Marketing to young people can teach you valuable lessons about managing Millennials.

Which Wich, a quick casual sandwich concept has a very cool offer here in Colorado. If you take a picture of yourself and a Which Wich bag on top of one of Colorado’s 54 peaks that is 14,000 feet or higher and bring that picture into Which Wich, you get a free sandwich.

Like this.

Now, in addition to being a very cool word-of-mouth marketing tactic (I heard about the plan from a couple of climbers on the top of Torrey’s Peak), I think that this could be a very effective model for managers looking to build relationships with their Generation Y employees.

Imagine that you put up an “Employee Achievement” bulletin board in back. Each period (week, month, quarter, etc.), your employees can bring in a picture of themselves accomplishing something impressive, and you can hook them up with something cool and post the picture.

Off hand, four things I would consider impressive:

• Climbing a mountain
• Swimming with a dolphin
• Accepting a scholarship
• Building a house for Habitat for Humanity

Now, not only are you celebrating what your employees do, you’re getting to know who they are. You’re learning about their interests, their hobbies, and their passions. You’ll be tapping into the same impulse that drives employees to post pictures on Facebook, and you don’t even need an internet connection to do it.

(I’ve seen something like this in the back of my local REI, and that’s a company that for 12 years running has been rated as one of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For.)

To really take it to the next level, once per period, snap and print a photo of an employee doing something awesome at work and put that on the Achievement Board to recognize their performance at work.

If you ask me, that beats the hell out of “Employee of the Month.”

I was lucky enough to attend a Rockies game and a Broncos game last week, and it got me thinking. You see, the simple truth of every sport is that defense wins championships. If you can’t field a team with a good defense, your time on the field isn’t going to get you anywhere.

So, what does this mean when you’re employing Millennials?

It means that you have to be able to defend your practices to them so that you can win their hearts. Because make no mistake about it: those practices will be under constant attack from an offense that has spent its whole life sharpening its wits to abuse, question, and disregard the procedures you have in place. (Just ask any manager I’ve ever worked for.)

Four excellent defenses for any procedure:

1. Following this procedure will make the young employee more money.

The appeal of this one is easy to see. Sometimes, though, the hard part is drawing a direct line between the three cents of cheese that are saved by using the correct portioning tool and the raise an employee might receive in the future if food cost isn’t too high. Two ways to make that line easier to see: 1. Immediate fiscal gains for following procedure (i.e., gift cards, cash, etc.) 2. Long-term rewards for over-all performance. Set up a prize or some sort of reward that is contingent upon the business’s performance.

2. Following this procedure is the right thing to do.

Generation Y doesn’t just come to the workforce looking to put some cash in their pockets - they want to do it on their own terms. I had a friend who worked in sales for a major national retailer. He was good, and was consistently able to sell extended warranties on products. Despite having the ability to have a similar success with applications for the company’s credit cards, he only got two applications in his entire time there. When I asked why, he said, “I didn’t think it was right to suggest a card with such a high interest rate to people.” So, as a manager looking to get him to work on credit applications, you’d have to do a few things: explain how it’s the right thing to do (it avoids anti-discrimination lawsuits, for instance), that the people who are applying for the card have the information available to them, and that it’s the right thing to do to let them make their decisions instead of him making the decision for them.

3. Following this procedure is easier/more effective than other ways out there.

Speak from your experience. Share times that you tried it a different way and ended up with hours of extra work because of the unforeseen consequences. This one can be particularly convincing coming from a peer instead of a supervisor.

4. Following this procedure is going to better prepare you for your future.

Sure, learning the new program doesn’t look like very much fun, and the old one worked perfectly well. But when businesses adopt new technologies, they typically aren’t the only business doing it. Learning to cope with change is just one a small part of this defense - learning new technologies and their applications is the real meat of it.

I’d love to hear about any others you’ve used in the comments!

My last post got some great comments - I encourage you to give them a read. I was a little surprised, though, that no one bit on my (theoretically) provocative question of

If you don’t reward your employees for doing something, are you telling your Gen Y employees that the value of that task was zero?

