How MNCs can prepare millennials to work in an emerging market.

Answer

How MNCs can Prepare Millennials to Work in an Emerging Market

Introduction

Emerging markets of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and other developing countries such as Philippines, Turkey, Egypt and Mexico, provide multinational corporations (MNCs, hereafter) with unique opportunities for faster growth and increased profitability (Brooks, Fiorentino, Akin & Stansel, 2014). However, as Levenson (2014) reports, succeeding in these economies is quite challenging, particularly when it comes to talent management and managing the innovation process. The fact that millennials are increasingly replacing the retiring baby boomers makes talent management in emerging markets even more challenging. The current paper examines the strategies and approaches that MNCs can use to prepare millennials to adapt and work in emerging markets.

How MNCs can Prepare Millennials to Work in an Emerging Market

Many MNCs have found investing in emerging markets to be more lucrative due to the economies’ high growth potential, lower production costs and larger consumer markets. Despite these benefits, MNCs in these economies face a unique challenge of talent and innovation management because the economies are still at early stages of development. Talent management in these markets, which Stokes et al. (2016) define as the “recruitment, selection and retention of national and international talent by organizations” (p. 2), becomes even more challenging when the employees in question are millennials. As a generation born during the digital era (between 1980 and 2000) millennials have been largely influenced by technology to become digital natives, and thus require a different talent management approach.

Although most emerging economies have underdeveloped technological infrastructure, which can be detrimental to innovation process, MNCs can still prepare millennials to fit and work in such markets. To do so, the companies must first understand the millennials’ job needs and concerns. The fact that millennials’ thinking, task performance and overall capability is influenced primarily by technology means that they need workplaces with advanced technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence and robotics, in order to be more productive (Burke et al., 2017; Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, 2018). Since workplaces in emerging markets may lack such technologies, MNCs should train their millennial employees on how to accomplish some tasks manually; that is, without relying overly on modern technologies. 

Second, millennials have higher job mobility due to their experiences with today’s “sharing economy”. This means that they readily hop across employers, job positions and even occupations in search for positions that offer better pay and higher career development prospects. As Hutt (2016) notes, for instance, approximately 54% of young employees in the UAE cited higher pay as the major factor influencing their choice of a given job position, whereas 46% value career advancement.

In another survey by Deloitte in 2017, it was established that more than 38% of millennial employees had plans to quit their current positions within two years (Deloitte, 2017; Pratchett, 2018). As such, preparing millennials to work in emerging markets should focus on increasing their (millennials) loyalty to the company by ensuring that the current talent management strategies or approaches reflect workplace flexibility, diversity and inclusion. For instance, with their mastery of new technologies, millennials have the capability to work in virtual workplaces or participate in virtual teams provided they have access to the internet. This implies that MNCs can boost the millennials’ morale to work in developing economies by providing them with such technologies as tablet PCs and laptops that will enable them to work remotely and on a flexible schedule, rather than limiting them to an office environment. A similar argument is echoed in Pratchett’s (2018) examination of “what MNCs need to know about millennials”. Citing various studies by Deloitte and other research organizations, she noted more than 64% of millennials want to work either from home or some other convenient locations that allow would them to balance their work with personal lives. Since working away from office can be challenging, especially for those with families, MNCs should adopt a novel and holistic talent management model: one that equips employees with skills that can enable them to work productively from any location or setting without supervision.

In conclusion, preparing millennials to work in emerging market economies requires MNCs to not only modify their business models, but to also adopt a novel approach to managing talent and innovation process (Khanna, Palepu & Sinha, 2005). The approach should consider all the job needs of millennials such as flexible work schedules, reasonable pay and opportunities for career growth as well as equip them with resources they can use to leverage their good mastery of new technologies.