I recently took my daughter off to her first year of college, and picked up a pearl of wisdom from her Residence Hall Advisor. I’m not sure I’ve fully processed it yet, but he may be on to something.
I was standing in the common room of my daughter’s suite. She was unpacking her clothes in the bedroom. Another father was in the common room with me. His daughter was in the other bedroom. We were cleaning out our Blackberries while waiting for our next command.
In comes the R.A.. “I bet everything in this room is just perfect,” he announced.
We concurred.
He continued, “I love the dads of girls. They are the best.”
“Why is that, and who is the worst?”
The gist of his response: “Moms of boys are the worst. They are incredibly involved. They don’t let their sons do anything. I had to referee a disagreement on closet space between two moms! They don’t realize the stuff will be on the floor in no time. Moms think their boys are completely helpless. And they are – but the boys don’t care.” He continued on, “Fathers of girls are the best. They know their place. Help if asked. Stay quiet otherwise.”
We can leave the nuances about fathers of boys and mothers of daughters to another day. We can also set aside the fact that I agree with anybody who thinks I am the best at anything. A few questions come to mind however:
In this dorm, the girls’ fathers felt their work was done. The boys’ moms were getting one more parenting lick in. In a work setting, when is it right to just let the action happen? When do you stop “helping” and let people do things for themselves?
Are America’s youngest working generation impacted by how their parents have been parenting? Are America’s young women more prepared for college and the workforce than America’s young men? Are fathers not helping on move-in day because they know their daughters are already capable? Are the boys truly incapable?
My generation experienced gender roles in a particular way. If I remember correctly, no male contemporary of mine would have allowed his mother to arrange his dorm room. Does today’s middle-aged manager understand that the 20-something worker has a completely different mindset than a 40-something? Does the 20-something worker expect mom-like help? Is the middle-aged manager prepared to mother the boys? What about the girls?
I’m sure one R.A.’s off-handed observation isn’t as good as a well-researched dissertation. It certainly isn’t adequate to create a new field of thinking about managing across generations. But kids do say the darndest things….
This post is not intended to be an analytical review of demographic differences. The sample size is essentially one, my daughter – and a few of her friends. Today’s high school seniors are different than those in the past, and their behavior will seem mighty strange when they hit the business world in five years.
E-mail is so yesterday – The only reason to look at an e-mail account is to communicate with somebody older than 35. There are no e-mails to peers.
The cellphone is primarily for texting – If I text her, I get an immediate response. My calls go unanswered however. It isn’t just my calls, she isn’t attuned to the sound of her own ringer.
Facebook changes the rules – She has “friends” she doesn’t and won’t talk to. Let me explain: A neighbor’s 18 year-old daughter was led away in handcuffs. The handcuffed girl attends a different school than my daughter and they are far from friendly. Here are the surprises…
They were Facebook friends. Not only were these two “friends,” but I found my daughter had many other “friends” she never spoke to. The biggest shock was she was “friends” with the captain of the archrival school’s basketball team. They elbow each other all night, never speak, and “friend” each other.
The girl shared things on Facebook my generation would have definitely kept quiet. Our scandals were definitely hushed up.
At a minimum, businesses will need to change how to communicate with employees. Definitions of acceptable behavior will be challenged as well.
By the way, she already knows demographics are on her side. She knows baby boomers are retiring and will be looking for as many young workers as they can get. She has also been studying Chinese for the last four years. Assuming past performance is an indicator of future success, she will be highly marketable. She thinks my generation will change – not hers.
Young and cocky is not a new combination. Fundamentally changing the “what” and “how” of communication is.
A large part of this year’s summer vacation involved college visits with my high school senior. I had plenty of time to reflect on all the things that have happened in her lifetime as I drove through cornfield after cornfield, and she slept soundly with her iPod blaring. One of those thoughts was a wake-up call for me.
About the time my daughter was born, I gave a speech at the annual meeting of the National Food Broker Association about technology changes and business. I can remember showing a mockup of an e-mail message and talking about how e-mail would change how business would operate. I remember the following line in particular:
“I estimate the average age in this room is about 40 years old. My guess is that many of you have never used a personal computer. There is now this thing called e-mail and many of you will think that your secretary will take care of your e-mail just as she has always typed your memos. The reality is – most of you have 25 or more years in the workforce. If you think you can avoid using a personal computer for the next 25 years – good luck. There will be plenty of 20- and 30-somethings who will be happy to compete for your job.”
Guess what? I am now the guy in the audience. I’m the one who is at risk of falling behind. The scary part is, I’m an early adopter of technology and I struggle to keep up with the pace of change.