We’ve got a pretty cool group out there. I had expected to at least see the word “entitled” make an appearance. But it didn’t, which suggests that maybe my expectations of the managers and supervisors out there need a little adjusting.

That said, my view on this particular question is that you run the danger of creating the “zero value perception” when you aren’t clear in the delivery of your rewards. Certainly, there exists a perception that Generation Y needs a cookie just for showing up on time, but you will ultimately set the norms in your workplace. If your employees learn that rewards are for going the extra mile, they’ll value them. The problem comes when they think that showing up on time is going an extra mile. When you hire new employees, establish clear expectations and tie those to their pay very explicitly. You’re paying these people X dollars/hour, and you should make sure that they know that money is the reward for meeting the bare minimum standards. I might go so far as to use a written “employment contract” that makes this painfully clear.

I’ll write one of these tonight and post a .pdf of what I imagine tomorrow.

People Report tweeted today that 65% of all the companies they survey use gift cards to recognize and reward hourly employees. So, if you’re in the 2/3 of employers doing this, congratulations! Obviously you’re on to something.

But just as with any reward program, if you’re not doing it right, gift cards are just going to be a waste of your resources. Remember: the purpose of any reward program isn’t to make your top performers feel good - it’s to make sure that they continue to perform well, and to motivate others to perform well.

Here are a couple questions I think you should ask about that gift card you’re about to give an employee as a reward to make sure that you’re getting ROI on the gift cards:

Is this gift card to somewhere the employee will want to spend it?

It’s hard to choose gift cards that will please everyone. In fact, common wisdom holds that you can’t please all the people all the time. My advice here: DON”T TRY TO DO THAT. Instead, pick a few different, more specific gift cards, so when your Chipotle junkie wins you a customer for life, he can have a burrito instead of five bucks to the nearest big box.

Is this gift card’s value in line with what the employee did?

A friend of mine once joined a stranger to drag a drowning woman out of her car after she crashed it into a ditch. She later sent him them both checks for $200. He said to me, “I never knew you could put a value on a human life. Apparently hers was worth $400.” When you put a value on a given task by providing a reward for it, your Millennials will do the math. Make sure that the value you communicate to your employees is the value you want them to place on a given task.

A related question I’d like you to consider here:

If you don’t reward your employees for doing something, are you telling your Gen Y employees that the value of that task was zero?

I’ll share my thoughts on this with a post Wednesday, but think about it, and share your thoughts in the comments section!

I just got a puzzling text message from my manager informing me that we’re having a pizza party on Saturday, and that we should try to get another one next week.

I don’t know if it’s a reward for something we did, or if we simply had a pizza budget that we needed to go through. Aside from a random act of awesome pizza-ness (a real word, I assure you), I’m not sure what to attribute this to.

Random acts of kindness make the world a better place. I won’t argue that. But targeted acts of kindness can make the workplace a better place. If I can see that a pizza party is the effect of a certain cause, my goals will shift to meet that cause. So if the cause is a sales goal, or customer service surveys, or punctuality, or anything in my control, I’ll set myself to it. But if I’m kept guessing as to why I’m enjoying the pizza, I won’t know exactly how to respond.

I recall being at the bar with friends once, and we saw the bartender - a guy maybe a couple years older than me - making repeated trips to the jukebox with his tips. For most of the night, he was calling the shots on what we were listening to, on his own dime.

Now, if you’re this employee’s manager, how easy is it to think of something that will keep him around at this point? How many different ways are there to leverage this employee’s love for music so that you can get him to give you his best?

• If he comes in to cover a shift, or he’s having a bad night, why not load the jukebox up with a five spot to let him know you appreciate his work?

• Maybe can give him some credits in the jukebox for every shift he works. (This is a double perk because it leaves extra money in his pocket, too.)

• If you can, turn off the jukebox and let him choose a radio station. He’ll have trouble quitting because he can’t find another job where he can choose the music.

Just because your Generation Y employees value work/life balance doesn’t mean that you can’t bring a bit of their life into work to make things happen.

