IBM's new team to focus on millennials

The firm has created a global team of 4,000 employees called IBM Millennial Corps focused on improving millennials' experience at the company

By 2020, research suggests that 50 per cent of the workforce will have millennials as employees. The world’s largest technology and information technology services firm IBM wants to be clued into how the millennials think and work. For this, the company has created a global team of 4,000 employees called IBM Millennial Corps.

Millennial is a generic term to describe those born between 1980 and 2000.

IBM’s global team (of all ages) is focused on improving the millennials' experience at the company. This community of millennials are constantly interacting within themselves and actively contributing to IBM projects. One of the recent key projects led by this group is Checkpoint - a quarterly feedback system. Part of that initiative was the creation of a mobile-based appraisal application called Ace.

According to D P Singh, vice-president and human resources head for India and South Asia at IBM, the millennials are “extremely active”, which is why the company wants to focus at this group.

This was evident when the company recently conducted a 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 out that this generation wants constant, quick feedback. We realised that we need to create a culture of feedback that happens on a constant basis. We developed an app called ACE — appreciation, coaching and evaluation. This is an application created by IBMers for IBMs. While the CIO (chief information officer) would look at what we had to create, the millennial team got in and said ‘we’ll 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 focus on performance as a culture and not just experience. For this, IBM is pushing for ‘early professional hiring’ (EPH). The idea is to bring in as much young talent into the workforce with every given opportunity.

“EPH for us would mean someone who has done a PhD; for engineers, it would be two or three years’ experience. In a very high consulting practice, we have hired people with one or two 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,” Singh added.

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 is managing millennials’ expectations. “As an HR leader, I have to spend disproportionate time to ensure my employees’ expectations are met 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 increasing.”

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