Human Resources Q & A
By Tim Rutledge
November 10, 2008
The question:
You’ve been writing about the need to identify talented employees and take steps to keep them from leaving. Now that we’re in a full-blown economic downturn, won’t that make people think twice before submitting their resignations? Won’t employees, talented or otherwise, hunker down and stay put?
Tim's Response:
It would be nice to think that the credit crunch will produce something besides doom and gloom, and that perhaps a side benefit might be an employee population less willing to take the risks associated with changing jobs. Maybe tough economic times will cause people to feel grateful to be employed.
I sense in this question another issue in the background. Will management be able to stop worrying that people are going to quit? Can employee retention and engagement be relegated to the sidelines, at least for now?
The short answer is "no". The credit markets may have seized up, but the job market hasn’t, not yet anyway. A look at the job posting boards for September and October - the months during which the media screamed about bailouts and bankruptcies - reveals that employers are still creating jobs and/or looking to fill vacant positions in the same numbers as in the previous months. Your existing employees have as many job opportunities as they did before the downturn. No one can say for sure if this will persist, but for now that’s the pattern.
I came across some interesting statistics recently that bear on employee mobility. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, today’s "learners" (young people) will have somewhere between 10 and 14 jobs by the time they reach the age of 38. Talk about mobility! Backing this up, some 25% of employees are in their first year with their current employer. Put another way, 25% of employees left jobs less than a year ago.
I’m going to call this phenomenon "job surfing"; people hire on and decide whether or not they like the experience. They make this decision fairly quickly, and changing jobs on average every two to three years means the decision to change was made well before that, and dissatisfaction with the employment experience set in even earlier.
Generation Y's tendency to expect fast results and responses is well documented. This is just another manifestation of it. This is the generation that has no experience of a world without search engines. They have 10,000 ringtones, 2,000 songs, 500 photographs, and 3,000 "friends". (Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. But not about the ringtones!) They burn through all of this rapidly, constantly accepting and rejecting, adding and subtracting. This is how they create and recreate their identities.
Younger workers bring this modus operandi to their work lives, too. For them, the onboarding process never really stops. But they’ve flipped it. We’re accustomed to think of onboarding as bringing new employees into the organization and seeing if they’re going to pass probation. These days, new employees put employers on probation and keep them there. If employers don’t provide challenging work almost immediately, work that allows employees to feel that they’re making a significant contribution very early, the employees sour on the employment experience and tell their friends, virtual and otherwise, all about it.
This is one reason why employers can’t let up on their engagement efforts. Social networking is transforming workplaces from more or less sealed, to more or less transparent. Just as young people don’t believe that they should pay for music (they view music as being in the public domain as soon as they hear it), neither do they believe that what happens in the workplace is somehow private. They’ll Twitter and Facebook away to all their contacts.
So to retain these highly mobile workers, employers still need to create and sustain engaging employment experiences. Employees are talking about their workplaces, so employers need to influence the conversations. It’s no exaggeration to say that the ways in which employees are treated during economically challenging times will be a big influence on their stay/leave decisions when the economy improves.
One way for employers to have an impact on what employees say about their workplaces is to involve employees in decisions that affect their work. “Businesses must shed negative perceptions and learn new ways to incorporate Gen Y views into the work force. This is the most educated and technologically savvy generation ever,” says Rob McGovern, CEO of Jobfox, a firm specializing in employee surveys. Just being asked for input is engaging. Employee ideas don’t always have to be acted on; it’s enough just to be asked.
“But,” I hear you saying, “I don’t have time to have constant conversations with my employees.” I have sympathy with this. Managers are time-crunched as never before. But it’s not impossible to free up time to focus on employees. And I’ll bet that many of you have done just that.
I’d love to hear from you if you’ve been successful in shedding a task or two in the interest of spending more time on and with your employees. My contact information is just below the end of this column. Please take a moment to share your time savers with me. I’ll share them back in future columns.
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Tim Rutledge, Ph.D., is a veteran human resources consultant and publisher of Mattanie Press. You can contact
him at tim_rutledge@sympatico.ca or visit www.gettingengaged.ca.
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