How to make a workplace appealing to Gen Y

For the millenials, work has to be more than just a job. A few years ago, it was normal to enter well known and prestige companies in the consulting & banking sector and having to work in a small grey cubicle. The myth of fancy luxury offices, that companies tried to get into the heads of young and innocent graduates, in order to attract them, was proven wrong by almost any graduate that decided to work for one of these companies.

Today, companies ask their employee for higher productivity and achievements  (ok, Google allows their employees to spend 20% of their working time on personal projects), forcing them to spend more time at work. Hand in hand with the increasing importance of work-life balance, employees begin to ask for workspaces, that they can at least feel comfortable at.

From the company side, one can observe a change happening out there. Many companies are trying to adapt their workspaces to the needs of young people. While there is still a vast majority of human resource departments out there, that are still trying to figure out what it is, that young people actually want and need, there are quite a few companies, that at least seem to have hit on the right spot with their adjustments.

According to our numbers, 76% of the Gen Y answered, that work-life balance is important to them. 24% answer, that they would do anything for their career.  Following those figures, companies are under pressure to follow the examples of Google or RedBull, in order to make their company attractive to work for, if they want to satisfy their craving for skilled employees.

The following list contains a few general points, that can be done to head into the right direction, as they were successfully implemented by other companies before:

1. Casual, Team Oriented Space – Think Café Style, a place where teams can gather to collaborate. Balance this with private work spaces for when quiet and focused work must get done.

2. Tech Friendly – Technology must be abundant, current, and available. Don’t forget great ergonomics.

3. Flexibility – Allow them to work on their own terms for maximum productivity. Flex hours and days.

3 things to make sure when criticizing a co-worker!

Due to the media, a day at the office is getting more and more stressful. One doesn’t need to excessively use search engines, to read articles about technology doing it’s very best to increase our availability to colleagues, enables us to manage our emails, appointments, as well as our to-do lists.

Executives like that trend, as there are no more excuses for their employees for not responding to calls or emails within a few minutes. Thinking about it for a second, one could easily come to the solution, that technology companies are something like a best friend to your boss. Hand in hand they change the original goal of smartphones from “enabling availability” to “enforcing availability”.

Besides all positive aspects, it especially causes stress and pressure. By now, many use their lunch break to answer overdue emails, instead of focusing on keeping the tomato sauce away from your white shirt. Meetingsare kept short, feedback is often communicated in an impersonal email, rather than in a real conversation.

73% of all MercuryPuzzle users answered that it is easy for them to criticize the work of their co-workers. Every economics book teaches you, that constructive feedback is absolutely essential for a good workingenvironment within a company. Though, I might go back and highlight the word constructive! What is making feedback constructive? Well, you might go back and check in your economics book. One thing that you will surely find is a personal conversation. Emails and text messages simply cannot convey a message as clearly and are making misunderstandings inevitable.

Here are three things you should bear in mind, when you criticize the work of a colleague:

Leaving him/her a choice:
„Hey, I noticed one or two things in your latest report that I’d love to go over with you. You mind if I show you what I’m thinking here?“

Use constructive comments:
After you have spilled out your critique, add a constructive comment like “…what if you try this instead?”

The sandwich method:
The idea of this method is to put one piece of bad news in between two good ones. If you haven’t tried this yet, you will be surprised what a difference it makes.

Let’s be honest: Of course, these methods will not always avoid serious or even loud conversations with your co-workers, but bearing them in mind will make a difference.

Have a good day at work!

High potentials – part of generation Y?

When one talks about high potentials, we have this very well settled stereotype in our heads. A well dressed man (or woman, to stay politically correct), wearing a suit & tie, leather shoes and cufflinks. He has a family but never sees them, as he does a lot of travelling for work.

While the leather shoes, as well as the rest of the clothing part might still apply, work-life balance has become a very important issue for young people today, at least for the majority. Of course this basic statement is nothing new to people that follow the news on a frequent basis, or are even working in the human resource management sector.
But what if we specifically look at high potentials? They are, by definition, part of the “Gen-Y”, but has their attitude really followed the mainstream, or did they stick to their old behaviours and lifestyle?
As more than 70% of the participants (70,000 in total) of this survey are high potentials, it is still interesting to ask them the same questions, that were answered by the rest of the millennials, years ago.

Interestingly, over 50% (ok, 51% is not a very convincing majority), do not want to frequently travel for work. Making some approximations, one can at least observe a slight trend. Estimating that all the 30% of theparticipants, that aren’t high potentials chose the answer ‚I don’t want to travel‘, we can draw the conclusion, that 14700 high potentials chose this answer as well. Now it can easily be calculated that 71,9% of the high potentials are willing to travel more frequently. This could be used to support the claim that this part the “Gen Y” does not stick to the overall trend of young academics.

Before judging these results, please remind yourself, that we unfortunately had to make assumptions, that make the result more inaccurate. Nevertheless, we gave our best to keep it as accurate as possible!

Feel free to engage and comment!

The top 4 most popular employers for young graduates!

