Recruiting Generation Me
Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal has a great article called The Most-Praised Generation Goes to Work. (This link should work for non-subscribers.)
It describes, sometimes hilariously, the inter-generational conflict between younger employees and their managers. According to the article: “Bosses, professors and mates are feeling the need to lavish praise on young adults, particularly twentysomethings, or else see them wither under an unfamiliar compliment deficit.”
Well, at least we can’t blame the “compliment deficit” on foreign trade!
Are You Special?
There is a serious side to this issue if you are concerned about your company’s future.
Bob Reynolds from Graybar gave a fascinating Chairman’s Address at January’s NAW Executive Summit. He focused on “…our collective need as an industry to do a much, much better job of recruiting, engaging, and retaining the best and brightest.”
Here a few choice quotes: You can read the full-text of his speech here.
- “Most young people today expect to have several employers in their working years. They are loyal — first and foremost — to their own development and personal growth aspirations and they measure their employers against this standard.”
- “Our industry has not capitalized on the power of training and development to the degree of other business sectors…we need to take a hard look at the level of commitment we make to creating robust employee educational opportunities.”
- “Clint Eastwood doesn’t work in distribution.”
- “In this world there's two kinds of people, my friend. Those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig.”
OK, just kidding about the last one – I’m quoting Clint Eastwood from Il buono, Il brutto, Il cattivo. But Bob’s message highlights the flaws in using The Man with No Name as a guide to management practice.
The Demographic Tide
In Chapter Five of Facing the Forces of Change®: Lead the Way in the Supply Chain, I highlight how the U.S. workforce will change. Check out these statistics:
- Although the U.S. workforce will grow by more than 12 million people by 2014, 77% of that growth will come from people over the age of 55. The number of people under 24 years of age will actually decline! As a result, more than one out of five U.S. workers will be older than age 55 by 2014.
- The number of 35 to 44 year-old workers in the workforce will be declining, so wholesaler-distributors will need to compete more aggressively to attract the next generation of managers into their companies.
- A major factor in U.S. labor force’s growth has been the growth in working women. However, the percentage of women in the wholesale distribution workforce is only 29%, compared to the overall U.S. average of 47%.
Will wholesale distribution attract the right people? Will your company be able to compete effectively for the next generation of employees? Will you be an employer of choice?
Before you chuckle at the “Praise Me Generation,” pause to consider that your future CEO is among them.
2 comments:
I, too, read this article, and as a member of this "Praise Me" generation (though just barely), I think the media has stretched a bit too far to come up with an interesting angle.
I don't require a constant stream of praise to keep me working, though it is important to set expectations for my performance so I can at least have a rough idea of where I stand.
One thing that should be taken away from this, however, is that sometimes benefits are mismatched to younger workers. My peers don't care about a gold-plated health plan, company pension, five kinds of insurance, etc....We want a decent HSA with a high deductible plan so we can get tax-free savings for retirement, a good 401k, plenty of time off, a flexible work environment, and lots of training.
I have to agree with Bob Reynolds on the last point, though. In today's extremely fast-paced work environment, if i'm not moving forward, i'm moving backward. The quickest way to lose me to a competitor is to let my job stagnate and skimp on training.
I couldn’t agree more. I am a recent college graduate getting my start in the Distribution Industry. Currently I have a unique benefit for someone my age in traveling around the country and listening to various distribution companies’ talk about the problems they are going through. One of my recent client visits brought up an interesting point. Just less than a month ago, all the senior executives retired, and took their internal Industry knowledge base with them. They left the company to the next generation of management, and are now comfortable in a country cabin nestled next to a lake, fishing.
They were some of the first I have run across that are getting started with the Generation Next Management teams, and if they keep going the way their plans are taking them, they will be sucking in a good portion of the current technology based graduates that will be implementing new and impressive sales oriented projects.
Of their new employees, only a handful had been with the company more than a few years, and most only seemed like they were staying because of the exciting opportunities, the good pay, and the opportunity for advancement, training in new technologies and sales methods, and plenty of job freedom allowing their personal lives to develop with their careers.
Increasingly, it is going to be hard to get the Generation Next Work force to accept a job without healthy access to technologies that allow them to be remote, such as VPN, blackberry or other cellular based e-mail technologies, and the ability to roam away from the cubicle as a manager. Benefits such as Retirement contributions to personal HSA accounts, Paid time off, and Stock Option plans and other personal investments, as well as personal development training will become a must have to acquire the best and brightest of the next generation workforce.
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