Last week, I was having a conversation with my parents, and I mentioned off-hand that I had earned an employee of the month award at my retail job. Judging by their reactions, you would’ve thought that I had forgotten to mention to them that I got married last time I was in Vegas. (I’m still looking for the right words.)

The funny thing was that I wasn’t trying to hide it from them. Really, I just didn’t think it was that big of a deal. The most exciting part for me was when the general manager of the store bought me dinner, and the knowledge that I’ve got a little something to beef up my resume.

Since receiving the reward, my work behaviors haven’t really changed. I’m still doing what I was doing. Essentially, then, the return on the time, energy, and hamburger that were spent by the company was zero.

So the question I’d like to leave you with is this: If they’re getting no ROI, why do my bosses still have an employee of the month award?

In my last post, I asked readers to share how they would try to motivate me to do a task I find incredibly boring and tedious. Apparently finding ways to get me to work isn’t tedious - I got some incredibly insightful responses:

• One reader challenged me to improve upon the process - if possible by leveraging new technology - to really demonstrate my great qualities to managers.

• One reader suggested that I teach myself to make the best of it. After all, there will always be unappealing tasks in life, and perhaps this is as good of a time as any to learn how to get through them.

• Another proposed that we make a tedious process of sorting through clothes to look for ink tags exciting by providing rewards for locating certain tags, thus encouraging both excitement and attention to detail.

• One e-mail I received aimed to shift my outlook from “What does this audit do for me?” to “By doing this audit, how am I helping my friends at work?”

So, right there, you’ve got four different ways to encourage an employee to get involved and committed to a boring task. Which one would work best to begin motivating some of your young employees?

My huge thanks to everyone who took time to register a comment or send an e-mail!

Rather than telling you what to do, I’d like to take some time today to ask you what to do. There is ample talent, insight, and managerial skill in this audience, and I’d like to put it to work.

I work in retail loss prevention, and one of the tasks we are required to do on a monthly basis is an ink tag audit. Ink tags, for those who aren’t familiar with them, are the long pieces of plastic that are stuck through items of clothing. They are difficult to remove without damaging or ruining the clothing (due to ink inside), and thus provide a deterrent to theft. The auditing process involves hitting the sales floor and counting hundreds of items of clothing to insure that we are up to standard.

I did one ink tag audit, and it was one too many. It’s a task that I will avoid ever doing again for any reason. It’s boring and time consuming. And that would be fine if I could picture some sort of benefit that doing ink tag audits would confer upon me in the future. But I can’t think of a single benefit. I don’t anticipate a future in retail loss prevention, I’m already comfortable with my ability to count to 100 and beyond, and I’m comfortable with my ability to understand and execute a standard (when I want to).

So, readers, here is the challenge:

How would you get me to care about an ink tag audit if you were going to ask me to do one? What would you do to try to relate it to my world, to my goals, or to my immediate benefit?

Leave comments with your responses, and I’ll be highlighting the most insightful responses in my next post!

I occasionally work for a photography company, either shooting photos or as a “helper” to do paperwork and help with sales.

At one shoot, I was trying to understand why parents were willing to pay so much for the sports photos we shoot. They’re great photos, but I looked at them and wondered aloud if my co-workers would be willing to pay what we asked for any of them because I couldn’t fathom a case in which I could.

One of my co-workers looked over and said, “Yeah, I’ve thought about it, and I realized that it’s pretty different when it’s your kids. Plus, these folks like basketball way more than you do. Think about if it was a picture of you with your favorite band - you’d pay it for that, right?”

Of course I would pay that price for a picture of me with Led Zeppelin. (Well, the three who are left.)

After that, the whole thing made sense to me, and I was much more confident about our product, which any one in sales can tell you is essential to being able to sell it.

This was a case where the “why” of the situation was vital, and once I understood that “why,” I was better at my job.

The “why” that will motivate your Generation Y employees isn’t always going to be concerned with your processes. It could be about your customers, your vendors, your equipment, your employees, their co-workers, their families, their friends, or their place in the world.

Once you’ve answered that “why” for your Millennial employees, they’ll get focused on the “how” of it, which is what you’ve wanted them to do all along.