Joyce Gioia-Herman - Future Workforce Trends

The Navy and Employee Retention

Yesterday, I was struggling with California traffic on my way back from meeting with Bob Beck, the Dean of the Naval Postgraduate School.

Bob, a fifteen tear veteran of IBM and some other household names, is a delightful fellow who really “gets it.” He understand the challenges of retaining human capital and shares my concern for making sure the Navy is able to hold onto its good (and great) people in the midst of this escalating workforce crisis.

He challenged me to tell him how I could contribute to his curriculum.

I asked if they were teaching “Employee Retention.” Of course the answer was “No.”

Most MBA programs don’t even touch on this topic, the greatest challenge facing business today. To their credit, a handful now offer courses in “Human Resources.”

So obviously, we will have further conversations.

Looking forward. . .

Joyce Gioia-Herman

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Being Tested by the Universe: Part 2

The real question is “Do I go to Singapore to speak or cancel out at the last minute?”

I am scheduled to leave on the July 28th at 7am, after I speak the night before at the opening dinner for an organization near and dear to my heart, Leadership CONNECTIONS. The organization mentors young women at risk and it has been very successful in turning young lives around.

I am delivering my new keynote for the first time and having it videotaped. I am very psyched to have some video of me delivering my new inspirational material, “Moving into the Future with your Head and your Heart.”

I have always been a motivational futurist in hiding. It’s time to come out of the closet!

Looking Forward. . .

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More Single Women Buying Homes

As more women postpone marriage and family, we see them choosing to buy their own homes as individuals. Some say they are taking a stand for "financial independence" and others say they say they are investing for the future. Whatever the reason, there is a definite trend towards more single women buying homes of their own.

Right now, the bulk of home buyers are still married couples (60 percent). However, a recent study by the National Association of Realtors shows unmarried women represent 22 percent of the total homes purchased in the United States; up from 14 percent in 1995. That is a more than 50 percent increase in only 12 years.

Last summer, a study issued by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies found that unmarried women buy about one million homes every year; and between 2002 and 2003, they spent $550 billion on residential real estate.

According to this Harvard study, single women prefer homes in the city to the suburbs and generally will not choose new construction. Seeking a stronger sense of safety, while requiring less maintenance, most women buy smaller homes or less-expensive condominiums.

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The Effects of Fear

Fueled by the publicity frenzy the press is enjoying, the current volatility in world financial markets is affecting many people at all levels of our societies.

From the employees' point of view, this uncertainty engenders insecurity. What will happen to my company? Will it be in business? Will I have a job? The reaction is that they continue "corporate cocooning", staying in the safety and sanctuary of their corporate jobs, despite their deep dissatisfaction.

A number of studies have confirmed that at least 35 percent of our workforce is unhappy. Thanks to a social network analyst Scott DeGraffenreid, we have a label for it. We call it "Warm Chair Attrition". The shame is these employees still collect paychecks, take up space, and infect their fellow associates. It would seem to be good news for employers: their workers will not leave. However, bottom line, disaffected employees are not particularly productive.

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Internal Consumers Make "Ethical Choices"

According to the recently released Cone Cause Evolution Survey 2007, more than two-thirds of Americans say they consider a company's business practices when choosing or staying with an employer. The study, the culmination of 14 years of Cause BrandingSM and corporate responsibility research, found a substantial increase in the number of workers who want their employers to be good corporate citizens and support a social cause or issue over their previous study. The latter findings confirm our research of a few years ago for our book "How to Become an Employer of Choice" in which we found that "making a difference" was an important element for an organization being an Employer of Choice®. (www.employerofchoice.com)

According to Julia Hobbs Kivistik, an executive vice president at Cone, cause-related marketing efforts remain an effective way for a company to express its charity and core values. This study indicates an evolution in internal and external consumer thinking about the ways organizations can support society.

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Domestic and Global Brain Drains Revisited

On numerous occasions in 1999, 2004, and 2006, we have written about "brain drains", from individual cities as well as the entire country (the United States). Here is an update.

First domestically, smaller cities like Council Bluffs, Iowa and Lynchburg, Virginia continue to be challenged to hold their young people after graduation. The city leaders say, "We are a great place to raise a family, so sometimes we get back our graduates, when they are ready to settle down, but we want and need to have these young people after college as well. Even if we can get them to stay for a short time, they invariably leave for more 'exciting' environments."

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Employee Retention is a Global Issue

On September 10 and 11, I delivered a two-day workshop for the ETELS Training Networks in Kuala Lumpur. KL, as the cognoscenti call it, is a beautiful city. Compared to Singapore, it is dirtier and the infrastructure needs a lot of work. However, the city has large green areas and the largest bird park in the world. It also has an orchid garden, a hibiscus, the national flower of Malaysia.

