Accessible through a prominent link off of its main career page, Honeywell’s career blog offers employees an opportunity to write about their work at Honeywell, including their likes and dislikes. This shows an amazing amount of trust in their employees as well as an incredible amount of confidence in Honeywell and its culture. Students researching Honeywell as a potential employer can not only read the blogs posted on the site, but they can add comments, too. This remarkable level of transparency is very important to Gen Y. An open forum for employee discussion will help Honeywell in its efforts to recruit Gen Y employees and also facilitate its efforts to attract quality interns.

To understand why employer supported or sanctioned blogging helps an employer retain Gen Y employees, let’s imagine that you work for an organization that trusts you enough to blog on their corporate site. Let’s also imagine that a competitor offers you a position which is moderately more attractive than your current position. It is quite likely that you will ask that competitor if you will be allowed to blog about your work experience on their corporate Web site if you were to accept their offer of employment. Because so few employers support or even sanction employee blogging, that employer will probably say no. They won’t say it, but the reason is that they don’t trust their employees enough to allow that and you’ll understand that. Faced with the choice of continuing to work for your current organization that demonstrates its trust in you by allowing you to blog on its corporate site and a potential organization that demonstrates its distrust by refusing to allow you to blog on its site, which would you pick? That’s why employer-sanctioned blogging is great for retention.

Gen Y employees are high maintenance, according Baker. They want to have it all right here, right now, and they can’t see any reason why that shouldn’t be possible. The upside of this demanding, high maintenance generation of employees is that they are willing work hard and be great sources of the innovation that keeps organizations growing and changing with the times.