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Harvard Business Review
Your oldest and youngest talent cohorts demand many of the same things in a workplace — and have the numbers to get their way.
RIGHT NOW, managers of people are operating in full recessionary mode. They’re wrestling with whether and how much to reduce head count, weighing alternatives like furloughs and pay cuts, and generally trying to get by with less. Not many are focused on what just a few years ago was described as “the war for talent.” As the economy recovers, however, companies will return to the challenge of winning over enough highly capable professionals to drive renewal and growth. Only then will they realize that the rules of engagement have changed — that the landscape of talent management has been transformed.
The combination of Generation Y eagerly advancing up the professional ranks and Baby Boomers often refusing to retire has, over the course of a few short years, dramatically shifted the composition of the workforce; each of these generations is roughly twice the size of Generation X, which lies between them. More important, Boomers and Gen Ys are together redefining what constitutes a great place to work. As we will show, they tend to share many attitudes and behaviors that set them apart from other generations. These shared preferences constitute a new center of gravity for human resources management.
Going forward, what will it take to be an employer of choice? Last year, Hidden Brain Drain Task Force, a group of 50 multinational companies committed to global talent innovation, took up this challenge. Four of the companies — Booz Allen Hamilton, Ernst & Time Warner, and UBS — spearheaded two large-scale, nationally representative surveys: one, in June 2008, of 3,782 employed college graduates and the other, in January 2009, of 1,046 people from the original sample. The resulting data allowed us to unpack the work aspirations of high-echelon talent across age groups and sectors. We augmented the survey results with qualitative input from 30 focus groups and 40 interviews. Stated at the highest level, our finding is that people, especially Gen Ys and Boomers, are looking for what we call a “remixed” set of rewards: Flexible work arrangements and the opportunity to give back to society trump the sheer size of the pay package. That was true before the downturn hit and remains so even as its full brunt is being felt.
This rewards remix is both challenging and liberating for talent managers. It’s challenging because it means letting go of cash as the prime motivator and tangling with the difficult task of redesigning incentives. It’s liberating because if nonfinancial rewards are less expensive to fund, companies can lay out more plentiful options. Perhaps that explains why we found managers experimenting with a whole range of such rewards — figuring out how to use time, for example, as currency, or a green workplace as a retention tool. In a period when many were not able to offer raises or bonuses, some realized it was the right time to respond to the attitudinal changes they were already sensing in the air. Because some of their initiatives deftly address the demands of the 800-pound-gorilla cohorts, Gen Ys and Boomers, we believe they show the way to tomorrow’s best practice.
IDEA IN BRIEF - Two large surveys of college graduates reveal remarkable similarities in workplace preferences between Baby Boomers and Generation V—the oldest and youngest groups in the emerging workforce.
- Both Boomers and Gen Vs want to contribute to society through their labor; seek flexible working arrangements; value social connections at work and loyalty to a company; and prize other rewards of employment over monetary compensation.
- Given the large size of these generational cohorts — relative to Generation X, which lies between them their workplace demands have significant practical implications for how employers should design work environments to and keep talent
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