There are few things that Deloitte's consulting arm and Box's file sharing business have in common, reports LinkedIn. Yet the CEOs of these respective companies agree on two big problems at their respective companies that keeps that up at night.
On a Monday panel discussion at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, Jim Moffatt of Deloitte and Aaron Levie of Box first agreed that recruiting and retaining top Millennial talent is top of mind for their diverse companies. While Moffatt is working to empower young employees to stay at the firm longer by giving them more diverse work, Levie is grappling with the challenges of running a 1,300-person workforce with the average age of 25 or 26.
"It is very apparent that managing and attracting this demographic of workforce is certainly interesting especially in Silicon Valley," Levie said. "There is this constant dynamism in the workforce that is very very hard to build the right part of platform and environment for people to accomplishment what they want."
Levie acknowledged that there is an ever-growing group of interesting companies for top talent to work at in the valley. His solution to try and keep his best employees is to try and compress the amount of times that it takes them to accomplish certain tasks and move ahead within the company. In the past what may have looked like a five-year career trajectory, Levie said is now more like a two-year trajectory.
"This generation is very very accustomed to moving quickly ahead in every part of their life and when they get to work and things move slowly and they can't get ahead quickly it impacts their ability to stay," he said.
For Moffatt of Deloitte, the challenge lies in disrupting the way Deloitte rewards Millennial talent. Unlike perhaps the generations that came before them, the youngest generation in the workforce is unmotivated by a staple in the consulting world: title changes and promotions. Instead, he said young Deloitte workers are value and impact driven which is forcing the firm to re-evaluate their HR priorities.
The talent crisis was not the only point during the panel that both Moffatt and Levie agreed upon. With the influx of data breaches suffered by companies as diverse as JPMorgan, Target and Sony, both CEOs have elevated the data security responsibility away from just the CIO or CRO level and directly into their office and the boardroom. Pointing to both the regulations and the massive size of the workforces that big companies have to deal with, Levie argued that small tech companies may be at an advantage when it comes to effectively coming up with solutions to tackle cyber security.
"The bigger the organization is the harder it is to solve the problem," said Levie. "But if all a company had to do was stay secure, that wouldn't be very interesting because you would just buy lots of security technology. It's in the same time that you are being disrupted by new technology that you have to figure out the nuanced way... to balance risk."
Levie called Silicon Valley a "dangerous place right now" that is going after specific industries in the data space, but without being the baggage that comes with being an established company with hundreds of years of processes, behaviors and information.
Moffatt's answer to combating new market entrants and protecting client data goes back to increasing the access points that need to be protected. He also said he is taking a hard look at the data that his company actually needs to keep. Alluding specifically to the email hacks that Sony suffered in late 2014, Moffatt said that data strategy is something that he is always thinking about as a top priority within his firm.
Levie's security advice for Moffatt and the other CEOs on his panel?
"You could just say fewer things in your emails," he joked.
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