So like e-mail from the early 1990s, what is the technology innovation with the most potential to disrupt how businesses operate in the 2010s? I won’t claim it is No. 1, but Web feeds or syndication is good choice. It is those little buttons:
If you don’t know what they are, you need to. The 3:44 video explains it better than any text could:
Think about some of the changes that are enabled in a business environment:
Collaboration and Innovation – Technology becomes another glue to connect knowledge – relationships are no longer the sole connector. An engineer working in a widget factory in Poland can easily be aware of developments in the widget factories in South Korea and Tennessee. New communities develop throughout the organization, and traditional boundaries blur.
Productivity – Access to information directly correlates with an ability to perform in a work setting. Syndication fundamentally changes how information can be provided and increases in productivity should be expected. At a minimum, managerial spans of control can be expanded.
Rethinking the Internal Communication Function - The internal communication function typically works as a mass-media broadcaster today. Messages are controlled and broadcast over a few channels of distribution. With corporate blogging and syndication now available with virtually no barrier to entry, message control is gone and channels multiply wildly. Doesn’t this change the work of Internal Communications?
You might want to try to figure out those orange buttons before some whippersnapper is competing for your job.
I continue to work on material for several speaking engagements and am currently focused on “what is on the mind of the C-Suite.” The methodology is highly informal, but some clear trends begin to emerge:
Economics – Today’s economy has made it all the harder to continue prior trends. Credit is challenging, commodities have sky-rocketed, inflation has awoken, the housing bubble is deflating, the dollar has slid greatly, confidence is weak, and the tax code likely will be changing next year. Good news is limited and some potential risks have turned into realities.
Agility and Innovation - Companies that can move quickly win. How does a business create new products and services and implement more productive ways of working quickly and effectively? How does an organization spark and nurture collaboration and flexibility?
People – The data is clear. Engaged people create superior results. How does a C-Suite attract, identify, hire and motivate the highest quality talent? Millennials have different expectations of their employer. Long-term employees are leaving with years of knowledge. Engagement is a here-and-now challenge. Tapping the supply of talented people that can lead and execute well in the new world will only get harder. How can they make people a competitive advantage? How can they effectively manage the employment brand proposition?
Community Responsibility - Whether the issue is climate change, sustainability or corporate social responsibility, there is an expectation that employers contribute positively to the communities in which they do business. It isn’t just nice-to-do anymore.
Corporate Governance - Enron and Sarbanes-Oxley may be distant memories for you, but you probably don’t sign and certify your company’s governance structure. More than one C-Suite member has voiced a worry about “their signature,” and “on my watch.” It may not be sexy, but it does take time.
Constituency Management - Will there ever be enough time to pay attention to shareholders, regulators, customers, suppliers and employees while staying at the forefront of personal and professional development? Don’t forget – the C-Suite also must demonstrate – occasionally – the merits of work-life balance as well.
Even if the list is not perfect, the reality is that there is a lot to worry about before looking at today’s sales, tomorrow’s advertising, or next year’s business plan. Today’s CXO needs people who can execute well so that they can address long-term opportunities for the business.
In an earlier post, we talked about the need for companies to use modern communication methods – such as blogs, RSS feeds and text messages – along with traditional methods – such as e-mails, posters, and newsletters – to effectively reach different generations in the workplace. Based on a new study by Randstad, communication styles are just one of the many generational differences affecting companies today.
The study claims the four different generations in the workforce: Matures, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y – have very little interaction with one another. Gen Ys, in particular, are not interacting with older generations.
This lack of interaction feeds dysfunctionality:
A new generation has entered the workforce. Those Gen Yers are associating most readily with those of the same age. They don’t associate with older generations.
As Gen Yers gain experience and mature, they look to take on more responsibility.
Although some in the older generations willingly share the knowledge necessary to help the younger generations, others view their growth as a threat.
Information is withheld to protect individual positions of power and organizational performance suffers.
Unlike money, you can take knowledge when you go. Matures and Baby Boomers are retiring and taking knowledge out the door. If the Gen Yers had been interacting up the generational ladder (and vice versa), much of the critical knowledge would have been passed.
The coming retirement wave and near-term economically-driven reductions in workforces are combining to create a clear burning platform for businesses to act upon. To help plug the brain drain:
Company leaders must understand there are real differences in how the different generations view leadership, respect authority, view work, relate to each other, and put simply, come to work.
Lead by doing. Anybody who has supervisory duties has a responsibility to inspire top performance from their team, and to do so means understanding that team members will have very different drivers and definitions of success. With that understanding, strategies can be built to best inspire each generation. As an example, give Baby Boomers the recognition they desire for their contributions, while offering Gen Y employees “passion, humor and straight talk.”
Senior managers have always needed to ensure junior managers had the right workplace sensitivities. Generational awareness must be added to that list of workplace sensitivities.
