Facebook was among the first large enterprises built by Millennials. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is just 27, and 50% of the company’s workforce is composed of the generation born between 1982 and 2001. It is a generation now taking positions of prominence across the corporate landscape. And its members have very different ideas about what they want and need from the workplace, which provides particular challenges for employers—at startups and traditional companies alike—to find a way to keep these twenty-somethings motivated and engaged.

Last week, Facebook’s Molly Graham joined Rypple’s Nick Stein at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, CA to talk about how Facebook uses Rypple to manage and engage their young, socially savvy workforce.

Here are some great insights from InformationWeek‘s David F. Carr, who reported live from Molly’s talk:

• [Molly] noted that when she joined the company in 2008, Facebook had about 80 million users. Today, it has more than 800 million. “You could have been the highest performer in 2008, and you would be underwater today if you hadn’t learned anything. The company changes at least every six months because the scale changes,” Graham said. That makes for a work environment that is “learn or lose,” she said.

• Prior to adopting Rypple about a year and a half ago, Facebook had already developed an informal system allowing employees to send each other thanks and recognition through an internal discussion board. Rypple turned that into an enterprise product that organizes all that feedback for use in a more formal review process later.

• Facebook wanted its system for providing employee feedback to feel natural in the same way [Facebook’s own photo tagging application does] by building it into the news feed of the company’s internal discussion board system.

• Facebook has periodically wrestled with figuring out the right way to handle employee reviews, and at one point tried to dispense with the whole process, Graham said. Employees missed having some process in place, however, because they wanted to be recognized, and fairly compensated, for their achievements.

• Building social qualities into work processes makes them more efficient because of “the natural interactions that happen if you know and like the people you work with,” Graham said. For example, even if she hasn’t seen a coworker in months, they keep tabs on each other online, which means they have less catching up to do the next time they need to work together.

To read the rest of the InformationWeek article, click here.