Many articles have been written about the impact of millennials on your workforce. As this generation ages – millennials are anywhere between 25 and 40 by the time of writing – the number of the millennials in (higher) management positions are rapidly increasing. This also affects our line of work – setting up value driven portfolio management. It is relevant to explore the impact of millennials on the way portfolio management is done and what the impact is on what your portfolio team prioritizes.  

Before diving deeper into that, I would like to remind you what the general impact of millennials on your organisation is expected to be. It is generally summarised as: 

• Limit the hidden agenda: millennials value transparency in the workplace – being a millennial myself I can testament to that. Millennials are seeking interconnectivity within the company they are work for – no one should be blind-sided by change and salaries and promotions should be given fairly.
• Work-life balance: they are constantly looking for a better work-life balance: working remote, flexible hours, parttime contracts and personal development. Not actively enabling that will ensure your workforce will actively search for it. out of your sight. This trend has been elaborately discussed in various media using the term “quiet quitting” or “the quiet resignation”.
• ’Show me the skills’, rather than ‘show me the papers’: millennials in management positions tend to recruit based on skills, experience and established results rather than a college degree. 
• Purpose: the work they do must have meaning. They still value fair compensation, but they are motived more by mission and adding value than a pay check.  
• Use of Technology: Millennial are extremely tech-savvy (or at least compared to our parents' generation), as most of them were born shortly before the Digital Age. Millennials are early adapters of technological services and products, and use a wide range of tools to communicate, to organize and achieve goals, and to complete tasks – whether the organisation is ready for the use of that technology or not.  

Portfolio management 

We can safely assume that people with 10-15 years of experience are starting to take up senior management positions, thereby becoming more crucial in the governance model of an organisation. This implies that (senior) management positions will be fully occupied by millennials before you know it. It is very likely that your portfolio management team will start to consist of a mix of millennials and the generations before (and after) them.  

Millenials will stimulate the roll out of the five topics mentioned above in their own teams.departments: decision making should be transparent, strategy should also follow execution insights, priorities should be clear and communicated to their teams, salaries and promotions should be fair and based on the value one adds. Additionally, they tend to argue in favour of the use of technology when there are opportunities to do something smarter as that might be more effective.  

Obviously, the millennial generation – just like any other – consists of a very diverse group of individuals, however you can expect the following main effects on portfolio management discussions will prioritise based on: 

• Available capacity:  requesting more than the available capacity (a mistake often made by the generations before the millennials) is out of the question, as they want to create – not only for themselves but also for their teams – a good work-life balance. 
• Smart use of (new) technology: investing in smart ways to doing work to free up capacity to do to invest in personal development, internal networking, and following up on innovative tasks. 
• Fit with the organisations purpose:  each investment needs to contribute to the purpose of the organisation whether this is to do a better job for customers or to improve the work experience of their colleagues. 
• Short-term gains: As appraisals, bonuses, promotion structures have not adapted to the millennials needs fully, it may stimulate them to focus on short-term gains (within their purpose) rather than long-term plans. E.g., 24% think they will not work for you’re the same organisation within 2 years and only 38% expect to stay beyond 5 years from now (Deloitte global 2022 Gen Z and Millennial survey). Even though the millennial workforce focuses on ‘purpose’, they also will focus on ‘leaving soon’.  

Portfolio management needs to adjust

Portfolio management needs to be able to prioritise work based on the delivery of value quickly to ensure that they yield benefits, revenue, or customer value from their investment. Not changing portfolio management approaches will ensure that the only thing you will yield are attrition rates. Millennials are – however – conflicted as they are not as loyal to organisations as previous generations were and tend to focus on short term results which negatively impacts long term strategies.