Connecting the generations will help change their perceptions, encouraging awareness and understanding about the strengths each group brings to the company. Without this awareness and understanding, employees will continue to work within their comfort zones and companies will miss opportunities to build long-term competitive advantage.
Differences in the way Millennials and other generations communicate and receive information are not the only differences companies will need to address in a very short time.
In a podcast, Barbara Keats, associate professor of management at the W.P. Carey School of Business, discusses the Millennials’ belief systems.
Keats said that, given their propensity for “frequent validation, quick rewards and permission to shape the rules to fit their lives,” academics and employers “are wondering if millennials have determined that cutting corners and cheating is an acceptable way of getting ahead” and “taking it to a new level.”
Given some recent examples of fraud and plagiarism in the U.S. – the 45 students dismissed from the University of Virginia for cheating in 2002 and allegations that three sections of Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel bore similiarites to one written by Sophie Kinsella – should give companies pause.
It also should cause companies to strengthen their ethics policies. And if they don’t yet have one, companies must begin establishing ethics policies or rules of behavior. Many professional organizations have codes of ethics in place to ensure their members abide by a level of integrity that protects the association and the profession. In the same way, companies can protect themselves and their other employees from the actions of one bad apple.
The 80 million Baby Boomers are approaching one of life’s major milestones – retirement. And many companies are preparing for the brain drain that will cause. Ready to step in are the 46 million or so Gen Xers.
But there’s a new generation on the horizon – affectionately called the Millennials. Born between 1982 and 2000, they are 76 million strong and now are beginning to graduate from college and flood the job market.
Millennials have been described as tech savvy. In a 2007 book by Reynol Junco and Jeanna Mastrodicasa, a survey 7,705 U.S. college students showed:
97% own a computer
76% use instant messaging
15% of IM users are logged on 24 hours a day/7 days a week
34% use Web sites as their primary source of news
28% own a blog and 44% read blogs
49% download music using peer-to-peer file sharing
Given the generational differences between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials – and don’t forget the Gen Xers – employers will be challenged to integrate these generations into their workplaces as the old and new worlds collide. So what will that mean for communicating to them?
Likely it will mean increasing message multiplicity by combining more traditional methods – company newsletters, e-mails, and memos – with more modern methods, like blogs, RSS feeds and text messages to their cell phones. It also might mean developing ways to personalize each and every message to a Millennial recipient.
This would mean implementing technologies to gather data on their own employees’ habits and usage to create individual user profiles. With their propensity for sharing details about themselves through things like Facebook, MySpace, and receiving banking updates on their cell phones, one might assume this to be an acceptable endeavor on the part of companies. However, these are waters that haven’t yet been thoroughly tested.
In our last post, we wrote about the large demographic shifts underway in the U.S. Baby Boomers are queuing up for the exits. That post was about the labor pool’s age groups. In other words, who will be available to work.
There will be an average annual decline of 0.1% in the overall labor force participation rate.
There will be an average annual decline of 0.6% in the 16-24 year old labor force participation rate. This decline is a continuation of a long-standing trend in lower levels of participation among teens and young adults. In short, analysts believe this group is spending more time in school.
There will be an average annual increase of 0.1% in the 25-54 year old labor force participation rate. Increases in this group are projected to come from women spending more time in the workforce.
There will be an average annual increase of 1.2% in the 55+ year old labor force participation rate. This increase is being driven by older people being healthier than in years’ past, longer expected life spans requiring additional savings to fund retirement, increasing costs of medical care, and increases in the Social Security retirement age.
In upcoming posts we will write about the implications of those changes and how organizations are acting in the near term to address the implications.
Our clients are worried about the coming “tsunami” of workforce retirements. Baby Boomers are queuing up for the exits, and with their departures they take invaluable knowledge about how to perform work effectively and efficiently. The people entering the workforce operate under a new behavioral model. Large-scale disruptive change is in the air.
In this post we will write about the projections for the workforce of the future. In upcoming posts we will write about the implications of those changes and how organizations are acting in the near term to address the implications.
Many U. S. workers compete in the global market for talent. Jobs can be moved to countries where comparable quality work can be performed for less or where there it is easier to find a skilled workforce. A 2005 study from The National Academies illustrates the point:
For the cost of one chemist or one engineer in the United States, a company can hire about five chemists in China or 11 engineers in India.
In 2004, more than 600,000 engineers graduated from institutions of higher education in China. In India, the figure was 350,000. In America, it was about 70,000.
Of 120 chemical plants being built around the world with price tags of $1 billion or more, one is in the U.S. and 50 are in China.
If you manage in a company that competes globally, or are employed by an organization whose work can be sourced globally, you know that constant change is necessary to either stay ahead or catch up. Choosing to change slowly is a choice to lose eventually. Choosing to change quickly is choosing to compete aggressively.
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