Enough With the Free Food, Already. Millennials Want Opportunity and Fair Pay

With the impending exodus of Baby Boomers from the workplace over the next decade and the insurgence of Millennials into it, Millennials are expected to make up roughly 75% of the workforce by 2025. That’s why it’s essential that winning organizations figure out what makes Millennials tick. So here’s one secret: it’s about providing opportunities for professional growth, not providing free food.

That may not seem obvious given the amount of hype regarding tech giants and what they’re doing to attract and satisfy Millennial workers. Articles regularly appear about how amazing the free meals are at Google or how employees at Facebook have to fight off the “Facebook 15.” One of Marissa Mayer’s first big moves when she took the reigns at Yahoo! was to offer employees free meals. It was hailed as a smart decision that would help Yahoo! compete in the war for talent. While you won’t see many people complain about free food, and while the free meals serve their own purpose, the data shows that it doesn’t play a big factor when it comes to recruiting or retaining employees.

The 2014 Qualtrics Millennials in Tech Survey found that the thing Millennials care most about when it comes to organizational culture is having a collaborative work environment. In fact, 74% of Millennials ranked a collaborative work environment as the first or second most important characteristic they look for in the workplace.

Where did free meals fall? Dead last behind even dress code with 71% of Millennials saying that it was the least important thing they cared about. In fact, when asked whether they preferred to have their organization pay for their cell phone plan or provide free meals, almost 60% of Millennials chose the free cell phone plan.

So while free food may get all the hype, it can serve as a red herring if hiring managers aren’t careful. What does the data show Millennials actually care about when it comes to choosing where to work? It comes down to money and opportunity. And even here there are plenty of misconceptions.

A common perception of Millennials is that they refuse to wait their turn in line, that they feel entitled and want a seat in the boardroom after their second week on the job. In reality, it’s not that Millennials are looking to run the company right off the bat. It’s that they don’t want to sit on the sidelines and simply be a cog in a machine; that’s very different from demanding to be in charge.

Another axiom commonly touted about Millennials is that they care more about purpose than profits, and that they’re more interested in the mission of an organization than they are in making money to line their own pockets. The data shows this just isn’t true. If all things were equal, Millennials would certainly rather work for a mission-driven organization. But all things aren’t equal, and what often gets lost in the noise is what tradeoffs Millennials are willing to make. It turns out that for the average Millennial, compensation isn’t one of them.

When asked, “When looking for a job, what is the most important thing you look for?” Millennials responded overwhelmingly (45%) that they sought out opportunities for professional growth. The next highest on their list of priorities was compensation (22%), coming in a distant second. Other things like company leadership, opportunities to be mentored, and industry hardly registered on the scale.

After understanding what got Millennials in the door to begin with, we then explored what kept them getting out of bed in the morning to come to work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answers were the same. Millennials reported that the most exciting part about coming to work is having projects that are both challenging and rewarding (37%) with the second most exciting piece – how much money they can make – coming in at 18%.

A third piece of the Millennial equation revolves around staying engaged at work. Addressing this issue, our study found that compensation and challenging projects flipped places, but still maintained their first and second place rankings. Millennials noted that not being compensated fairly was the biggest challenge they faced to staying motivated, while having uninteresting or unchallenging projects was the second biggest obstacle.

The theme is clear. When it comes to recruiting, engaging, and retaining Millennials in the workplace, organizations need to provide opportunities for growth that involve challenging projects, and they need to compensate Millennials fairly for the work they do.

Perhaps it’s easier and more fun to talk about ancillary perks like free food and the resulting “Facebook 15,” but hype differs substantially from reality. That’s why we turn to data to understand what’s really going on. And in the case of Millennials in the workforce, we’ve heard enough about free food. It’s time we start talking about providing opportunities for growth, challenging projects and meaningful compensation. In that sense, maybe Millennials aren’t so different from the rest of the working world after all.