Tapping Into Multi-Generational Talent
Does it ever seem to you as if we all walk around every day with what you might think of as a lens in our pockets, our own personal lens? And so when something happens in your world, you pull it out and look at the event through your lens. Now, one person's lens may say, “That’s a great development. I love it!” But your lens may say, “Are you kidding? That’s really scary and threatening, and I don’t like it at all.” And so we begin to misunderstand each other -- not only in personal life but also in the workplace.
One of the real challenges we've found in many organizations is it’s pretty easy for people in their late 50s and 60s—people we would call boomers—to have that sense of “What are they thinking?” when talking to co-workers who are in their 30s and 40s—people we would call Xers. It’s not always obvious that we see things alike, and that can lead to some issues.
This presentation excerpt explores these differences, and helps readers to understand and embrace a multigenerational workforce.
To download your free copy of Tapping Into Multi-Generational Talent, complete the form at right. Or, take a look at the excerpt below to sample the research included in this white paper.
Excerpt from Tapping Into Multi-Generational Talent:
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Now, think about the Ys. How would they get together with a friend for dinner? Almost certainly with text. When would they text? Not even an hour before, I can guarantee you that. And what do they text? Is it a plan? No, they almost never text a plan. From the texts I’ve looked at, the majority of them read something like, “Where are you?” And then the other guy sends back coordinates, and they begin this process of homing in on each other like ships until they meet up someplace. They never plan during the course of it. They coordinate.
This group has a very different way of getting things done. Because of their ubiquitous technology, they coordinate instead of plan. And I’m not going to argue that that’s the way we should do everything — we need some plans and schedules — but don’t be 100% resistant to their way. There may be some ways you can actually improve your business by building in some of their approaches.
I got a call from a CFO once who said, “Tammy, I can’t get anybody to take my job.” I said, “Well, that’s weird. What are you telling them?” He told me, “Well, I’m telling them it’s a 60-hour-a-week job. And they’re all telling me they would like 35 hours and maybe 40 in a pinch.” He asked if I could come down and talk to them. I said, “Well, I could talk to the kids, but why don’t I start by talking to you, and I’ll tell you what they’re thinking. They’re thinking that they’re really sorry it takes you 60 hours a week to get your work done. They don’t think it’s going to take that long.” Now, I don’t know who’s right, but what I do know is that you can shift away from time-based metrics and just say, “Here’s the task. I need it by Friday. Take as long as it takes. If it takes you 60 hours, that’s your problem. If it takes you 30 hours, go have fun. But I need it by Friday.” The more you can manage to task, the better off you will be with this group.
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Re-Think Ten Assumptions that Are No Longer True…But Still Shape Our Organizations Today
Have you ever found yourself wondering “why do we do it this way?” If not, you should. Most of today’s business organizations are perfectly designed . . . to respond to conditions that no longer exist. The ways we’ve always done things – the approaches we grew up accepting as the normal order of things – simply don’t make sense anymore. They are predicated on a set of underlying assumptions that are not valid today. These assumptions were all true in the first half of the Twentieth Century, when modern organizations were designed. None are true today. All have major implications for the way we lead, design organizations, and manage talent. Today’s organizations are ripe for change. It’s time to re-think ten key assumptions.
To download your free copy of Re-Think Ten Assumptions that Are No Longer True…But Still Shape Our Organizations Today, complete the form at right. Or, take a look at the excerpt below to sample the research included in this white paper.
Excerpt from Re-Think Ten Assumptions that Are No Longer True…But Still Shape Our Organizations Today:
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Rethink: Talent Availability
Old Assumptions: There will always be a line of young people (qualified young people) outside my door, eager for a job – particularly at a “good” company like ours. The population is shaped like a pyramid, with more young than old people.
The assumptions of a population pyramid and the accompanying notion of there being more young people than old are not true in many countries today and, increasingly, won’t be true throughout much of the world. The combination of longer life expectancies and lower birth rates has conspired to give us increasingly diamond- or rectangular-shaped populations – and a growing shortage of young workers.
Birth rates are dramatically lower than they were just a few decades ago. These rates are falling below replacement levels, toward 1.85 children per woman, in many parts of the world. At the same time, life expectancies are increasing dramatically. Human life expectancy averaged 35 years for most of the last 1000 years of man’s history on earth, but has more than doubled to 75-80 years today.
New Reality: The workforce is becoming an inverted pyramid, with more older people than young. Young hires, particularly college graduates, will be in short supply.