Just recently, a survey about young graduates and their job preferences and preferred employers was released. More than 5000 young grads participated in the “Austria Student Survey”. Without surprise, the most important premise for young people when deciding for future employers turned out to be the work-life-balance.
The list below shows the outcome of the survey, sorted by the attractiveness of the companies.

1.

For business students RedBull is the clear number one employer. RedBull became well known for their local sponsoring events, which explains why especially marketing students are interested in working for this firm. Originally coming from austria, it is a global player within the industry.

 

2.
Raiffeisen Bank International  made it into the top-ten of the most attractive employers. This sets a clear signal against the negative trend of the banking sector, regarding it’s popularity as potential employer.
 
 

3.
Technicians chose Google  as the most interesting employer. The global player is known for their generous working conditions and a friendly atmosphere. “Fringe-benefits” such as free food or playrooms belong to the everyday life, just like any other business.

 

4.
Interestingly, BMW turns out to be an attractive employer for technicians (4^th place) and business graduates (3^rd place) at the same time. With more than 300 talent pool members, BMW is the most famous company on MercuryPuzzle.com, which confirms the outcome of the survey!

 
Are you interested in working for any of the mentioned companies or you simply haven’t joined a talent pool yet? Then klick here to browse for companies that suit your personal talents, or klick on the company links above to join there talent pools!

Interesting statistics about generation Y

 

 

Generation Y – for some of us it is the word of the year! While there is hundreds of articles released every day, showing up statistics and talking about attitudes of this generation, it is interesting to see, that opinions and statistics vary a lot and come to different conclusions.

The only thing all the articles have in common is the fact, that those young people have changed their philosophy of life to a big extend, resulting in a change in their work commitment and attitude.

Hence, the „real“ attributes and therefore the definition of Generation Y still is a real mystery. This becomes evident by looking at the famous “fringe-benefits” coming from Google, Facebook etc. They are only the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to HR-departments racking their heads, when trying to make their company attractive to young graduates.

Being a talent-matching network, MercuryPuzzle is in the unique position of being able to collect objective data regarding that topic, as we are trying to help this target group with their job search.

Of course we want to share these data with you. We will take a chance and post new Generation Y statistics and trends every Monday.

The first entry will be posted on the xx.xx.xxxx

Coming back here will pay out! J

 

TOP 3 gadgets that cheer up your office life!

What would you say to a workplace, like shown above? Probably boring and dentist-like!  No pictures, no post-its, no coffee mugs – basically nothing that sweetens up your day at the office.  I want to use this short blogpost, to introduce the top 3 little gadgets to you, that will definitely will cheer up the mood of your colleagues and yourself! 

1. Missile Launcher

If you are sitting in an open space office, this might just be the right thing for you. With a shooting range of more than 25ft, you will be able to hit every single one of your colleagues, even in the furthest corner. One even has the possibility to mount a webcam on top of the launcher, enabling you to aim through a scope on your laptop.

2. Like & Dislike stamp

Got any documents lying on your desk, that need your approval to be executed? No big cuts needed, simply put a „like“ or a „dislike“ on them and your colleagues will surely get the message. Trust me when I say that this kind of signature will cause many more smiles on your colleagues faces than your usual scribbling.

3. Mini Fridge

You are sitting in the furthest corner of the office, or you are simply having the longest way to the fridge? On hot days every move makes you sweat, so make sure you do not move too much! This little tool, will keep your soft drink, or even your  beer (when you are self employed 😉 ) nice and cool.

All the tools mentioned above we personally tested by our employers at http://www.mercurypuzzle.com and turned out to be the best little helpers to make a day at the office bearable! 🙂

3 REAL tips against stress at work

Being in an important position demands a lot of devotion, endurance and energy.

In a world full of burnouts and people breaking down, because they can not handle the workloud anymore, one comes across louds of articles mentioning tips, how to avoid and handle stress at work.
Interestingly more than 80% focus on explaining it is important to take a lot of breaks, learn to say no to extra work etc. etc.
But honestly…did any of these articles have a direct impact on your stress level? Yes, Really? …Well I don’t believe you 😉

But what if you are having a day where it just all comes together and there simply is no way to escape a 14h work day? In this short blog entry i provide you with 3 short and simple tips to make stress bearable! – At least in the short term!

1.) Energy Drinks
They help – But make sure you don’t make any spelling mistakes!

 

 

2.) Pills

My grandma taught me: Wanna chill? Take  a pill!

3.) Coffee

An old classic when it comes to staying awake: BUT WATCH OUT FOR SECONDARY EFFECTS!

As you are probably young, still have hair on your head and got a working brain inside of it, you might get to the point where you notice, that those 3 approaches mentioned above might not be a solution in the long term!

If you don’t get around such „pick-me-ups“ you should consider quitting your job and find one, that suits your talent and doesn’t stress you as much!

Consider using www.mercurypuzzle.com as a free service, that helps you with exactly that!

Cheers,

A guy that went through it all!

Lessons learned: $15000 spent on guerrilla offline marketing and no impact!

