More than half of the global millennial population – also known as generation Y – lives in Asia, where three out of the world’s five largest absolute millennial populations are in India, China and Indonesia. They have become the world’s most important age group for recruitment and represent our future leaders. Today, more than 60 percent of our employees across Asia Pacific were born in or after 1980, so the needs of millennials have significantly impacted how we engage our entire workforce.

Millennials thrive when their work has meaning and their workplaces have a sense of belonging, which has influenced what employees of all ages now expect from their employers. Millennials are the most engaged employees in our company, but they also represent the highest turnover compared to all other generational groups. This not only drains resources for on-boarding and training, it negatively affects productivity and knowledge transfer, so multigenerational companies like ours have transformed workplace priorities to attract and retain millennials. These include:

Purpose. As they actively engage online in a world where work and personal lives continue to blur, millennials seek alignment between company values and their personal passions. In addition to our corporate mission of solving the unmet medical needs of our time, we actively cultivate a culture of volunteering. We offer paid annual work days to employees who want to devote time to a volunteer activity of their choice, and our Asia Pacific J&J Corporate Contributions Committee invests in partnerships across our region that actively involve employees in projects that benefit children, women and local communities.

Agility. Millennials from developing countries in Asia, in particular, want to experience new and different things in their careers and often volunteer to work abroad, so we enable dynamic career paths that combine agility with professional development. To offer the broadest work experiences possible to everyone, we’ve established programs that offer skill-building and development through international rotations, special projects, stretch assignments and participation in cross-functional and cross-regional teams.

Knowledge. Millennials expect robust corporate training programs that emphasize coaching and offer a variety of e-learning options. Our employees in Asia Pacific have access to the dynamic career development opportunities offered by J&J at a global level, with a portfolio approach that includes face-to-face and online classroom learning as well as learning from others through formal and informal mentoring and coaching sessions. We have found that our mentoring programs not only benefit those being mentored, they also benefit our mentors, especially in cross-regional mentoring initiatives. In parallel, the J&J University offers a range of services that enable our employees to acquire essential skills, opportunities to apply those new skills as well as formal assessments to allow them to reflect on their progress and plan their next level of development.

Work-Life Balance. We know that millennials will be our future leaders, but research has shown that many resist leadership roles because of the perceived work-life imbalance. In line with our goal of becoming the healthiest workforce by 2020, we are committed to helping employees optimize their time and achieve their personal best – pursuing programs and policies to support every individual’s unique purpose and wellness. The philosophy of the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute is based on the concept that sustaining our energy bolsters our performance and accelerates our growth. Through a range of interactive workshops and educational activities, including Energy for Performance in Life (E4P), we educate and coach staff on personalized strategies to optimize nutrition, movement, stress reduction and energy management.

We also encourage our workforce to adopt healthy behaviors through challenges like the global step challenge, Goal Getters, where teams around the world are competing to complete 10 fitness milestones in 30 days, and our workplaces, more and more of which are offering group fitness lessons, in-house gyms, ergonomic furniture and free healthy snacks on-site.   

Inclusion. As the face of our societies continue to change, millennials represent a vast range of social and economic backgrounds, so they want more inclusive workplaces that resemble their networks. We have several formalized Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) that specifically aim to advance diversity and inclusion in our workplace. These include the global J&J Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI) that engages both men and women throughout the company to support long-term career development opportunities for women and a global program for our LGBT community. Many of our ERGs run programs to address unconscious bias and the importance of inclusive leadership, and we also have mechanisms in place to support whistleblowing whenever discrimination or harassment is experienced or observed.

Millennials are an important contributor to the optimism and energy of any company and have driven many positive changes in our workplace policies, but what about centennials – otherwise known as generation Z? As we begin the exciting journey of learning more about this emerging age group, it’s important for all of us, including millennials, to keep an open mind to the needs of future employees for the benefit of our entire workforce.