Whenever I travel to someplace new, I allow at least an extra week to acclimate to the time zone, see the area, and most importantly, learn the culture.

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Latest Employee Retention Research Confirms Herman Group Forecast

On September 4th, Monster.com released the results of their most recent survey:

70% said that employee retention is a major business concern and 40% reported that recruiting has become more difficult in the last 12 months.

In another recent study, this one from Talent Keepers, almost half (45%) of the companies surveyed said that they expect employee turnover to increase; only 3% expect it to decrease. (We wonder what they're smoking?)

These findings line up perfectly with our 2007 Workforce/Workplace Forecast. You can read the whole thing at http://www.hermangroup.com/forecasts_2007.html.

These findings also point to employee retention being a growing problem for many employers. We can easily understand why increasing numbers of people want to sign up for The Employee Retention Specialist™ Certificate Program. There I teach everything HR professionals and other business executives want and need to know and what to do to attract and retain top talent.

Looking Forward. . .

Joyce Gioia-Herman

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A Fascinating Plane Trip

Often when we travel, we have an opportunity to sit next to people who have different and interesting perspectives. One such plane ride was my recent trip from Kuala Lumpur (KL) to Bangkok. There I sat next to a young man responsible for global investment for a major, Fortune 50 multinational organization.

He explained that his company had closed their office in KL in favor of opening one in Singapore. He explained that the cost of living in KL for employees being paid in Ringit (the currency of Malaysia) was higher than for those living in Singapore paid in SNG dollars, so they had an easier time hiring and keeping staff in Singapore than in KL.

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U.S. Competitveness

Yesterday, I delivered the closing keynote for the Annual Learning Festival for the country of Singapore. The title of my presentation was "Capitalizing on the Aging Workforce to Win the War for Talent". Sponsored by the Workforce Development Agency of their Ministry of Manpower, part of my job was to talk about a program called the Advantage! Scheme. This initiative gives employers up to SG$400,000 to hire and or retrain older workers which they define as 40+.

Advantage! supports a variety of services employers can provide for these older workers, including career guidance and health education, as well as improving the work environment to be better for seniors.

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Senior Workers and Keeping Up

When I spoke in Singapore last week, a member of my audience asked an interesting question: In Singapore, the younger, more highly educated workers are pushing out the more experienced, older workers, who do not have the same levels of education.

I was told afterwards by my clients that they thought this man wanted me to say that "the work culture in Singapore is 'bad' or 'wrong'". That is something I would never do. My view is that no foreigner has the right to denigrate the culture of a country being visited, particularly if that foreigner is a business person visiting the new country for work.

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Sabbaticals---The Right Way

On numerous occasions in the past, we have written about sabbaticals. Originally offered to college educators, sabbaticals now provide employees of non-academic institutions with an opportunity to disconnect from their jobs for a period of between three months and one year. The purpose is to allow the individual to relax and rejuvenate so that they may avoid burnout and return to their jobs with renewed energy.

Reviewing this year's list of Fortune Magazine's 100 Best Places to Work®, there are 22 (surprisingly, down from 25 last year) companies that offer fully paid sabbaticals. The list of companies includes Adobe, American Express, Genentech, Bain & Co., REI, and others. There are many more companies not on Fortune's list offering sabbaticals as well. In fact, the benefits-consulting giant Watson Wyatt estimates about 20 percent of large companies offer this benefit.

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Herman Trend Alert: War Games II

Once a year, Fuld & Co., a global pioneer in competitive intelligence, hosts a “public” war game between business school students. This year's timely and competitive challenge took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts and included teams from the Harvard Business School, MIT’s Sloan School, Northwestern’s Kellogg School, and the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.

This year, the student teams took on the identities of executives from Google, AT&T, Intel, and Vulcan Capital. The topic for the 2008 War Game National Championship was “The Battle for the Wireless Internet”, a business sector with many billions of dollars at stake. The students used their creativity and business skills to develop strategies for this rapidly shifting market, as they vied for a $5,000 prize.

We were impressed by the cultural diversity of the team members. Observers of the competition from high-tech, pharma, manufacturing, consumer goods, and finance, gained valuable insights by watching some very smart young people tackle what is next for this industry sector.

There were only three dozen observer guests, mostly strategy planners and judges from syndicated research firms and venture capital groups. About ten students from each B-school participated in the event.

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War Games Observed, And the Winner Is...

