Negotiating Employee Rewards in Small Increments

Today we live in a world in which relationships are governed by an increasingly short-term and transactional logic. That’s true for people of all ages. But Millennials have never known it any other way. Segmented as a market from birth and armed with credit cards, they have been taught to think of themselves as customers in virtually every sphere. Even in their roles as students, most Millennials think of themselves as buying and consuming the learning services sold by schools. Meanwhile, their parents have been negotiating “choices” with them since they first uttered “I want” as toddlers, trading short-term rewards for short-term desired behavior.

Plug into Millennials’ transactional mindset. Stop paying them and start buying their results.

By the time Millennials arrive at the workplace, short-term transactional thinking is second nature to them. They are still thinking like customers. Sometimes when I point this out to managers, they’ll say, “Yeah, well, they’re…