Archive for the ‘Generations/Demographics’ Category
PEAK Employee Needs: Looking through the Diversity Lens
Sunday, June 6th, 2010Organizations have more diverse talent than ever due to increasing globalization, demographic shifts and multiculturalism. Research shows that when a diverse team is managed well they produce higher quality ideas than a team with homogenous talent. Talent diversity in teams can be a competitive advantage for organizations.
Although the relevance of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is universal, how employees might want those needs fulfilled may differ. Some of those differences can be attributed to individual preferences and others to cultural or socialized preferences.
We invite you to consider the questions below while remembering that these are broad questions that are meant to facilitate a conversation. The purpose is not to stereotype or put people into boxes, but to encourage you to use a wide-angle lens in thinking about your employee population.
The best thing to do is to encourage managers to get to know their employees and what is important to them as individuals. Exploring these questions may make for a more meaningful manager-employee conversation.
- How might the need for compensation, benefits/perks and job security vary by generation, culture, country of origin, gender, and sexual orientation?
- How might the need for affiliation with the organization or colleagues (and/or how it is fostered) differ by generation, culture, country of origin, gender and sexual orientation?
- How might the need for recognition (and/or the way it is delivered) differ by generation, culture, country of origin, gender and sexual orientation?
- How might the need for meaning (and how and where it is found) vary by generation, culture, country of origin, gender, and sexual orientation?
Younger Than Barbie, Older Than Barack
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009[originally posted March 9, 2009 on the Huffington Post]
For some reason, the fact that Barbie turned 50 this past week freaked me out. As a guy who’s on the precipice of 48 and a half, I was already struggling with the reality that our President is younger than me. But, now I know that Barbie and I will hit the big Five-O within a couple of years of each other, yet my movable body parts live by the laws of gravity and hers don’t. Damn that Barbie.
Our economy has movable parts, too, and a whole lot of gravity. In fact, there’s so much gravity that savvy observers are starting to worry that my little cusp of a generation (what some have called Generation Jones, those late boomers or early-Xers born in 1954-1965), who’ve seen their retirement piggybacks lose more than half their value, “bail out of stocks for good. Some analysts say stocks, which posted zero gains for the ten-year period ending in October, are setting up for a second ‘lost decade.’” (USA Today) Does that make mine the “lost generation” since we may lead the way to a generational divesture out of the stock market?
Frankly, my generation has been lucky as we’ve experienced the “Great Expansion” from the time we graduated from college. Starting in late 1982 and continuing for 25 years through December 2007, this adult half of my life has been one long economic orgy (with two strictly-defined little recessions: nine months in 1990-91 and eight months in 2001). My generational cohorts have gotten used to the good times. But, what if that’s been a momentary quarter-century illusion and the U.S. may resemble an economy like the rollercoaster Argentina in the next couple of decades? Don’t cry for me, Barbie and Barack!
Our growing national debt, the painful process of de-levering American households and corporations, and foreign competition that at times makes the U.S. feel like Little Leaguers promise a bootstrap era like our grandparents experienced in the 30’s. Hell, amidst all this doom and gloom, our savings rate as a country skyrocketing to 5% last month after years of hovering around zero as we were scared as the dickens to spend a dime. But, like my Nonnie and Potka (yes, that’s what I called my dad’s parents), we’re saving under our mattress instead of in those bankrupt banks (the 17th of which was taken over by the government this year on another failing Friday). Listen, the federal regulators are taking the America’s top 20 banks through a “stress test” to see if these financial giants can make it under a variety of future economic scenarios, but I think that expression is more apt for what we’re all living through at the moment.
Debt financed a national lifestyle of consumption. Ouch, it’s hard to even write that sentence as it makes me feel like a fire and brimstone preacher shouting out of a flatbed truck. But, maybe it’s time to learn a few things from that Great Generation that survived the 30’s, learned to fight in the 40’s, and made babies in the 50’s. Barack’s Inaugural address basically told us it’s time to grow up. I guess he was speaking to me and my classmates who’ve been “kids in the candy store” for most of our adult life. Some of my friends are hoping this is just a “lost weekend” (on a really rainy weekend, watch that classic alcoholic film with Ray Milland — it’ll pick your spirits up or maybe drive you to some spirits), not a “lost generation” or “lost decade.”
But, let me end on a positive note. When I was at the TED conference a month ago, an economist revealed a fascinating graph that showed that if prognosticators in 1930 had predicted American economic growth for the balance of the century based upon either the pace of growth during the roaring 20’s or the growth during the first three decades of the 1900’s, they would have dramatically underestimated the actual growth we experienced by almost half. So, one of the key lessons about life is that we humans tend to imagine when we’re in bad times that they’ll never end and we tend to do the same during good times. Yet, this graph reminded me that there’s some givens in life beyond the fact that Barbie’s skin is still taut and smooth and Joan Rivers’ shouldn’t be. One key given over the past few centuries is that over the course of a lifetime, things do tend to get better economically, at least in a macroeconomic way. That’s an important reminder to those of us who may be approaching 50 and imagining that modern medicine suggests we may have just hit midlife. Now, if modern medicine could only perfect its cure to gravity.