Saturday May 19, 2012
Having a company with many young employees means that an employee or an employee's spouse is almost always pregnant. Indeed, there are usually multiple babies on their way.
We have even hired obviously pregnant applicants, knowing that the new employee would soon take time off for the birth. I think of all of these babies as the next generation talent pool. Occasionally, though, upon completion of the 12 week FMLA leave time, a valued employee decides that work is not a current option and that staying home with the baby is most important.
We support whatever choices our employees make, although we'd like to be in on the decision as soon as possible for planning and work coverage. Lifestyle choices are important to millennial employees (also called Gen Y) in your company. Even many gen-X employees seek flexibility that the Baby Boomer generation never dreamed of demanding.
Here are tips for managing these valued millennial employees and some thoughts about not putting millennial employees in a one-size-fits-all box. Myths abound about millennial employees; don't get sidetracked and miss the best the millennials have to offer in your workplace. It's a lot.
In fact, I ran across a great example of millennial employees successfully contributing to a workplace. Donna Fenn, a respected small business guru, posted on Facebook that the CEO of Tasty Catering in Chicago helped his business grow by handing the reins to millennial employees.
Interesting to me, too, is the company's habit of hiring the best possible employees they can find as interns during high school. Many stay through college and on into their career. Worth your time to hear more, too, about balancing generations in a workplace.
In my company, we hire millennials as interns and offer jobs to the best contributors. It's a real time opportunity to try before you buy, so to say. But, working with Gen Y, as my new article explains, is both a challenge and a joy.
Image Copyright Pando Hall / Getty Images
Friday May 18, 2012
Think about this changing world that we live in. Changing customer needs, information sought and delivered 24 hours a day to any device and networking far and wide through online social media. Is your organization already on the path to developing agile employees who understand that change is a constant? Or, do you need to help nudge your organization in this direction?
Think about the qualities and characteristics of people who will work most successfully in a rapidly changing, agile environment. How do you ensure that your organization can attract and retain resilient, agile, nimble, adaptive people? You can plan your recruiting to ensure that you are attracting agile candidates. And, you can do so much more.
In an interview about agility, Brian McGowan (pictured), Managing Partner of Aquinas Search Partners, talks about how to recruit, develop, and encourage agile employees. Learn more about agility: why it must be your goal and how to build agility successfully into your organization.
Image Copyright Brian McGowan
More Related to Agility
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Friday May 18, 2012
Delegation can be viewed as dumping by the employee who receives more work to do. A young employee's complaint reminded me. Though she was extremely interested in more responsible work and taking on new challenges, she felt that her manager was just giving her more work to do.
Consequently, some of the delegated work was more challenging; attending meetings during which she helped impact the direction of a developing product was challenging, exciting, and responsible. She believed her manager didn't understand the difference though, so she spent her time doing more work of a mundane, repetitive nature. This workload, that had her working long hours and weekends, interfered with her ability to take on more responsibility.
Admittedly, any job has its share of mundane tasks that have to be completed. I don't like filing and I don't like billing clients. I also don't like doing the wash. But, the manager must carefully balance the delegation of more work with the delegation of work requiring more responsibility, authority, and challenge. Effective delegation is one of the most powerful opportunities organizations have for developing employee capabilities and skills.
Image Copyright Aleksej Vasic
More About Effective Leadership and Delegation
Thursday May 17, 2012
The job descriptions I write for the site are comprehensive and attempt to provide the possible scope and range of each of the jobs described.
You'll want to look at the positions in your own company and pick and choose from the job description objectives based on your goals for and needs from the position in your company.
In conjunction with one of the major goals of this site, which is to provide forward thinking Human Resources information for forward looking professionals, the job descriptions challenge you to think about the possibilities for each job.
You may want job descriptions with less detail, but I am a firm believer that people need to know what you expect from them. And, being unclear about expectations is the main reason people don't do what you want them to do. It's also a significant factor in why employees label their boss - a bad boss.
I also like job specifications for use in recruiting and hiring employees. In the case of both job descriptions and job specifications, you need moving targets. My favorite recent reader idea talked about her company's approach in which employees wrote their own job description and updated them annually to show changes. The employees truly owned their job description.
Human Resources Assistant Job Description
Hmmm, said an HR Director friend, looking at the HR assistant job description I developed. You have her doing assistant work, but also generalist work. The answer is "yes." I want the employee firmly grounded and knowledgeable about the basics but also looking forward to her next opportunity as a generalist.
I also know that, for a bright young person, HR assistant work can be deadly dull - yup, you went to college for four plus years to maintain employee files - and I like to add a bit of challenge to the job.
Interested in a quick overview of what an HR manager, director, and generalist do? Take a look at the following for more indepth resources.
Image Copyright Indeed / Getty Images
More Human Resources Job Descriptions
