On Jan. 1, 2011, Baby Boomers began turning 65 years old, and we started losing 12,000 workers every day to retirement.
“Most leaders don’t realize this is going on and is real,” said John Grubbs, an expert on generational change in the workplace. “It is significant, and most leaders do not have a plan.
“If your organization isn’t talking about talent today, then you are missing a huge opportunity because we are starting to see the bands of the storm come ashore.”
Grubbs shared research with attendees at the recent Louisiana Governor’s Safety & Health Conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that shows by 2020, almost 50 percent of workers will be millennials, and those millennials will be the superiors and leaders making decisions in your organizations. Grubbs focused not on the usual topics of worker shortage or the transfer of knowledge but instead on how to work with this tech-savvy, multitasking generation.
According to Grubbs, the millennials or Generation Y, born in 1981-2000, are 70 million strong. Much different than the Baby Boomers whose parents lived through the Great Depression and had loyalty of 20-40 years on the job, Grubbs described millennials as “vapors because they are here one minute and gone the next.” He outlined subsets of Generation Y — one as products of a single working mom who were influenced more by their peers and another set as products of “helicopter parents” who hovered over and protected their children from everything in life, including failure.
“But there is a whole subset of Generation Y in the middle,” explained Grubbs. “They have been taught and loved, and they know they are good, and we have to treat them right.”
Grubbs said these managers of the future are going to be more understanding and flexible.
“If you want to be attractive to these millennials, you have to build this into your organization,” he said. “People call millennials a lazy generation, but they work for what they believe in. You just have to ensure your organization is something they believe in.”
Key to this is employing methods to engage this workforce. According to the Harvard Business Review, 70 percent of employees are merely earning a paycheck. Grubbs breaks the workforce into three groups with each making up one-third: 1. Leaders, 2. Seaweed (those who go with the flow) and 3. CAVE people (Citizens Against Virtually Everything).
“If you can influence that engaged 30 percent, they can influence the seaweed,” he said. “The war for talent means it is how well you attract and retain that is going to separate you from your peers.
“The millennials have been exposed to information at their fingertips their whole lives. You must give them information on a regular basis.”
Grubbs recommends using social media forums like YouTube and Twitter to push content to your employees every day.
“We are not going to be able to keep technology out of the workplace,” he said. “Use it to relay information to your employees. There is going to be a whole lot of technology changing the way we train in the next five years.”
Further, companies should share the values of the organization with employees.
“Most values never reach the front line as intended,” said Grubbs. “Decision making is easy when values are clear. If you use proven methods to get your values to the front line, people will make the right decisions.”
Grubbs said most leaders are frustrated at not having a plan, and most companies need help.
“Ask your management, ‘What are we doing to deliberately attract the best and brightest to our organization? Do we have a plan?’” he said. “If your organization doesn’t have a strategy in writing with how to deal with generational change, then you are vulnerable.”
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