Maybe it’s just me, but frankly, I’m tired of the nonstop bashing of the Millennial generation.
I wrote about this in March in my Last Word column (“Millennials at the Gate”), and I marveled then at how so many managers seem to want to demean and dismiss the youngest (born between 1980 and 2001) and largest (80 million) generation in the workforce as nothing more than a group of self-involved, unmotivated slackers.
That’s why the latest survey by career site Jobfox of more than 200 recruiters about their perceptions of job performance across generations is so maddening. According to the survey, only 20 percent of recruiters considered Millennials as “generally great performers.”
By comparison, 63 percent of the recruiters polled said baby boomers (43 to 62 years old) were great performers, 58 percent gave high marks to Gen X (29 to 42 years old) and 25 percent for traditionalists (63 and older). Gen Y was also classified as “generally poor performers” by the largest number of recruiters polled. Thirty percent of recruiters classified Millennials as poor performers, followed by 22 percent of recruiters who classified traditionalists as poor performers, 5 percent for Gen X and 4 percent for baby boomers.
I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t surprised by these numbers, given that Millennials are the youngest and least experienced employees in the workforce. Is it any great shock that this Jobfox survey shows an inverse relationship between age/experience and performance? My guess is that the baby boomers who fare so well in this survey would have been rated about the same as Millennials if a similar survey had been done, say, around 1978.
Rob McGovern, the CEO of Jobfox, also believes that Millennials get a bad rap, and that it is corporate leaders—not Gen Y professionals—who need attitude adjustments.
“Businesses must shed negative perceptions and learn new ways to incorporate Gen Y views into the workforce,” McGovern said in a press release about the survey results. “The companies that succeed over the next two decades will be the ones that can most inspire Gen Y. This is the most educated and technologically savvy generation ever.”
It’s also the generation that’s going to drive innovation and practices in the workplace for the next 50 years. It is actually a little larger than the baby boomer generation that has dominated things for the past 25 years, and so it will slowly ease those workers out of the picture.
We wrote about how to get the best out of Millennials earlier this year here at Workforce Management, and it’s a good article to reread in light of the Jobfox survey. But more than that, we need to have an attitude adjustment about these younger workers. For better or worse, they are our future. And are they any worse than any of us were at the same age? That’s the real question I wish these surveys would get to.
It’s a tough concept to get your head around, at least from my perspective, mainly because it is so difficult to define and measure. I’m also skeptical of a lot of the surveys and studies pertaining to engagement because I’m not always sure of what they are measuring. Here is one that seems to be able to get past that issue by comparing engagement across generations and age groups.
According to the survey, you can summarize employee engagement with these four primary principles, or drivers, that show that workers are engaged by:
• Leaders who inspire confidence in the future.
• Managers who respect and appreciate their employees.
• Exciting work that employees know how to do.
• Employers who display a genuine responsibility to employees and communities.
Kenexa has also come up with the Kenexa Employee Engagement Index, which comprises “four key components—pride, satisfaction, advocacy and retention,” according to a Kenexa press release. “Employee engagement, therefore, is not strictly happiness, excitement or the willingness to work long hours. Engaged employees align with their organization’s goals and are personally vested in the outcomes.”
This employee engagement index, or EEI, is “57 percent across all surveyed countries … [and the] EEI score for India, the top-ranked country, is almost twice that of Japan’s, the lowest-ranked country,” according to Kenexa. There’s also this additional bit of perspective: “In general, EEI scores for North American employees are higher than EEI scores for European workers—the Netherlands is the exception. Outside of India, other Asian and Middle Eastern countries score lower on the EEI. As economies strengthen in other low-ranking countries like Russia and China, EEI scores could increase in future surveys.”
“Organizations can make changes to align with these critical drivers,” says Jack Wiley, executive director at the Kenexa Research Institute. “Doing so makes good business sense because it not only improves employee engagement but also drives higher quality and customer satisfaction, revenue growth, and the company’s profitability. Time and time again we see that an engaged workforce delivers superior business results.”