The implications of this new reality, a re-proportioned workforce, include the need to:
- Develop the capabilities required to attract a disproportionate share of available talent
- Re-think career paths, moving away from using movement “up” as the only way to provide additional learning, variety, compensation or recognition
- Eliminate mandatory retirement
- Develop approaches to leverage older workers effectively, including increasing development investments at all stages and bell-shaped curve career path options (a “deceleration” phase through one’s 60’s, 70’s and even 80’s)
- Help the generations work together effectively
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Four Keys to Successful Enterprise Collaboration
by Tamara Erickson
Most enterprise leaders are sold on on the tremendous potential new collaborative technologies present to change the way work gets done: increasing productivity, stimulating innovation, and enhancing employee engagement. But realizing the benefits is proving to be a frustrating challenge for many: How do you achieve widespread adoption? Why is it so difficult to drive real changes in the way work is done? How can you speed the adoption of productive practices in the workforce? Our new research provides answers and guidelines.
To download your free copy of Four Keys to Successful Enterprise Collaboration, complete the form at right. Or, take a look at the excerpt below to sample the research included in this white paper.
Excerpt from Four Keys to Successful Enterprise Collaboration:
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Keys to Social Media Adoption
There are four keys to the successful, productive adoption of collaborative technology:
- Strategy – start with a clear, specific intent in mind
- Technology – invest in technology designed around user behavior
- Organization – create new structures and practices that support collaboration
- Personal Engagement – catalyze individual discretionary effort
Strategy
Where can collaborative technology have the biggest impact on your business? What specifically do you want to achieve? Consider who has knowledge that is not being fully leveraged, where you could speed your processes through faster exchange of information, or who would benefit from being connected to whom.
Successful personal sites have clear and focused objectives. For example, Amazon.com wants to sell lots of books and other goods. Their design is cleverly geared to encourage users to buy more and more products. Facebook wants to create a large, engaged community. The popular photo-sharing application is one way that they’ve deepened individuals’ connections within the network. Twitter wants to provide access to the pulse of breaking events and ideas. A specialty site, Stack Overflow, wants to help programmers pool their knowledge.
Rarely in corporations do we find that same degree of clarity of intent – and the accompanying discipline to focus and optimize around the selected intent. But getting clear about what you want to achieve is the first step toward success.
Teva produces and sells generic pharmaceuticals. Success requires being able to shift production rapidly to meet sudden peaks in demand, insuring a dependable supply to key customers. This company has employed a collaborative site for near-term problem resolution among employees in Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management. Using real-time collaboration, employees are able to share sudden changes in demand, solve unexpected problems in manufacturing, and get fast answers to questions that require the specialized expertise of a colleague. In our Collaborative Intents language (see sidebar), they are using the site to tap expertise and resources and to coordinate time and place.
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Generations and Geography - Understanding the Diversity of Generations around the Globe
By Tammy Erickson and Timothy Bevins
Geography significantly influences the formation of generational beliefs and behavior. Each country's unique social, political, and economic events shape specific views and attitudes among today's adults. Western generational models cannot be applied broadly to a global workforce. My latest research builds on an approach of understanding the generations by looking at the shared formative events that shaped their early years.
To download your free copy of Generations and Geography - Understanding the Diversity of Generations around the Globe, complete the form at right. Or, take a look at the excerpt below to sample the research included in this white paper.
Excerpt from Generations and Geography - Understanding the Diversity of Generations around the Globe:
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Research on the generations in eight major countries points out significant differences around the globe, as shown in Figure 3.
The eight countries profiled include the four BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), some of the most important markets for talent over the next decade, as well as one country from the Middle East. The two countries chosen in Europe, the UK and Germany, represent the two opposing sides in World War II. The workforce in each country includes individuals with very different perspectives and values, based on their youthful experiences.
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Building Organizations to Leverage Collaborative Technologies
By Tammy Erickson
Over time, human beings have continually evolved new ways to communicate -- from the spoken word, to the written word, to the printed word, and onward. Each expansion in our communication capability has increased the scope and richness of our interactions. Each has been accompanied by changes in the ways we live and work. Today we are on the brink of another transformation. New technologies, most of which have appeared only within the last decade, greatly amplify our abilities to interact simultaneously with large numbers of people. The frontier of human productive capacity today is the power of extended collaboration – the ability to work together beyond the scope of small groups. There are eight assumptions that are deeply embedded in the ways most organizations operate and the ways most of us think about collaboration. With the new technologies of extended collaboration, these assumptions are no longer valid. This white paper examines each one and the implications for changes necessary for success.
To download your free copy of Building Organizations to Leverage Collaborative Technologies, complete the form at right. Or, take a look at the excerpt below to sample the research included in this white paper.
Excerpt from Building Organizations to Leverage Collaborative Technologies:
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Outdated Assumption #7: The purpose of collaboration is clear.
Perhaps one of the most limiting assumptions is simply the notion that we understand the applications of collaboration in the business enterprise, or that they will emerge naturally as workers use whatever technology platform is provided. This assumption ignores the reality that the applications which have been most successful in our personal lives, such as Facebook, are backed by teams of designers who focus on the processes and practices that make up our daily activities, creating features that are carefully matched to facilitate or reengineer a specific activity. The most successful and widely adopted platforms are thoughtfully geared to making our day-to-day activities more productive.
