Career aspirations are a moving target with most millennial young employees and one should not be surprised to get a completely new perspective on job roles that attract people every six months
Ganesh with skills pros Mukta and RuchiEvery time we conduct a top management workshop, in India or the US these days, the topic inevitably veers to the subject of transformation. Digital transformation is often the overarching theme but it involves technology, process, data and cultural transformation and of all these transformation, talent transformation is possibly the most interesting and yet the least amount of time and money is spent by senior leadership on making it happen.
Talent, entering organizations has changed dramatically. The millennials who populate most functions in the organization are interested primarily in being challenged with new tasks every day and even large increments and frequent promotions cannot motivate them to stay unless they see opportunities for learning and mentoring coming their way. And what about the Gen Z, twenty-something who join the organization from campuses or after a couple of years in another company? Once the initial excitement of the new job fades, they are already wondering if their role in the organization is appropriate and wouldn’t it be better and faster to find a different role elsewhere!
This is where the crux of the talent transformation challenge lies. How does one create an environment in the organization where everyone from the newest recruit to the senior management has a role that adds value, has access to skills that enable good performance and continuous learning and is provided with coaching and mentoring that reaffirms their importance to the organization and makes them perform at their best? This places an onerous role on the human resource function to recruit the right people, enable them to perform at their best and retain the best talent even as non-performers get helped or weeded out in time to keep the organization performing to potential. And the trend in these times is to see how much of the contextual functions of HR management can be outsourced so that employees get a seamless experience while the organization leadership focuses on the core transformation agenda in line with business requirements.
The four key pillars on which this rests are employee branding, career management, skills and support communities. The first is of course a reflection of the quality of management and the visibility the leadership team has as innovators and the reputation they build as good employers in the communities they operate in. At the company I ran for fifteen years, Zensar Technologies, we had a focus on the triple bottom line of Profits, People and Planet and the accolades we received for our work with people and society made us one of the great employer brands in the city and industry.
The millennials who populate most functions in the organization are interested primarily in being challenged with new tasks every day
Career aspirations are a moving target with most young employees and one should not be surprised to get a completely new perspective on job roles that attract people every six months. It is easy to get frustrated with this frequent change of mind but the truly dynamic organizations of tomorrow will recognize the needs of the restless mind and constantly give them opportunities to evaluate possibilities and assess what it takes to succeed and get that coveted promotion in the current role or re-skill and succeed in a different role. This automatically provides a segway to the third critical feature which is skills and learning on demand at the time and pace of the employee rather that the scheduling skills of the employer. The days of training centers and sending people for expensive weeks of education in business schools are fast ending and it’s “just-in-time” learning personalized to the changing needs of the day and the different styles of each learner that makes for effective skills development.
Finally, the concept of creating communities is still largely ignored by traditional organizations who still suffer from the paranoia of unions and employee collusion against the wishes of management. In a world where communities are being formed hourly on Facebook, and every other form of social media, organizations that enable communities are more likely to retain employee and keep them happy. Three types of communities are becoming popular peer communities for knowledge sharing and learning from each other’s experiences, communities led by coaches and mentors and even alumni communities that discuss progress of the organization with leaders and offer themselves for roles when new opportunities emerge in fast growing organizations.
If all this looks too complex for the average HR department to handle, many medium size and even large companies are considering outsourcing of many of these functions to organization who can use a judicious combination of expertise, technology and tested processes to provide better HR outcomes. One organization in Southern India which has already done an RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) effectively is now outsourcing these four functions to an organization which will install a digital platform for all employees that enable them to explore alternate career options within the firm, explore learning through multi-media and choose mentors and peers to help them on their learning and career journey. No shortage of excitement for the leaders of tomorrow.
by Ganesh Natarajan
