Does the Economic Crash Really Spell the End of Staff Satisfaction and Engagement? (Nothing’s Changed You Idiot)

I recently came across an article interviewing several human capital specialists about the implications of the economic crash for employee management. The gist of their collective views was that the power balance had shifted from employees to employers. Apparently – according to these wise consultant folk – employers no longer need to worry about wether their employees are satisfied and engaged. In these dire economic times, they should just be grateful to have a job.    

 

It goes something like this.  IQ has replaced EQ as the key employee management strategy so employees ‘… just sit down shut up and get on with it’.  Generation Y – you’re in for the shock of your life.  The days of picking and choosing are over.  Don’t expect you’re employer to care about you’re training and development.  Forget coaching and participating – just behoove to your authoritarian masters and be thankful they put the pittance in your bank account each month.  Don’t ruminate about the latest i-thing you can’t afford as you sweat it out in some back room for the man…  (OK – a little bit exaggerated but you get the drift..)

 

I never know how this sort of tripe gets into the pages of my daily city news paper.   As I see it, the balance has changed for those who have lost their job – no question.  But for those still in the job the balance has just become a bit misshapen – contorted.  This is because when after an employer   has decided who to keep and gone through the harrowing process of “disengaging” (i.e. sacking) the unfortunate employees no longer required (who were most likely employed as a result of poor decisions anyway – but that’s another story),  the employer is probably left with less staff to do more work. Now to get these now stressed and torn people to work more productively than ever, the last thing you want to do is reduce their engagement and  satisfaction levels. 

 

The ability to harness employee motivation and creativity  will more than likely be the differentiating factor which separates the winners from the losers in the current economic environment.  Getting your people to work harder at being more efficient, solving more problems and creating new solutions is a recipe for opportunity. growth and prosperity – just the same as it always has been, but even more so right now.  And if you can’t pay them for it properly at the moment, link their efforts to the company’s future prosperity at least so that when it all pays off they will get some reward. 

 

So if you think that getting tough on your staff is just natural and justifiable reaction to an economic downturn – let me tell you – your lawyers won’t care when you’re down at the insolvency court.

Career Conundrums for the Young Generation

The other night teenage son interviewed the Propitious Manager as part a school project on career development. Teenage son is generation P (Pokemon and Harry Potter), normally uninterested in anything other than what can be conducted on-line or by text message (with the exception of loud guitars and amplifiers).

After traversing the ups and downs of dads professional pursuits ( and unprofessional pursuits – the idea that PM had once slaved as a kitchen hand for petrol and rent money posed a look of fear across teenagers face lest the same fate be in store) the inevitable question arose – ‘what advice would you give a young person about developing their career?’. This of course gave the PM a rare fleeting opportunity to pass some wisdom and guidance to teenager which would actually enter his brain, even for the moment it took to print the answer in the project book. Alas, however, I found the answer quite perplexing.

Back in the dawn of time (the early 1950’s) the PM’s father entered the work force in the days when one left school and sort lifelong employment with a respectable company (although PM senior went on a number of tangents during his working life). Years later during the ‘age of the oil crisis and heavy rock’ the PM began his career after some frivolous (but useful) years at university. With no real ambition other than to make some money and find a nice girl to marry, the PM’s career (to date) was one of opportunistic leveraging of a gradually expanding skill set across government and private industry (see about). This is the modern corporate career where there’s little long-term job security and and people cry job and skill flexibility and lifetime learning.

But hold on here – should I propose that teenager multi-skill – do a carpentry apprenticeship, followed by a degrees in technology and environmental science and perhaps a medical or law degree for good measure. With a bit of luck that should give him a varied enough skill set for the career flexibility required to leverage the job market over he next two or three decades. Of course the ideas of multi-skilling and multiple careers is perpetually popular but actually of limited value when one is talking about moving across trades or professions. PM’s career flexibility actually focuses around a few mathematical, psychological and business skills and some common sense. My career is largely variations across the same few themes, admittedly, applied in different contexts. I’ve known only a few people who have actually changed their professional career midstream – they could afford both the time and the money (no kids or working spouse) and putting up with post adolescent culture of a university (we should all eventually move on from there….) and then climbing the ladder – its too much for most.

Still, this has little bearing on my response to teenagers project, other than the conclusion that 99 per cent of folk could never afford or tolerate complete professional career change, and that diversifying in your main area of expertise is probably valuable. At the very least, opportunism is a good thing – but that involves attitude and behaviour – the ability to see and exploit situations, self-confidence etc.

Opportunism is probably closely related to entrepreneurship except that whereas the former finds and leverages the situation, the latter actually creates the situation and runs with it. Entrepreneurship is probably the greatest career asset of all if you happen to be really good at it. First you’ve got to have the idea, but then you have to have the charisma and fortitude along with basic business knowledge to get it to happen. There should definitely be more classes about Richard Branson and Bill Gates in todays schools – it would get young folk a lot further than messing with foreign languages or sport.

Anyway, as I monologued to teenager (this was an interview) I realized the basic problem was trying to figure out what the working world would look like in the next 30 years. Careers are a long-term concept – you study for years, work for years and finally you might reach a stage where you can contribute and influence. There may be some careers which will exist in 30 years, such as teaching, medicine or law but the life or many other products, services, industries and production methods gets shorter and shorter. For many people, there is a risk that their specialist skills will become redundant by changing consumer preferences driven not just by technology, but changing values as reflected in public policy such as environment protection strategies.

