Cognology
  • Products
    • 360 Degree Feedback
    • Competency Management
    • Compliance Training
    • Course Builder
    • Learning Management
    • Onboarding & Inductions
    • Performance Management
    • Profiles
    • Skills Management
    • Talent Management
  • Resources
    • Agile Performance Management
      • Balanced goals
      • How does performance management work?
      • How to write SMART goals and objectives
      • The Ultimate Guide To Agile Performance Management
      • What Remote Working Means for Performance Management, Plus 7 Other PM Trends
    • 360 Degree Feedback
      • What is 360 degree feedback?
      • How to run a 360 degree feedback process
      • 3 Easy Tips For Your 360 Feedback Questionnaire
    • Induction and Onboarding
      • Employee Onboarding Resources
      • Easy guide to a great Onboarding Process
      • Get the Onboarding Business Case Whitepaper
      • How To Switch From Face To Face New Hire Inductions To Online
      • Selecting an Onboarding System
      • Sample Orientation and Onboarding Program
      • Forms You Will Need For A New Employee In Australia
      • What Is Information Onboarding
    • Competencies & Skills
      • The Ultimate Guide To Competencies
      • What is a competency?
      • 7 reasons you should be using competencies
      • What is competency based assessment?
      • Competency Assessment Methods
      • Competency Assessment Template Form
      • Easy Guide to Competency Based Assessment Tools
      • Competency Management
      • What is skills audit?
      • How To Conduct a Skills Audit and Identify Skill Gaps
    • More about Performance Management
      • What is Performance Appraisal?
      • Performance Appraisal Template With Tips
      • What is performance management?
      • Social Performance Management Explained
      • What is talent management
    • Samples
      • SMART Goal Examples
      • Sample Goals and Objectives
      • Sample competencies
      • Sample competency review comments
      • Sample goal review comments
      • Sample development activities
      • Sample one-on-one check-in conversation notes
      • Sensitive items to avoid in feedback/comments
    • Learning & Coaching
      • A leaders guide to coaching
      • Coaching conversations
      • How to give feedback like a pro
      • How to conduct one on one meetings with team members
      • Seriously Good Learning and Development
    • More
      • Designing a Work-From-Home Policy: Where to Begin
      • How to Keep Employees Informed During a Crisis
      • How To Keep Staff Working From Home Productive
  • About
    • About Cognology
  • Ask Us Anything
  • Search
  • Menu Menu
Jon Windust

Are Millennials really changing the way we work?

December 9, 2014/in Blogs, Millennials, Workforce Data/by Jon Windust

Part 1 of our data driven investigation into the talent trends of 2014

Introducing a four part investigation into 2014’s key talent trends, thanks to our friends at Indeed

We’ve spent the past few weeks searching for a data driven way to investigate the top HR and talent trends of 2014. The real question that I wanted to ask here was: “are these real trends affecting business, or just a big media/blogger beat-up”?

Luckily, we found Indeed’s awesome job trends tool. If you’re not familiar with Indeed, it’s one of the world’s biggest job post aggregators. Indeed collects millions of job ads from sites across the web. This approach has quickly seen them become a recruiting powerhouse.

Each week, the team at Indeed make data from millions of job ads publically available and searchable. So we can look at how frequently key words (or phrases) are occurring in job ads, going back ten years.

It’s an incredibly powerful way to look at whether these HR trends are really changing the way that companies are hiring.

What do millions of job posts tell us about the real talent trends?

We picked out four trends that we’ve seen come up time and time again in the business press over 2014. These four trends are:

  1. Millennials are changing the way we work (part 1, today)
  2. HR is about to be taken over by data/finance (part 2, coming tomorrow)
  3. Technology is reshaping the way we work (part 3, coming this Thursday)
  4. Holacracy is set to make managers obsolete (part 4, coming this Friday)

We wanted to understand if these are real trends shaping the way companies are hiring, or if they just make great stories in the press. We’re going to dive into one of these topics per day over the next four days. So make sure you check back frequently!

Without further ado, let’s jump into Millennials and find out if they’re really reshaping the workplace…

Are Millennials really changing the way we work?

