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At work, keeping the “young kids” around is a really big problem.

You see, I work for a division that has been around for 40 years in a company that is over 120 years old. My division had its heyday in 1980 and most of its employees are aged to match. They are all creeping nearer and nearer retirement and my employer is having difficulty solving the need for new blood in preparation for the soon-to-be boomer exodus.

In the time I’ve been employed there, almost all of the people with whom I started have left and been replaced with fewer, younger employees. Management has only recently grasped the enormity of the problem, and is still treating it with the backroom secrecy that was popular before the dot-com bubble.

They are of the same mind and opinion as the people who researched and wrote this article:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/011008-young-workers-hard-to-retain.html

Lets talk about why this article is so completely out of touch with reality, shall we?

1. Economics.
   You cannot claim that people are making unreasonable demands for more than their market worth if another company is willing to pay those demands. This is called “Econ 101″ and most executives need to throw out their “synergistic foundational paradigm” MBAs and retake it.
   Its pretty damn simple: If your employees are all leaving for more pay somewhere else, then you aren’t paying them enough! (No matter what you paid their parents or what you got paid when you started.)
2. Environment
   The article makes the audacious claim that some employees are expecting their own office! (The Scandal!!!) I can vouch that the office itself isn’t the primary problem… it is the entire work environment. If a new-hire sees that there is never a chance for an office in his/her near future, or if he/she sees that employees are hired as cattle to be herded into pens, then of course that untethered employee is going to leave for “greener pastures”. (Pun most horrifically intended.)
   We have a bit of this where I work, and I am trying every chance I get to get things resolved. Fighting for pay may be tilting at windmills, but “workplace environment” is a huge CEO buzzword and can be improved.
   The fact of the matter is, my company is a fantastic place to settle down and have a career. The problem is, most people my age aren’t looking for that. Companies who want to retain my generation need to recognize that they can’t use boomer-era thinking anymore.
3. Rewards.
   I love the part in the linked article where the writers are shocked by the fact that younger workers expect to be rewarded for good performance. That just tells me that these employers are ruthless slave-drivers whose companies won’t survive for another decade.
   If you aren’t rewarding good performance, then you have far more problems than new employee retention. Take a quick scan of your code one day and count the number of expletives… then rent the movie “Office Space” and make sure every Milton gets his red Swingline — lest your lunchtime martini becomes a Molotov Cocktail.
   New Employees are the most important to reward. Over the course of their first 6, 8, 12, 24 months, they are going from “no-nothing” to “fully functional”. Those first years are the most formative and most likely to define how they treat the rest of their tenure at your company. They see everyone else around them doing the same job day-in and day-out, and by 2 years vested, these new-hires are doing it themselves. If you don’t reward them before this point (either in pay, recognition, positions of leadership, stages of ability to provide input, etc.) then they will (correctly) ascertain that rewards come just as frequently as excitement breaks the Monday-to-Friday monotony.

I think its about time for executives to stop whining to their trade magazines and accept the fact that we’re not going to put up with the stuff our parents put up with. We grew up learning that the generations before us overcame The Great Depression, World War(s), Rises and Falls of Communism, Civil Rights Injustices, and all manners of hardships. To see those same generations shackled to desks giving up their livelihoods dashes away most of the pedestal on which we placed them.
“There has to be a place where people still have Spirit within them,” we think. “If this place pays more, it must be a less-demoralizing place to work,” my generation (commonly, unfortunately) mistakes.

Now to anyone who reads this far: Save this text and send it to me in 20 years. If I’m in a position where I’m hiring employees, I’m sure this situation will rear its ugly head yet again… and I’ll probably need a kick out of my “client-focused competency resilience platform”.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 2:29 am and is filed under IBM, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.