There is a lag in these changes driven by vested interests of those unable to accept change or seeking to preserve their employment. In the end the market place driven by technological change and consumer preferences of generations Y and P extinguishes them or the renitent protagonists grow old and retire.

So in the future, the only real hunch I have is that most jobs will continue to involve maths, language (communication) and ideas – the foundations of our modern economy as has always been the case. If you are highly skilled at these the you have a chance to make a contribution. After that it is about commitment to something (not necessarily that you like passionately), because when your committed, opportunities arise and ideas evolve. And of course you will always have to learn how to apply your skills to changing contexts.

This was OK for the project but of course seemed vague and pathetic to concrete teenager. I lamely suggested that for my fathers father the answer would have been simple: tidy yourself up and join a respectable profession or company. Back then it would have served him a lifetime of employment, today you might be lucky to last 6 months before your taken over or restructured out of employment.

Anyhow, its of little consequence. At present teenager is committed to being a rock star and we have a deal – you pass maths and english exams and I’ll buy you a new amplifier.

Is There a Business Strategy Left for the Music Industry Dinosaurs?

As I noted previously, its out with the old and in with the new for the music industry as the internet erodes property rights and the foundations of the entertainment industry crumble. I admit to having a fascination with this scenario, but it is a unique opportunity for whimsical postulation about the product cycle.

When post maturity decline is reeling in your product or business model your reflex is too kick and thrash wildly to try and unhook yourself from the inevitable end. Sometimes the hook breaks and you get away scarred – but when the change is structural (is an this case) another reel soon comes along with an even bigger hook. So if your a record company, its not surprising that you might try to use what capital and market power you have left to try and leverage your way into the new on-line world by doing deals with the major on-line providers to save your skin. But is it overconfident or courageous to invest in the new music world?

In fact, the evolution of the digital internet era and the demise of the pre-digital markets are moving at different trajectories. In the former case, its hard to predict precisely where things are headed as exponential technological innovation propels music making and marketing into the living rooms of millions of musicians. Last year it was iTunes downloads, this year its MySpace personal playlists. In the case of pre-digital markets the end of a product cycle is merely about wasting profits and capital on fruitless litigation – action which is akin to climbing Mt Everest with a broken leg. Large corporations in any industry tend to be very bureaucratic for several simple reasons, they have a lot of employees which a) they have to organize large groups of people in a cohesive manner, b) many of whom are pursuing their own political self-interest rather than cohesive operational interest within the organization, and c) who find it a lot more convenient to take a salary as an alternative to being entrepreneurial. These are necessary qualities when the corporation is operating within a mature and stable market. But not so flexible when the market is chaotic and evolving. The problem is that apart from trying to shut down the competition through litigation, the only other thing the dinasours can do is buy it, then shut it down or leverage it depending on the relative cost of closing the old or expanding the new. In the latter case there are two conundrums. First it is ambitious to try and predict the life-cycle of the new product. You could spend a lot of money on buying a new tech-based industry only to see it overtaken by something newer before you have leveraged it. Secondly, you can only buy a legal entity, and much of the competition has no legal entity (eg. torrents, peer to peer services etc.)

The is another problem. This concerns the fact that the consumers of digital internet products are largely generation Y, and the newer generation P – the Pokemon/Potter (of Harry fame) generation who are aged between 6 and 16. Generation P, even unlike their generation Y forefathers learn’t to manipulate Nintendo control’s at the age of 4 and can six finger touch type 40 wpm at seven years old. They are not consumers of iTunes, but of torrent, peer to peer networks and social networks. And here lies the real problem; they don’t pay, they’ve never bought a record album, or CD. Their parents might pay to download from iTunes but generation P doesn’t know the meaning of the word royalty and they don’t need too to get hold of anything from the 50 year back catalogue of rock and pop.

Generation Y in Asia

Generation Y is a cultural clash creating all sorts of challenges for companies around the world. Asia seems to be no exception.

So not that long ago we were doing a job in South East Asia. The company was confused about why their generation Y professionals kept churning off to work for smart Japanese owned companies. Well it turns out that the gen Y folk were after a bit more action than you might get in some more traditional Asian businesses. Often said is that Asian employee behaviour is about loyalty, formality and respect for those older/wiser, or if your a Hofstede fan, high on uncertainty-avoidance and low on individualism – the collectivist culture. (I’m not actually a great advocate for putting large diverse populations and geographies into little concept boxes, but anyway….)

Well, the gen Y folk, armed with their engineering degrees, MBA’s etc. weren’t happy because they were ambitious (not just money – they wanted training, experience, career development and participation etc.) just like their western counterparts. Perhaps they get the ambition bug from their western university education, or maybe just from being globally networked. Curious too that they respected their elder managers to the extent that they didn’t complain – they just left the company. Those that remained intended to move on after a couple of years experience.

Interesting is the 2/6/2008 International Monetary Fund article projecting economic growth in emerging Asia slowing to 8.6% (excluding China 10%). with 40% of export trade between Asia itself. I can’t see much change in gen Y labour demand based on those numbers.