There has been a lot written about Millennials in the workplace over the past year. Here’s a couple of the more influential pieces that you might have seen

  • Millennials at work: Reshaping the workplace (PwC)
  • We don’t need to change the workplace for Millennials, we need to change the workplace for everyone (Cognology)
  • 8 things you need to know about Millennials in the workplace (Business Insider)
  • Why Boomers can play nice with Millennials at work (Forbes)

I’m going to highlight some of key attributes of a “Millennial friendly workplace” that just keep coming up throughout these articles:

  • Flexibility
  • Feedback
  • Collaboration
  • Friendly
  • Work from home

To see if workplaces are really becoming more Millennial friendly, let’s have a look at these five terms in job advertisements:

Flexible

We know that Millennials want more flexibility and better work life integration. And this chart provides pretty strong evidence that workplaces are heading in this direction. Over the past 10 years, you can see the frequency that “flexibility” comes up in job adverts has nearly doubled. This is the most frequent of the Millennial related terms, appearing in nearly 15% of all job posts.

Flexible

Feedback

Feedback has shown similar growth, albeit from a lower base. It’s interesting that the term has plateaued in job advertising since mid 2012.

Feedback

Collaboration

Collaborative and friendly workplaces are commonly cited characteristics of a Millennial workplace. There’s an interesting relationship here between the “collaborative” and “friendly” workplace. Collaboration showed very strong growth over the period of 2005 to late 2011. It has plateaued since and fell significantly in 2014.

Collaboration

Friendly

In an interesting takeaway for your recruiting efforts, it seems that the “collaborative” workplace is out, and the “friendly” workplace is in. This was probably one of the bigger surprises in cutting the data. Over the past ten years there’s a real trend towards more friendly workplaces. I certainly didn’t expect to see such growth over the past 2-3 years.

Friendly

Work from home

We’ve saved the most interesting for last! Because in identifying the real Millennial trends of 2014, “Work From Home” is the big growth story. Since early 2014, the term has shown accelerating growth with no end in sight (have a close look at the explosive growth from mid 2014).

Work from home

Millennials really are reshaping the workplace

The data does show that out that these Millennial demands really are reshaping the workplace. More and more workplaces are offering what Millennials are ‘demanding.’

But there’s also a deeper trend here. It does appear that we’re moving to “Phase 2” of the Millennial friendly workplace.

  • Phase 1 includes the trends of “Feedback”, “Flexibility” and “Collaboration”. These were trends that showed strong growth through to early 2012, and have now plateaued.
  • Phase 2 includes the trends of “Friendly” workplaces, and “Work from home”. These two trends in particular have shown significant acceleration over the past three years – whilst some of these earlier trends have stagnated.

Where to next? I’d love to hear your thoughts on what else is could be included in phase two of the Millennial friendly workplace trend.

Interested in the real talent management trends of 2014? Don’t miss the other parts of this series….

If you loved these talent insights, there’s plenty more in this series:

  1. Millennials are changing the way we work (part 1, today)
  2. HR is about to be taken over by data/finance (part 2, coming tomorrow)
  3. Technology is reshaping the way we work (part 3, coming Thursday)
  4. Holacracy is set to make managers obsolete (part 4, coming Friday)

I’d always love to continue the conversation and discuss this article on Twitter. Tweet @cognology with your view on this research and any other key trends you’d like to see investigated.

Tags: millennials, trends, workforce data
Share this entry
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on WhatsApp
  • Share on Pinterest
  • Share on LinkedIn
  • Share on Tumblr
  • Share on Vk
  • Share on Reddit
  • Share by Mail
https://www.cognology.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Talent-trends-of-2014.gif 210 210 Jon Windust https://www.cognology.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Cognology-logo-colour-300x101.png Jon Windust2014-12-09 00:56:412021-12-03 12:03:56Are Millennials really changing the way we work?
You might also like
Talent retention and attraction Why is Australia ignoring talent management and recruitment risks?
Talent trends of 2014 Is technology reshaping the way we work?
Graph of companies that ignore people as a key business risk 50% of Australia’s largest companies ignore people as a key business risk: New Cognology research
The future of performance management What can Netflix, HubSpot, Zappos and Google teach you about the future of performance management?
Talent Management talk intro Millennials and the future workplace: Launching Talent Management Talk
Most valuable employees in Australia Who are Australia’s most valuable employees?

Recent Posts

  • Course Builder
  • 7 Trends Driving Change in the Skills Landscape
  • How HR Can Boost Talent Retention, According to New Research
  • The Worried and the Well: How to Boost Your Employees’ Wellness in a Time of Crisis
  • The Quick Pivot at ACSQ

Subscribe

Get our latest news, tip and tricks

Receive our occasional newsletter

Products | Pricing | Resources | Blog | About | Contact

© 2021 Cognology

© Copyright Cognology 2019
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Youtube
Millennials and the future workplace: Launching Talent Management TalkTalent Management talk introTalent trends of 2014Is HR about to be taken over by the CFO?
Scroll to top