Generational talent management

Firms focus on newest workforce consumer, Generation Y

By Deloitte Consulting Korea.

Corporate brain drain, caused by an aging talent pool combined with a diminishing pipeline, is the single most concerning impediment to long-term sustainable growth in companies. To remain competitive, companies must market their brand to their newest workforce consumer ― Generation Y.

While it is estimated that Generation Y ― also called Gen-Yers ― (birth years 1982-1993) currently make up less than 10 percent of the Korean labor pool, approximately 0.3 million more are expected to join this year.

Targeting Generation Y

As Generation Y joins the three existing workforce populations (Veterans, Baby Boomers, and Generation X), company leaders should understand their varying attitudes, beliefs, and needs and leverage such diversity.

According to Deloitte Consulting LLP and the Institute of the Future, Gen-Y values can be very different from those of existing workforce generations. Gen-yers tend to look for long-term career development, variety of experiences, a sense of purpose and meaning in their work, open social networks, and work & life balance.

The G-yers’ chart (right) discusses implications such workplace values can have on employers as well as the strategies needed to develop, deploy, and connect these new entrants. The model builds upon Deloitte’s Develop-Deploy-Connect Talent Management framework (right). In general terms, companies can “develop” their workers by providing them with active learning opportunities, “deploy” them by designing effective organizational environments, and “connect” them by creating infrastructure to foster collaboration.

To help sustain relevance in shifting talent and market contexts, companies need to develop comprehensive generational competence. To that end, company leaders should strive to incorporate the following fundamental workplace elements, which generally underlie the aforementioned Gen-Y values and strategies: 1) Flexibility; 2) Balance; 3) Respect and 4) Accessibility

As companies adjust their approaches to talent management, they will be challenged to rethink their goals, strategies, and policies. While Gen-Y values seem different than those of other workforce populations, they may reflect many of the broader marketplace changes ― developments such as technological advancement, focus on social responsibility, flexible sourcing and global connectedness.

Moreover, this shifting business environment will likely influence the demands of the entire workforce. To remain relevant, corporate leaders must proactively research and institute the infrastructure for ongoing cultural changes and communicate their workplace values through their company expertise, culture, and positioning.

Branding for Generation Y

In order to attract and motivate talent in an increasingly supply-constrained context, companies must establish and market their firms’ reputations. This process, known as employer branding, extends well-beyond traditional outward-facing advertising.

Instead, employers must communicate consistently, through their actions and offerings, a commitment to develop, deploy and connect their workforces. This is especially critical to engaging Gen-Yers, who tend to use their networks to uncover diverse sources of information and then form their own opinions.

As noted, Gen-Y tends to value substance over labels, so employers must market appropriately. Specifically, they must convey their commitment to develop, deploy, and connect this new talent group by addressing its workplace needs, identified previously. Moreover, to help ensure consistency, they must build into their actions the fundamental values of flexibility, balance, respect, and accessibility.

A model for employer, which was adapted by Peter Sheagan, a Generation Y subject matter specialist, shows elements of brand. The graphic serves as an iceberg metaphor with name at the tip. While a company’s name, or logo, represents the smallest volume of the structure, it is the most visible portion. In effect, it encompasses all the perceptions and practices below the water’s surface, specifically corporate expertise, style and positioning.

Expertise refers to products and services a company provides. Companies can demonstrate a commitment to developing, deploying, and connecting the Gen-Y workforce by engaging them in the process of expertise improvement and communication.

By instituting multigenerational teams, companies can provide Gen-Yers the opportunity to expand the scope of their experience within the organization, establish meaningful mentoring relationships with senior leadership, and strengthen their social networks. Moreover, such collaboration can empower Gen-Yers, providing them with a sense of greater purpose and meaning in their work.

Style includes the roles and rewards programs that together define an organization’s culture. Companies can take several approaches to develop, deploy, and connect their workforces through these mechanisms including, establishing infrastructure for collaboration on critical large-scale projects, creating development plans and rotational programs for newer employees and enabling flexible work and benefit structures.

For Gen-Yers, large-scale project teaming would mean increased access to mentors and improvement of social infrastructure for collaboration, training and rotational programs would mean long-term career development, and adaptive work and benefit structures would mean improvement in work/life flexibility.

Positioning refers to company differentiation in the employment marketplace. To truly be an “employer of choice”, companies must work to distinguish their corporate style and expertise to incoming talent in a manner that develops, deploys, and connects their workforce.

To that end, they can conduct multi-generational focus groups of existing and potential employers to help identify elements that make them unique, and then highlight such features through customized advertising. Moreover, by using a variety of channels for communication, company leaders can better target various talent segments.

Similar to strategies for corporate expertise, engaging Gen-Yers in the positioning process can enable them to expand their experiences and networks, and to develop a greater sense of purpose in their work.

A confluence of factors will likely create shortages of incoming Gen-Yers at the exact time that companies need such talent to remain relevant. Companies, therefore, must rethink their approaches to attracting, engaging and marketing to their people.

To that end, they should evaluate their current talent management agendas against the identified Gen-Y values and needs. Such analysis may then serve as input to a generational change plan, or roadmap, to better develop, deploy, and connect all the workforce generations.

This article was provided by Deloitte Consulting Korea.