Creative benefits: An example that resonates
Posted On October 14, 2014
I’m on the road at least one night per week for 30+ weeks a year talking to companies about how to attract, engage and retain the next generation of talent. Whether in a small group workshop or to a keynote audience of multiple hundreds, we are often discussing creative ways to look beyond pure dollars and identify other benefits that make employees feel appreciated and understood. The examples I share and ideas that come from the audience frequently focus on achieving the elusive work-life balance. I’ve heard a lot, but I found this example recently on slate.com and it is… Read More
Categories: Generation Y / Millennials, Workplace
Is an ethics course in order for the Millennials?
Posted On September 25, 2014
The workplace cliché of the boss who makes the young staffers do all the work and then takes all the credit may be meeting its match. A new study by marketing firm DDB found that 27 percent of Millennials had taken credit for someone else’s work. And that’s just the ones who would own it. Comparatively, 15 percent and 5 percent of Xers and Boomers, respectively, admitted to the same. So what’s driving this seeming underhanded behavior? And how does this reconcile with a group that we’ve called social and altruistic? According to the survey authors, it’s the old dollar… Read More
Categories: Generation Y / Millennials, Work, Workplace
Retirement across the generations: Outlooks and warnings
Posted On September 11, 2014
It’s generally accepted that individuals will need retirement savings of roughly 16 times their pre-retirement salary, and that social security will cover only 4 times salary at most. It is also generally understood that most individuals cannot count on employer-defined plans to fund that missing 11 times salary – but how much is very different by generation. An Aon Hewitt study reported in Benefits Quarterly predicts that Boomers will be responsible for generating roughly 6.3 times salary out of their own savings while Millennials are faced with a daunting 10.5 times salary gap. The upside, of course, is that Millennials… Read More
Categories: Financial Services, Generation Y / Millennials, Retirement, Workplace
The Cool Part of this Job
Posted On September 3, 2014
Can anyone guess why there are so many more young people in this section of Canada? The grey background reflects the entire Canadian population. The bars reflect the specific area discussed in the slide. Big discrepancy here – why? Let me know if you can figure it out and I’ll send you the book of your choice of mine. Cam
Categories: Workplace
A few words on business clutter
Posted On August 19, 2014
An article in The Economist this month got me thinking about how different generations value time. The piece talks about three types of business clutter – organizational clutter, meeting clutter and email clutter. None of these is a shocking revelation to anyone who works in a large organization. The demands on time are significant, and often not related specifically to the task at hand. In fact, a colleague recently shared that when her boss asked for yet another report, she had to tell him “I can do the report, or I can do the work that the report is about,… Read More
Categories: Workplace
Millennials waxing nostalgic
Posted On August 7, 2014
A friend told me about the new Miranda Lambert tune and it made me chuckle. At the ripe old age of 30 years, Lambert is a Millennial. Yet here she is singing about the good old days of hard work and paying your dues. And I did my homework with good ol’ Google – Lambert isn’t just singing a lyric written by a Nashville old-timer; she wrote it. The chorus is especially amusing for someone who was only 15 when the Internet went mainstream: Hey, whatever happened to waitin’ your turn Doing it all by hand, ‘Cause when everything is… Read More
Categories: Generation Y / Millennials, Workplace
Gen X – stuck in the middle again
Posted On August 5, 2014
The numbers show it. And so do the conversations. Generation X is stuck in the middle. In “10 things Generation X won’t tell you” MarketWatch author Quentin Fottrell delivers a fairly thorough assessment of why Gen X is “poor, ignored and jaded.” Gen X numbers roughly half to two-thirds of its generational peers. Depending on whose statistics you use, there are about 49 million Xers compared to 75 million Boomers and 89 million Millennials. No wonder people aren’t paying as much attention anymore. But it’s more than that – Xers have been around a while. They were the thorn in… Read More
Categories: Generation X, Succession Planning, Work, Workplace
Searching for role models, Millennial women still come up empty
Posted On July 31, 2014
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg made big waves with her book, Lean In. But a recent study of Millennials, conducted by Bentley University’s Center for Women in Business, seems to agree with her assertion of an ambition gap among female workers. According to the study, while nearly 20% of Millennial women seek to emulate women leaders in their companies, another 20% have “no interest in becoming a leader at my current company.” Of course that leaves a good majority floating somewhere in the middle. It’s even more interesting when you apply the assumptions these Millennials are making about the women CFOs… Read More
Categories: Generations, Parenting, Work, Workplace
Truth in advertising vs. telling them what they want to hear: A recruiter’s dilemma
Posted On July 29, 2014
The Millennial workforce rivals Boomers in size, but not necessarily in availability. This creates an interesting conundrum for recruiters. While there should be more supply than demand (and in some industries there certainly is), companies are still competing hard for the best talent. Those with traditional business models, such as public accounting, are particularly at odds with the Millennials’ more relaxed approach to work. How do you entice with promises of work-life balance in a business with a “busy season” that has young employees averaging 60+ hour work-weeks? Very carefully. Maybe the balance isn’t about the number of hours worked… Read More
Categories: Work, Workplace
Is health insurance still an attractive benefit?
Posted On July 17, 2014
With the recent Supreme Court decision excusing Hobby Lobby from providing certain birth control options in its employee health plan and the goal of Obamacare to make health care affordable and accessible to all Americans the employer-assisted health plan is getting tons of attention. We know costs keep rising and many employers are passing more and more of that cost on to employees. And with the rise in part-time and contract workers, employees are finding themselves increasingly ineligible for employer plans. Will all these trends converge to make employer-provided coverage a relic? I don’t see it happening right away, but… Read More
Categories: Financial Services, Generation X, Generation Y / Millennials, Retirement, Workplace