It’s hard to dig into this survey, since you need to jump through a few online hoops to actually buy it, but many of the findings that Kenexa touts in the press release are not exactly breakthroughs. For example, “according to the WorkTrends data, if employees are confident in their senior leaders and the future of their employer, their EEI scores are four to five times higher than those of employees who lack this confidence. Confidence levels correlate with fast-growing economies—India, Mexico and Australia all have experienced recent economic growth and their employee engagement index scores are among the highest.”
It’s not a news flash that employees who are confident in their organization’s senior leadership and future are a lot more engaged, but the interesting thing to me is how much more engaged they are. If you can find a way to turn that into a greater ROI, you have something tangible. That might help take employee engagement out of the shadows as some hard-to-figure measure, and instead make it a real, honest-to-God business metric that managers can comfortably use and understand.
Back in 2006, we published a Workforce Management article that squarely focused on the job-related perils of social networking. “Web sites such as MySpace.com and Facebook can contain details about candidates that make employers think twice about hiring them,” staff writer Ed Frauenheim wrote. “The Web pages people create there sometimes include racy photos and videos, images of drinking or other compromising information.”
I’ve always been worried about having too much personal information online. Although I use LinkedIn—and that’s probably due to my age —I’m not into some of the larger social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. And as beneficial as I find LinkedIn, I also know I need to be careful about how much detail about myself I want on the Internet for everyone to see.
You may not worry about such things, or you may share my concerns, but either way, a new nationwide survey of employers by CareerBuilder.com should make you think again about the uses of social networking. According to the survey, 22 percent of hiring managers are using social networking sites to research job candidates, up from 11 percent in 2006. In addition, 9 percent of hiring professionals say that although they aren’t currently using social networking sites to screen employees, they plan to start doing so. In other words, almost a third of recruiting and staffing professionals are using or plan to use social networking sites to check up on potential hires.
And, there’s more to the CareerBuilder survey that hiring managers revealed:
• Some 40 percent of candidates posted inappropriate or provocative information about themselves on their social networking site.
• Nearly 30 percent revealed they had poor communication skills.
• Some 28 percent bad-mouthed their previous company or a fellow employee, while 27 percent lied about their qualifications.
• About 20 percent shared confidential information from a previous employer or linked themselves to criminal behavior.
That’s the bad news, but there are some positives that hiring managers reported as well:
• Nearly 50 percent found that a candidate’s background supported their qualifications for the job.
• Forty percent said that the candidate was a good fit for the company’s culture.
• Some 36 percent said that a candidate’s site presented a professional image.
• Twenty-four percent said the candidate’s profile was creative.
Yes, there are pluses to social networking, but also some perils for job seekers. And, it goes back to something I used to tell first-time computer users years ago: Always be careful what you write and post online, because no matter what it is, the last person you want to see it is likely to find it at the most inopportune time.
Ever wonder what PR people do when things are slow and they have too much time on their hands? I’ve got an answer to that: They huddle in corners and make up fake workplace problems.
I’ve written before about how so many experts seem to come out of the woodwork with “solutions” to problems like romance in the office (around Valentine’s Day), office pools and gambling (around the men’s college basketball tournament in March), and the perils of the company holiday party in December. Although there are some legitimate HR issues associated with all of these events, they get blown out of proportion by way too many PR people who are more interested in hawking their “expert” with an answer looking for media exposure (usually with yet another boring book to sell) than actually addressing a pressing workplace issue.
These issues are the urban legends of the workplace. There is no more evidence of employee productivity losses or other problems because of these events than there is evidence of alligators in the sewers, Elvis living with aliens, or the Loch Ness monster.
Now, in August, there’s another bogus workplace issue to add to the list: employees wasting time watching the Olympics at work. Below you’ll find the press release about this “problem” that we received this week at the Workforce Management world headquarters. The names have been removed to protect the guilty and clueless:
“With NBC boasting 7.8M unique visitors to their website on Monday, along with 15M video streams and 230M page views the first four days of the Olympics, which easily surpasses the ENTIRE 2004 Athens games, the 2008 Olympics are on pace to be the most watched ever.
“How are businesses addressing the effect that the most popular Olympics to date will have on employee productivity and workplace Internet access for the month of August? XXXX County, Maryland’s CIO, (name deleted), is using a product from (Company X) to monitor its 3000+ employees’ web usage, ensuring the county’s critical applications, staff productivity, and network resources don’t suffer as a result of the games.
