Millennials Aren’t Buying Your Corporate Messaging Anymore
Digital natives wanted their jobs to “make a difference”, and some companies exploited that. This is how you win the generation’s trust back
Back in the day, everyone wanted to work at Theranos. It was a MedTech company that intended to revolutionize the way blood tests are conducted and analyzed, by narrowing the sample needed for the test to a single drop. The company’s CEO and founder, Elizabeth Holmes, used to appear frequently on worldwide media. With bright blue eyes and Steve- Jobs-inspired jumpers, she discussed her so-called “mission” to make a breakthrough in affordable healthcare. There were plenty of reasons to get excited about Theranos: the high cost of taking a blood test in the US, for instance, or the possibility of exporting Theranos’ technology to third world countries.
Unfortunately, Things didn’t end well for the company (if you are unfamiliar with the story — please watch the HBO documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley”. It’s great). Now, that Theranos is defunct and Holmes is facing fraud charges, one may wonder what drove Holmes’ elite workforce to stick with her, even when they knew her product wasn’t working. The answer, it seems, is the belief in the company’s lofty vision and values, even when they both failed to deliver practical results. As one of the former employees says in the movie (skip to 1:23:21):
“In the carpeted world [public appearance, OR], Elizabeth was a goddess… she was the next Steve Jobs… and then you go on to the tile side [labs/R&D, OR], and nothing works, we’re on a sinking ship, everything’s a lie. Reconciling the differences between those two worlds was really hard for me to do”
Cynics may say that Theranos is an extreme case study for how corporate in-house messaging succeeds in retaining talents within the organization. After all, even when the employees became suspicious of Holmes’ intentions, they continued working for her, convincing themselves that “they are the ones who are crazy”. Except that in reality, this was not the case.
You see, Theranos was a highly effective PR machine. It had a charismatic female founder and all the buzzwords millennials love to hear. It had cultural reference to Yoda from Star Wars, as well as political connections that made it seem more accountable. What it didn’t have is honesty, and millennials, as idealistic as they can get, are not easily fooled. In the end, they were the ones who came out about what was going on in the company’s laboratories, and they were the ones who stood in front of the camera to tell their side of the story.
Nowadays, the real cynics are the millennials themselves. They can recognize when a company is trying to mislead them with fancy words into buying something they don’t need or get a bad job. What is even worse is that they won’t shut up about it. Social media is allowing them to vent their frustration and expose what they really think of their managers. It is that frustration that fuels secret Facebook groups and sites like Glassdoor and sometimes, it is that rage that drives them to consider litigation.
Considering that, it is understandable why millennials are finding it hard to believe the corporate messaging regarding the mission statement. The millennials don’t care what part of the company is trying to message them (HR, the marketing department or the general management). It only matters to them if the messages were written by people they recognize and can interact with. In other words, the messages have to come from a person they can trust, with proven integrity and honesty. That person can be their friend and co-worker, preferably, but it can also be an employee from another company.
Companies are only starting to create User Generated Content (UGC) as an internal communications strategy, but those that encouraged their employees to create work-related content were surprised by the results. Take Cisco, for instance. The tech corporation launched a Snapchat campaign in 2016 called #WeAreCisco, in order to draw new graduates into the organization. 20 employees from several offices were chosen as super-ambassadors and shared daily stories about what it’s like to work there.
The campaign hit just under 1M total views and won the New York Shorty Award for social media, but more important than that — it helped the talents within Cisco to identify themselves with the organization. Those not only called themselves “the secret Cisco society”, but later on took on more challenges for the campaign, such as taking over a Nasdaq account for National Techie’s Day event and initiate a competition in a recruiting event for empowering women. 8 winners from that competition were later invited for a job interview.
So how do you win millennials’ trust back? You don’t. You invest your resources in a mission that matters and make sure your office is a pleasant place to work in. If you are honest with them, your employees will do anything in order to ensure the company delivers results and grows, and they will also be very proud to tell everyone, including your potential new hires, where they work.
