Posts Tagged “workforce demographics”

Ok. Back to writing.

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….

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.

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

75% have a Facebook account

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.