“Please let me know if you are interested in speaking with (name deleted) and/or (Company X) about how companies can avoid hosting the Olympics at the office this summer.”
Is there a single manager anywhere in America worried about the Olympics cutting into productivity? The only “evidence” I can find, if you can even call it that, is this “survey” that is reported at the “News Lite: It Barely Qualifies As News” Web site. The claim is that 18 percent of workers age 18-24 “say they will catch part of the Olympics while working,” but again, there is no evidence of how this “survey” was conducted, who was surveyed or when the question was asked.
Interestingly enough, I got another press release on workers using the Internet at work for their personal purposes this week from the Kansas State University media relations office. It quotes Diane Swanson, a management professor at the university, who claims that checking the latest score on your computer or taking home a few pens from the office needs to be put in proper perspective. Swanson says: “I’m not dismissing it as a legitimate question but, for one thing, it pales in comparison to the massive highway robbery that has gone on at the top of organizations because of corporate scandals.”
And in case you think that Professor Swanson is making a case for stealing from the office, she’s not. Her memo talks about the need for businesses to talk to employees about striking a balance on these issues when so many are traveling, telecommuting and working from home. Take a read and I’m sure you agree.
But back to watching the Olympics at work: Is this a problem anywhere? Are you worried about it at your workplace? I’d love to hear from anyone out there who thinks this is a big deal (either with a comment posted here or an e-mail sent to me at jhollon@workforce.com), because in my mind, this is just another PR-driven workplace fairy tale.
As the San Francisco Chronicle reports on Thursday, August 7, “California employers can’t limit their employees’ right to work for a competitor or solicit former clients after they leave the company, the state Supreme Court ruled today. In a unanimous decision, the justices said state law since 1872 has forbidden so-called noncompete clauses that restrict management employees’ options in their next job or business.”
The reason this is important, as the Chronicle points out, is because “Courts in some states have upheld [noncompete] restrictions, and the federal appeals court in San Francisco has interpreted California’s law to allow a company to limit its employees’ future job choices as long as it doesn’t prohibit the employee from working in the same field. But the state’s high court said any such restriction conflicts with California’s ‘legislative policy in favor of open competition and employee mobility.’ ”
In other words, California’s highest court says that allowing workers the mobility to seek new jobs and openly compete on the free market trumps, in most all cases, the ability of an employer to restrict a worker from going to work for a competitor.
The Chronicle quoted Justice Ming Chin, who said, “An employer cannot by contract restrain a former employee from engaging in his or her profession, trade or business.” According to the justice, “the law recognizes only a few limited exceptions, for noncompete agreements that are part of the breakup of a corporation or partnership.”
If you’re wondering why this is important, the Chronicle explains: “Businesses and employment lawyers have been following the case closely, anticipating that it would resolve the disagreement between state and federal courts on the meaning of the California law. Federal courts are likely to fall in line now that California’s highest court has interpreted the law.” And if the federal courts follow California’s lead, this ruling will quickly spread across the country and be applicable to every workplace in every state.
“Both California employers and employees are winners in this case,” said attorneys James Pooley and David Murphy, partners in the trade secrets and unfair competition litigation practice at Morrison & Foerster. “The court’s decision was correct both as a matter of law and public policy. California will continue to have a high-velocity labor market, with the type of high employee mobility that many economists and social scientists believe has fueled its high level of technological innovation.”
To put that in non-attorney English, the court’s decision is good for both workers and the businesses that employ them because it removes a barrier limiting the ability of workers to freely move in the labor market—a restriction that might limit future innovation and job growth in California’s large and ever-changing economy.
Here’s my take: I’ve always thought that noncompete agreements were the province of paranoid, small-minded executives. I worked for at least one who has to be frothing at the mouth over this. He loved to bully workers and threaten them about taking his “trade secrets” to someone else.
His problem, however, was that he had nothing worth taking. There was no secret sauce, no combination of 11 herbs and spices for workers to take across the street. He had nothing to lose then, and with this California Supreme Court ruling, one fewer thing to bully his workers about now.
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