This same level of attention to the design of business collaboration will be essential to achieving breakthroughs in productivity, rather than simply increasing the social capital within the workplace. Just as research on the returns generated by investments in enterprise software in the 1980’s and 1990’s has shown that contributions to productivity growth only occurred when the technology was accompanied by thoughtful business process innovation, the same will certainly be true for collaborative technologies in the workplace. The ways in which collaborative technologies contribute to productivity will vary by industry sector and organization. The approaches will need to be tailored to sector- and company-specific business processes.
Without doubt, the use of today’s collaborative technology can bring a wide range of business benefits. For example, it makes it possible to:
• Tap people, expertise or other resources only as needed, making your fixed cost base more flexible.
• Share ideas between previously unconnected groups or individuals.
• Coordinate activities, allowing individuals more flexibility regarding when and where they work with greater visibility into the progress of the whole.
• Poll a large number of individuals quickly to gather input or determine group-wide preferences.
• Allow multiple parties to discuss and issue or debate possibilities, before coalescing around an emerging consensus.
Our research has identified 10 specific roles that collaborative technology can play in business. (See list, next page.) Some will be critically important factors for future success in some industries and not at all important in others. Each application requires a slightly different implementation design – for the technology itself, as well as for the adoption and use strategies. Understanding exactly which forms of collaboration will have the greatest impact on your business and how to re-think existing practices to leverage these new capabilities, is critically important to realizing the returns they promise.
The promise is there: historically, the most important determinants of longer-term productivity growth have been the rate of adoption of existing and new technologies and the concurrent changes in the way work is done. Today a new suite of technologies offers the opportunity for a step change forward – but only if we don’t assume it will happen automatically.
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How Collaboration Will Drive the Next Step Change in Productivity
By Tammy Erickson
Increasing productivity – making more with less – is at the core of any company or any economy’s economic progress. From a societal view, productivity drives higher living standards and increases shared resources, for example, providing a government with more resources to invest back into its citizens. For a company, increasing productivity has the same result – increasing profitability that can either be used to increase the wealth of employees and shareholders or invest back into the future of the organization.
To download your free copy of How Collaboration Will Drive the Next Step Change in Productivity, complete the form at right. Or, take a look at the excerpt below to sample the research included in this white paper.
Excerpt from How Collaboration Will Drive the Next Step Change in Productivity:
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An Extraordinary Wave of New Technologies
Today, we are at the brink of a new wave of technology entering the workplace. Collaborative technologies, most of which have appeared only within the last decade, greatly amplify our abilities to interact simultaneously with large numbers of people. As they make their way from use in our personal lives into the workplace, they offer the promise of significant improvements in generating, capturing, and sharing knowledge; finding helpful colleagues and information; tapping into new sources of innovation and expertise; and harnessing the “wisdom of crowds.” Collaborative technologies have the potential to shift the way we interact with people on our teams, find external expertise when it’s needed, and share ideas and observations more broadly.
But, as with the technology investments of the 1980’s and 1990’s, the ability of these technologies to drive real productivity growth will depend on whether or not they are accompanied by thoughtful changes in the way work is done. New approaches will need to be developed and tailored to sector- and company-specific business processes because the ways in which collaborative technologies contribute to productivity will vary by industry sector and organization.
It would be a mistake to assume that the most productive applications of collaboration in the business enterprise will emerge naturally as workers use whatever technology platform is provided. Just as the most successful and widely adopted platforms for our personal use, such as Facebook, are thoughtfully geared to making our day-to-day activities more productive, this same level of attention to the design of business collaboration will be essential to achieving breakthroughs in productivity, rather than simply increasing the social capital within the workplace.
Our research has identified ten specific roles that collaborative technology can play in business.
• Share ideas between previously unconnected groups or individuals,
• Co-create products, services, and experiences,
• Engage stakeholders more deeply – customers, communities, employees, and partners,
• Tap people, expertise or other resources only as needed, making your fixed cost base more flexible,
• Coordinate activities, allowing individuals more flexibility regarding when and where they work with greater visibility into the progress of the whole,
• Distribute work, cost, or risk among multiple parties,
• Sense emerging patterns to detect trends, opportunities or threats,
• Pool judgments to develop better insight than any individual alone could possess,
• Poll a large number of individuals quickly to gather input or determine group-wide preferences, and
• Allow multiple parties to discuss and issue or debate possibilities, before coalescing around an emerging consensus.
Each of these forms of collaboration will be critically important factors for future success in some industries and not important at all in others. Each requires a slightly different implementation design – for the technology itself, as well as for adoption and use strategies. Understanding exactly which forms of collaboration will have the greatest impact on your business and how to re-think existing practices to leverage these new capabilities, is critically important to realizing the returns they promise.
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To continue reading How Collaboration Will Drive the Next Step Change in Productivity, complete the form at right to download your free copy.