Every year, the global leader in intelligence for business strategy, Fuld & Co. hosts a "war game", giving four business schools the opportunity to compete for a $5000 prize. This year's spirited competition titled "The Battle for the Wireless Internet", featured the B-schools from Harvard, MIT, University of Chicago, and Northwestern. And the winner was . . . (drumroll, please!) Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, representing Intel.

The kernel of their strategy was to dominate the handheld wireless market with a new chip. As we mentioned in our Herman Trend Alert of 03-04-08 and an earlier blogpost, we were struck by the diversity of the teams. In fact, one of the teams didn't include one United States-born student. Each B-school team included one woman; one team even had two.

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Productivity is Up---A Good Thing? Maybe?

Besides the election results, this morning the news media is featuring a story about productivity in US employment rising 1.9 percent. They're not concerned about that figure (it was expected to be 1.8) as much as they are concerned with an attendant rise of 2.6 in unit labor costs. We are much more concerned with rising productivity numbers, when many employees are already stressed out and overworked.

From an economist's point of view, any rise in productivity is good. From the POV of the HR consultant, it is cause for concern about employee retention. Employers that push their people too hard will never be considered an Employer of Choice®. www.employerofchoice.com

Looking Forward. . .

Joyce Gioia-Herman

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Herman Trend Alert: Second Life Revisited March 12, 2008

Last year the virtual world Second Life (SL), secondlife.com received quite a bit of media coverage when several Fortune 500 companies staged events or built virtual presences there. Not so long ago, we covered the use of SL for market research. (www.hermangroup.com/alert/archive_3-21-2007.html ) Now, we revisit this topic to discuss some important developments. Second Life now has eleven million registered users with an average of 18,000 new people joining everyday.

In November, the hit TV drama CSI:NY aired an episode tracking a killer into this virtual world. At the end CBS aired a commercial, inviting viewers to go to their website to find a branded link to join Second Life and "continue the pursuit". The result: an extra 100,000 people signed up.

B2B and Consumer Products companies have also used SL for product development, recruiting activities, and staff meetings. Corporations, like IBM, bring in authorized staff from around the world to have virtual meetings that may include PowerPoint presentations, audio, video, interactive surveys on the spot, and more. Manpower has its own SL location and holds periodic job fairs.

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Cities Should Support Internships

From time to time, we are approached by second tier cities, complaining that they can not keep their young people. The answer is so simple, we didn't even get it on first exposure. One of the main reasons given by young people leaving their home towns is "employment". Their perception is that they could not find "the right employment" for them in the town. Often, they are wrong, but no amount of persuasion was ever successful in getting them to stay.

What will work is to engage them as interns, give them lots of training, show them working in a good culture is like. Trust me, they will be salivating to work with you after graduation. And the coolest part for employers is that they get the benefit of people who already know their cultures and how to get things done within the organization―--an issue that we maintain is a major driver of employee turnover.

Internships are win-win-win opportunities:

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Herman Trend Alert: Making HR Metrics Serve the Bottom Line

In our 2008 Workforce/Workplace Forecast, we discussed the growing importance of metrics (measurement) in Human Resources to drive more money to the bottom line. http://www.hermangroup.com/alert/archive_12-12-2007.html

Recently, we met Janet Walsh, President of Birchtree-HR, Llc, the person who coined the term "Human Capital Financial Management" (HCFM). "In HCFM, we evaluate investments in people for their returns and link them to business strategy," said Walsh. "Research studies conclusively prove organizations that link human capital programs with business strategy enjoy six to 38 percent higher return on total capital than those that don't," she added. The best systems are the ones where there is a "clear line of sight" between the people programs and the business strategy.

A global Human Resource consultant, focusing on HR strategy, compensation and performance management, Walsh is often asked, "How do I link the business strategy of the company to my programs?" Agreeing with our previous Herman Trend Alert, "the future of training will be gaming and simulation" http://www.hermangroup.com/alert/archive_2-11-2004.html , Walsh and her colleagues created an HR simulation, called "At the Table".

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Herman Trend Alert: U.S. Employee Confidence Index Declines

The Spherion Employee Confidence Index, a monthly measure of workers’ confidence in their personal employment situation, fell for the seventh consecutive time last month. With this decline, it reached the lowest level since the survey's inception in 2004.

We see two reasons for this downturn: first, the United States has experienced negative job creation for the last two months, last month losing 63,000 jobs, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics; second, the media continues to beat the drum of doom and gloom, because "Bad news sells." We have written about the media's effect before. http://www.hermangroup.com/alert/archive_8-15-2007.html

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