The Invisible Revolution

Submarines revolutionized the way war was waged at sea. Silent, invisible and deadly, submarines challenged the very core of naval strategy. There are similar threats looming in the deep that will challenge the effectiveness of every Human Resources Professional. And, just as the Navies of the world needed tools such as sonar to reduce the threat of submarines, Human Resource departments need to develop tools to peer beneath murky waters and identify friends and foes.

Why Now?

There are five basic changes that are creating an imbalance in the company-employee relationship. Each of these changes, when viewed individually, may not seem that important but when they are connected and occur together, they increase the potential magnitude of their effects. Some changes you will recognize – others will be foreign – but all are important!

Five Changes That Are Impacting the Employee – Company Relationship

• Boomer Retirements
• Generation X and Y
• Web Logs (Blogs)
• Social Networking
• Accelerated Business Cycles – “Mission Du jour”

So how will these five trends change the balance?

Boomer Retirements

The core group of employees we all know and love are moving on. By 2008, a wealth of skills and experience will begin to disappear from the job market. The first members of the Baby Boom generation will turn 62. Along with retirements, massive skills gap makes finding talent even worse. In the United States, colleges will graduate only 198,000 students to fill the shoes of 2 million Baby Boomers scheduled to retire between 1998 and 2008, according to NASA projections.

"A tremendous amount of knowledge is walking out the door in a relatively short period of time," says David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich.

"Corporate America is facing a potentially mammoth talent crunch," the National Association of Manufacturers warns in a report.

As the people companies traditionally rely on leave, the new employees coming on board are demanding a different employment relationship.

Generations X and Y

As one generation exits another enters - Generation X has made itself known and will soon be followed by Generation Y. Generation X is comprised of people born between 1960 and 1981. Generation Y is comprised of 14 to 24 year olds. Generation X and Y are very different than what corporate America is used to. But the good thing is that they are also very similar to each other. This means if you’ve started to focus on the Generation X’ers in your company, you’ll be more prepared for the Generation Y’ers following closely on their heels.

Characteristics of Gen X include:

• They are good at change
• They are comfortable with technology
• They are independent
• They are financially savvy
• They are not intimidated by authority
• They are creative

Generation Y takes up where the previous generation leaves off… at greater speed and with more intensity.

Eric Chester, an author and speaker who coined the term Generation Why, believes those in Generation Y are “stimulus junkies”, easily bored. They are skeptical with well-developed garbage detectors and desensitized, which means that respect isn’t yours by virtue of your title.

That Generation X and Y are more technologically savvy and have found ways to connect to each other using technology give more power to the next two threats to HR managers in the future: Blogs and Social Networking.

Blogs

(n.) Short for Web log, a blog is a Web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual. Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author.

The blog revolution is well underway, giving every Internet user the opportunity to become an online journalist. While it is difficult to calculate exactly how many individuals are using Web sites as journals, Technorati estimates over 57 million blogs as of October 2006.

An excerpt from an article in Business Week Magazine on blogs says it best:

“Picture the blog world as the biggest coffeehouse on Earth. Hunched over their laptops at one table sit six or seven experts in nanotechnology. Right across from them are teenage goths dressed in black and thoroughly pierced. Not too many links between those two tables. But the café goes on and on. Saudi women here, Labradoodle lovers there, a huge table of people fooling around with cell phones. Those are the mobile-photo crowd, busily sending camera-phone pictures up to their blogs.
The racket is deafening. But there's loads of valuable information floating around this cafe. Technorati, PubSub, and others provide the tools to listen. While the traditional Web catalogs what we have learned, the blogs track what's on our minds.”
Now think of your employees having the same conversation about you as an employer. Scary.

Social Networking

A social network is a map of the relationships between individuals, indicating the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds. Social networking also refers to a category of Internet applications to help connect friends, business partners, or other individuals together using a variety of tools.

In 2003, social networking sites Friendster, tribe.net and LinkedIn started business. Now there are up to 200 social networking sites covering everything from business contacts to dating. Most recently, MySpace has been getting the lion’s share of the press. While there is currently some backlash to these types of services, and declining numbers, the concept, when implemented correctly can be very powerful.

But now some online services seek to take networking and personal connections from the HR toolbox and marry them to technology. “Social networking technology” refers to software and web-based services that enable users to use their personal relationships for networking, hiring, employee referrals and references.

HR professionals are trying products such as Visible Path, which measures the strength of relationships by analyzing company e-mail accounts, and LinkedIn Jobs, an online job board that allows users to visualize how many “degrees of separation” lie between them and potential job candidates.