In this blogpost I want to share experiences with offline marketing events, that I have made with our startup http://www.mercurypuzzle.com.

Our lessons learned from our last offline marketing event:

1. If you do offline marketing, make sure you collect email addresses or any kind of information about the user. Do not just give him a goody and wait for him to come to you!
2. If you do a photo competition (or anything similar) make sure your promoters know what they are doing. Sympathy, enthusiasm and charisma are important characteristics that are needed to get a person to actually talk to you! (otherwise you will end up with 60 email addresses)
3. Motivate your promoters, give them a bonus if they do a good job!
4. Flyers & stickers are good for brand awareness but do not directly drive users to your website!
5. If you plan to bring along promotion cars make sure you have a spot to park them, the day BEFORE the event!

This is how we came to the conclusions, that are listed above:

You are CEO of a growing StartUp? Think back to the time, where your startup was right at the launch. At that time you probably didn’t think about anything else, except how you are going spread your baby as fast and cheap as you can! I don’t believe there is many CEO’s that did not visit a website like FlyerAlarm.com or similar, to buy the usual goodies like flyers, stickers or even branded USB-sticks, for offline marketing events.

As www.mercurypuzzle.com is an IT-StartUp that lives of user conversion, we always had a critical view on classic offline marketing events, being afraid people would take the goody, appreciate the event, but would never visit the website. After days of discussion and having read tons of articles, talking about different ways to promote effectively, we could not resist the temptation and ended up ordering tons of stickers, flyers, pencils and to be different to other StartUps: Branded condoms!

Soon we had planned a trip to Berlin, where the largest job-fair of Germany (the Connecticum) was taking place. As we didn’t want to spend thousands of euros extra, just to get a company space inside the fair, we decided to do it the Guerilla way and rented two BMW X1 from sixt and parked them right in front of the entrance. Obviously that wasn’t easy, since the securities did not appreciate our presence at all. After moving the cars twice, we finally found a parking position, that was near enough at the fair to make an impact, but still keeping a distance to the securities. Turning the music up loud, distributing condoms coming along with flyers, we did everything we could, to get masses of our goodies to the people, that were passing us in huge crowds!

Another feature our three promoters were focusing on was our photo competition. We made photos of people, loaded them into a program, that automatically added the MercuryPuzzle mask to them and finally uploaded those onto our facebook page and additionally sent them out to the people via email. In order to win an Ipad, they had to tag themselves on their picture.

At the end of the day we had given out 2000 flyers, 3500 condoms, shot 60 pictures and branded the tram station with over 2300 stickers. At night, we were all very excited to find out what impact we have made and after logging into our Google-Analytics account the only word that was left to say was: FRUSTRATION!

The only real benefit we had were the 60 email addresses we collected with the photo competition! Too bad it was only 60 of them! Next time, we will get more, and especially more experienced promoters!

How I converted 20,000 users, with a $50 budget in 1 month

Our StartUp www.mercurypuzzle.com has managed to reach over 20 000 registered users within only one month, by completely focusing on Facebook marketing. Cheap, straight forward, neglecting all other common marketing advices and strategies.

Generally, gaining a social reach with a small and limited budget is a major problem, every Tech-StartUp has to face and conquer. Usually a lot of effort goes into finding the right marketing techniques.

Simply type in „StartUp-Marketing“ into Google and you will find SlideShares, that list useful tools, offline solutions and articles about how important a Facebook, Youtube and Google+ pages are.

My advice to all StartUps out there: FORGET ALL THAT SHIT! 

The no.1 marketing technique, we used was highly frequented Facebook group posting!Sounds rough…and it turned out: it is!

As our target group are students, as well as young professionals, we explicitly focused on study groups, starting at 100 members, going up to 5000 active users.

The best marketing of a website is always the content itself. Hence, one can argue about the sustainability of this method. Though, it allows StartUps like us to get a decent user base. And every CEO of a StartUp knows how important & difficult that is!

“The right content for the right target group”

Besides constantly adding groups to our accounts (btw. we noticed very quickly, that no more than 300 groups can be added to fake-account), we created content for every sub-target group, with the intention of increasing the probability, that users won’t regard our posts as spam – sometimes successful, sometimes not!

“Facebook is intelligent”

After joining about 150 groups within 10 minutes, Facebook tells you, that you are misusing this feature and asks you to type in your phone number. Managing 15 fake accounts and only 6 people in our team, we were in desperate need for phone numbers, that we could use to verify our accounts. THE SOLUTION:

Prepaid simcards became very cheap over the last years, allowing us to buy simcards for 8$ each. This resulted into an office desk that looked like this:

“1200 unique visitors / hour”

Applying this technique brought us up to 1200 unique visitors / hour. The Google-Analytics screenshot below nicely illustrates the steep increase of unique visitors. On that day, we started our posting session at 12:00am and went on for one hour!

On an average day like below, we  that day we had almost 500 registrations, resulting from one hour of work and a 50$ investment on phone numbers! That’s what I call a good return on investment!