You’re the best-educated generation, but there’s a bigger reason.

Your generation is rapidly and radically changing the workplace.

Millennials, America has never seen a generation as highly educated, nor as immediately impactful in business as yours.

You hold the highest percentage of bachelor’s degrees of any generation in history. More than one third of you, ages 25-34, graduated from college by 2015, according to the Brookings Institution. That’s up from 30 percent in 2000 and 25 percent in 1980.

The recency of your education is even more important to employers. Your training reflects the transformational impacts of globalization, digitization, and the democratization of media on society and in the workplace. You know things the rest of us don’t—important things, as receptive Gen Xers and Boomers are gradually finding out. You know how to use technology to learn and to adapt to an increasingly faster pace of workplace changes. You know how to use communications technologies to work more collaboratively as teams, and to engage and service customers more personally. You believe technology increases your productivity, and you’re willing to retrain as often as necessary to keep current throughout your career, as Deloitte research shows.

Your influence matters more now than ever, according to Pew Research, as you have surpassed Gen Xers as the most strongly represented generation in the workforce. Your way of doing things is quickly becoming the workplace standard and your differences are bringing about many positive changes.

We see among the clients we serve, that in companies where Millennials have a high degree of influence, they are rapidly changing workplaces in five broad ways. They are:

1. Re-envisioning increasingly antiquated organizational hierarchies and tapping into the educational training and expertise of a higher percentage of employees
2. Driving technology deployment toward improving organizational efficiency
3. Improving the ways in which companies communicate internally and externally
4. Driving changes in workplace flexibility
5. Urging organizations to be a force for positive social impact

Here are just a few of the specific ways in which your generation is revolutionizing the workplace:

Remote Work: Major studies including the SHRM/Globoforce Employee Recognition Survey and the IBM/Globoforce Employee Experience Index have revealed that Millennials strongly value flexible work environments and work/life balance. This has accelerated adoption of cloud-based software, online communication, and business networking telecommunications solutions.

Mobile: You’re digital natives. Few of you have ever used analog landline phones at home. As a result, smartphones have begun to take precedence in many offices, and many workers are seeing the advantages of mobile communications in the workplace. Texting is taking the place of what would have been short phone calls. This has accelerated the development of secure applications and networks that can keep company data and communications secure. It has also led to a re-envisioning of traditional workspaces.

Video Conferencing: Skype and other web conferencing apps are familiar to your generation, and you find it natural to duplicate this experience in the workplace. Video conferencing has become a preferred form of communication, not just when people need to communicate from remote locations, but even within offices. Your influence has driven the adoption of video conferencing hardware, software, and the necessary communications infrastructures.

Language Changes: The day when shorthand abbreviations and emoticons join punctuation as part of our language is coming, and Millennials are driving this trend. It isn’t for lack of communication capability that your generation uses these time-saving communication tools. It’s your preference for the most efficient and instantaneous way of communicating, and that is influencing Gen Xers and Boomers to reconsider how they communicate at work.

Organizational Changes: A low-level GenXer wouldn’t think of sending a company-wide email or a direct email to someone in the c-suite for an answer to a question, but Millennials think nothing of it. You are accustomed to fast communications, you seek input from everyone because you expect everyone to be accessible. Your generation is breaking through traditional bureaucratic chains of command to get the responses you need, when you need them. In the process, you are exposing the limitations of hierarchies in an environment where efficiency always wins.

It’s a brave new world that you’re creating, Millennials.

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