for us. This app has been adopted globally at IBM," said Singh.

The other shift underway at IBM is a focus on performance as a culture and not just experience. For this IBM is pushing for 'early professional hiring'. The idea is to bring as much young talent into the workforce at every given opportunity.

"EPH for us would mean someone who has done a Phd, for engineers it would be 2-3 years experience. In a very high consulting practice we have hired people with 1-2 years experience and fast forwarded then, we call this 'consulting by degrees'. There are various programmes. We are focused on performance as a culture' and that means experience does not count as long as you are performing," said Singh.

IBM also wants to give a push to the entrepreneurial spirit of millennials. For this they encourage employees to use Watson APls and its Bluemix Platform. "If they come up with an idea they co-create, co-learn and get funding. This builds and feeds into the entrepreneurial desire of this generation" said Singh.

Despite all these initiatives, Singh says the biggest challenge for him remains to be managing the expectation management and experience of millennials. "As an HR leader I have to spend disproportionate time to ensure my employees' expectations are meet and experience is enriched," he added.

Singh also acknowledges the fact that automation is inevitable. "At present I am hiring and the numbers are growing but what is changing is the skill sets we hire. Even at IBM the number of data scientists, app developers, storage technology experts, UX designers and others is all increasing," he added.

With a global headcount of 377,757 (as of December 31, 2015) IBM and a significant employee base of millennials, IBM has initiatives such as job shadowing, mentoring and reverse mentoring to keep them engaged.