This Forbes article, aimed at marketing professionals, hammers home the incredible importance of interactivity and visual innovation when selling to Millennials. It is my belief that the ideas in the piece have extensive application to managing Millennials in the workplace too. Here’s how.

Make things visual

Millennials and the generation following them, Generation Z, are highly visual. And sophisticated with it – what was once acceptable as illustration for a PowerPoint presentation is laughable now. Make sure you bear that in mind when planning and commissioning visual material for training and information-sharing purposes. Can your employees themselves input on the creation of visual material? It’s a great way to tease out skills you didn’t know your team had, and to open doors you didn’t know were there!

This is also about disrupting our set-in-stone notions of how information is related and narratives conveyed. Could your business start its own YouTube channel, so employees can give each other tips? If some of your employees are working remotely this is also a nice way to encourage social interaction.

Make things collaborative

People want to create and collaborate. Whether it’s a beautiful artwork or something much more humble (or even an ad aimed at themselves, as in the linked article!), we like to see something coming together before our eyes. For Millennials used to innovative use of visuals, that applies even more. So do have faith in shared working. Rather than the model where everyone has their work squirreled away on their private hard drive, encourage collaborative documents. It’s might only be a Gdoc, but it’s still far more pleasingly visual – not to mention efficient – than the older ways of collaborating on documents.