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TOMORROW'S PEOPLE ARE ALREADY HERE
27 / 05 / 08
Tomorrow’s People.
If I could transplant you to the year 2020, you’d look around your firm and be astounded. There you are in the corner still working, aged 65, either because you don’t want to retire, or because you can’t retire - there aren’t enough people around to do the work and besides, if you’re salaried, your pension’s too small to live on. The few young people in the office seem alien to you, obsessed with things that you don’t understand, coming as they do from completely different backgrounds and what’s more, they never seem to do any work!
Well, here’s the bad news. This isn’t 2020; the people of tomorrow are already here…and you’re one of them.
Shortages of People
We’ve known about the demographic time bomb for a while, but no-one heard it explode. It wasn’t a loud bang, more like the slow release of a poison gas.
Some professions are already experiencing shortages of good people to do key jobs: global business partners for example, and those who provide cross border services. In the accounting business, channel 2 consultants are in short supply, and in the legal profession, good IP specialists. But more worrying is that the lifeblood of your firms, your trainees, is also under threat.
There is increased competition for these young people as more professional service firms finally wake up to the idea that they are in a war for talent. And for the first time ever, we are seeing a generation of young people who are inheriting enough wealth not to have to work for a living. How are you going to lure them back from the beach?
These youngsters have seen their babyboom parents burn out, so they value lifestyle over career success. They want a share of the action, and of the rewards, but they don’t seem to have the same allegiances as former generations. They want to binge work, stay with a firm for a limited period and then move on. They sell their skills on the open market to the highest bidder or decide to take a year out and write a novel. Furthermore, they’re fussy about the kinds of opportunities they take. (See inset)
A 24 year old production manager at Nestle in Switzerland whom I spoke to recently was complaining about his company wanting to send him to South America to turn a failing unit around. It would be good for him, they said. ‘But why would I want to go there?’ he asked, ‘when I live in the most beautiful county in the world, surrounded by the mountains and by my support network. They can’t seduce me by the lure of foreign travel. I had travelled to five continents by the time I was twenty. The money’s no better and I’m living in dreadful conditions away from my family and friends. Why would I? ’
In the developing world, the situation is different. There is still ambition, hard work and, for a while at least, cheaper labour, hence the interest in outsourcing. But that’s not easy for professional services firms whose skills base relies on a sophisticated knowledge of local legislation and regulation and which cannot easily be off-shored to Bangalore. How do you attract these workers and give them enough understanding of local practice to be qualified to do the job?
Knowledge working and emotional labour
Futurists are predicting that the knowledge economy will divide into know-how jobs, which is something that can easily be replaced by technology, and hyper-human jobs which can’t. We are already seeing knowledge workers lose their jobs because their roles are being replaced either by technology or by people doing it themselves, for example, completing their tax returns on line.
This leaves jobs that require the human element, in particular jobs that require emotional labour, as the psychologists put it: professional advisers, people in customer service roles, managers, leaders. An accounting firm, for example, might outsource most of its service centre jobs, increasingly use technology to cut out the routine processes, but use its professional staff to create business value, become business coaches to clients, even hand-holders. In short, to add the hyper-human element. This may mean dividing channel 1 and 2 services even more clearly into separate businesses.
The shape of organisations to come
Professional services firms have remained the same shape, if I can put it like that, for a considerable time. A large base of trainees at the bottom of the professional chimney, channelled into more senior roles and eventually into partnership, with a supporting cast of administrators and specialists.
But a recent report in the British newspapers suggested that young middle-class potentials, impatient to begin their careers and disenchanted with how well university equips them for the world of work are choosing not to go to university at all but are taking different routes, some of them straight into work. Will you be able to find these people to offer them a career, when they have disappeared into retail or rock and roll? Is the chimney model sustainable when there are fewer young people, they’re not so motivated to work for you and the milk-round no longer exists?
You need to see your organisation not as a well-sealed chimney but as an amorphic, porous, amoebic organisation which can change shape with elasticity and grow or shrink as needed. In short, your organisation will be a network of talented people, located in a variety of organisations, not just yours, or working alone, across the globe, connected by the assignments they choose to complete for you. They will include the self-employed, alumni and even competitors.
Resourcing = long term access to the best work of the best people
Bruce Tulgan, Rainmaker Thinking
To attract and retain the best people you may need to change the ways you contract with them. After all, they’re used to customising their i-pod jackets, desktops, coffee, so why not their terms and conditions?
You need to open up every job, partners included, to part-time working to encourage people who have other interests and obligations. You should expect leakage at the partnership level as more burnt out seniors want to retire early or combine their retirement with consultancy, charitable work, other jobs and interests. Allow later retirement as older people are younger now than they have ever been. Keep them reeled in. Consider job sharing and use your alumni as a resource. Professional practices have operated a leverage model for years, but how are you going to make money using leverage when you have so many expensive older people working for you? Will young people be interested in equity if it ties them in? Maybe you should be investing in their embryonic businesses, in their talents, partnering with them to serve your clients?
Understanding your people’s motivation
Tesco has taken the principles of CRM (Customer Relations Management) and applied it internally to help them understand what motivates their own staff. They considered five grades of commitment, from the complete workaholic to those who just wanted minimum involvement: People who
• Live to work
• Want it all
• Seek a work-life balance
• Want to have some fun
• Work so they can live.
Tesco are happy to embrace all levels of commitment, they just like to know, so they can tailor people’s packages to suit.
Accounting firms are going to find it difficult to have such grown-up conversations with their staff about their motivations, likelihood of leaving, interests outside of work, etc. because of the unspoken assumption that everyone wants to be a partner and the fear that if they leave, they might take business or talent with them. But this kind of myopia, less prevalent in the corporate world, needs to be confronted.
So what’s to be done?
1 Cast your net widely to attract the most talented in the world
2 Become an amoebic organisation, soften your boundaries, recruit outside the traditional pools, share talent with other partner organisations
3 Be prepared to adopt multifarious ways of working
4 Know your people, why they work for you and what they want in the future
5 Re-think the leverage model of business
6 Offer equity to everyone or no-one
7 Decide what kind of people you want to employ (work-aholics or live-aholics) and market yourself as such
8 Isolate those hyper-human activities which only you can do well and charge a premium for them
9 Talk to the under 20s; they’re the people of tomorrow.