But don’t think for a minute you are smarter than your employees. For every company using social networking to find people, there are 100 employees trying to find a new employer.

Accelerating Business Cycles

In 1978, about 10,000 businesses failed. The number of failures now exceeds 75,000.

Disruptive forces today include the collapse of distance and time-reducing product lifecycles and length of product differentiation. Increasing competition from traditional competitors as well as new competitors blurring business boundaries, are also driving greater change for companies and its employee base.

In addition, the buyer has increased power through improved information, increased choice and rapidly expanding expectations. This environment is forcing management to re-examine its mission and business operations more frequently.

Think about that for a minute. Companies are changing their mission and business processes more often – sometimes annually – and yet the one thing most employees want more than anything is consistency of direction; consistency of message from Management. How can a business survive when changes occur so quickly?

Not only is the business environment changing quickly, it is happening faster than the organization can respond. The time it takes to move to a new business process or business strategy is the new bottleneck for business.

Bringing it All Together

What we’re dealing with is a rapidly changing business environment that requires more knowledgeable and loyal employees during a reduction in supply of quality workers who now have more tools available to them for researching companies and connecting to new employers.

The revolution is taking place and it can’t be stopped. It’s fueled by technology, youth, and a desire to change the world. EIM believes that the smart companies will find a way to focus these issues and direct them toward furthering corporate objectives.
EIM recommends that companies think revolutionary to win. The following elements will help companies not only increase employee loyalty and help identify future employees but they will also provide an early warning system for identifying future issues and opportunities.

Identify your key talent and market to them directly

No different than identifying your key customers it is important that employees be segmented and marketed to differently. We’re not talking about “executives” or highly compensated talent, we’re talking about the people that truly reinforce your mission and values. If your company is known for its customer service then start looking in your call-center for key employees. Identify them, understand them and market to them.

Create communication channels outside your “normal” channels – and make it electronic

Weekly emails from the boss don’t cut it anymore. The only people that your employees really listen to are each other. Provide new communications tools – online blogs, bulletin boards, etc that allow for more informal conversations between employees. It’s revolutionary – but that’s why it will work.

Allow employees to determine rewardable behavior

Corporate culture is what is shared by the company not dictated by management. If your employees don’t have a way to reinforce the culture and behavioral norms of your business then they aren’t engaged. Within your HR strategy should be an element of peer-to-peer recognition and reward that puts the responsibility of reinforcing appropriate behaviors in the hands of those closest to the behavior.

Not only will you be able to understand what your employees feel is important you can be privy to shifts in culture long before they impact your bottom line.

Provide social networking within the company

The technology for identifying potential employees through social networks exists. Unfortunately, for your current employees it is used to connect with employers other than you. Implement a social network for employees to research and find opportunities within your organization. Sometimes the grass isn’t greener – just more visible. Allowing employees to connect with other departments gives them more information to make decisions about their future.

In addition, as an HR executive you now have an early warning system to see if there are problem areas within your organization. Is one area having too many requests for information on other areas? Maybe there is a management problem you don’t know about? Or even more frightening, do your employees know something about your business that you don’t? Remember, the person in the crow’s nest on a ship is usually the last to know if there is leak at the bottom of the boat.

Make employee recommendations more important than search firm recommendations – and make them visible

Good employees want to work with good employees and know what it takes to survive and thrive in your company. Listen to them. Create a space for referrals into your company. Track the progress, let the employee know why some one they recommended is hired (or not). This is critical with some of your more tenured employees (those that will be leaving for retirement). Get the old-timers in the loop. Help them identify new employees and make sure they are rewarded for it. Use your employee segmentation strategy to target soon-to-be retirees for referrals (family and friends are typical starting points.)

In Summary

The bottom line is that the issues HR professionals will face in the near future are going to be revolutionary. Take the time now to understand your employees today – and who they will be in the future. Begin setting up the infrastructure that will enable them to be their best.

Establishing new communications, reward and recognition systems will pay big dividends for any company. Who knows, you might even see your company being hailed in a blog and connected to the best talent through a social network.

About Excellence In Motivation (www.eim-inc.com)

Excellence In Motivation, Inc. (EIM) is a full-service performance improvement firm with over 200 professionals. We provide support for our many Fortune 500 clients through a network of 16 national offices. EIM creates comprehensive performance programs and business improvement strategies aimed at positively changing the behavior(s) of one or all of the audiences that matter most to our clients’ business performance: Channel Partners, Employees and Customers.