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Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The Cost of the Generational Divide

The generation gap is most often noticed when older workers are trying to mentor or motivate younger workers, and younger workers are not receptive. The younger workers complain they just want to hear the company goals and be set free to work rather than be forced to sit through a pep rally.



The older workers complain the younger workers do not respect tradition and have no sense of teamwork or any work ethic, for that matter. This kind of miscommunication happens all the time in companies all over the nation.

Every employee is valuable and brings skills and talent to the table. Miscommunication and conflict across generations impact a company’s productivity and bottom line.

Lost revenue and turnover, costly consequences of the generational divide, can be averted if managers learn to bring employees together.

Generational harmony impacts a company’s profitability. In 2005, it was predicted that unemployment would be at five percent at the end of 2006.

Low unemployment and steady job growth usually makes employees comfortable enough to look for jobs with better opportunities and better benefits. It was predicted that by 2010 the United States would be short 10 million workers with the right skills.

The U.S. was short only three to four million workers in the late 1990s, and hiring managers were scrambling to fill empty chairs. Organizations need a plan to recruit and retain employees from all generations with the right skills.

Turnover is expensive, costing “50 to 150 percent of a departing employee’s annual wage.” It is time for organizations to assess the demographics of their workforce to make sure they have the “bench strength” for projected retirements.

Managers can take the following actions to immediately improve retention:
• Evaluate age of workforce.
• Develop strategies to attract and retain those about to retire.
• Identify ways to operate more efficiently.
• Create a formal process to assess manpower over the next five to 10 years.
• Evaluate current turnover.
• Establish two-way communication on all issues.
• Assess skill development commitments.
• Proactively work to retain talent.

Managers should be developing strategies to coax ready-to-retire workers into semi-retirement so they can mentor younger workers to do their jobs. Employers should not only be thinking of ways to retain quality employees, but also how to retain valued customers and colleagues. Generational misperceptions can injure these critical business relationships.

People are a business’s key resource. It is the people that make a company successful. Managers need to understand the demographics of their workforce, and to do whatever they can to retain and develop the skills of all their employees, regardless of generation. This plan of action will minimize turnover and increase the bottom line.

Bridging the Generation Gap was written as a reference tool for managers confronted with recruiting, retaining, and balancing the needs of five generations of employees. To access the book summary, please go to BusinessSummaries.com.

Monday, March 7, 2011

The 10 Attributes Of An Offer According To A Blur World

Let us take a look at all these attributes, keeping in mind that the most essential feature of all offers is that they are connected.

Anytime
Accessibility by users at any time of day is becoming a must-have for offers of all kinds.

Real Time
This need for Speed of response in today’s business environment puts a premium on systems that can operate in “real time”.

Interactive
Another great benefit of online systems that eliminate the middle person – travel agent, bank teller, stockbroker (and sometimes maybe even the physician) – is that they can easily be made interactive.

Anyplace
Hand in hand with anytime access goes anyplace access; this is the other half of the mail-order boom. The trick is being able to service anyplace access effectively – anytime. Is your offer available to customers wherever they are?

Learning
Offer really start to get interesting when they make it possible to learn; that is, when they can not only capture information about their use, but make adjustments or initiate action in line with that new information.

Anticipating
Once offers have the ability to learn, it’s just a short step to give them something even more blurred: the ability to anticipate.

Filtering
A special form of customization is the filtering of the wide range of information and choices that increasingly confront users.

Customizing
Customization is a major theme running through the offers cited so far, whether they involve computers, jeans, or books.

Upgrading
One distinctive feature of software products is the constant stream of upgrades they spawn. Once you’ve bought a program, it isn’t necessary to make a whole new purchase when its functionality is improved.

In this groundbreaking book, Stan Davis and Chris Meyer deliver more than a guided tour to these momentous shifts. They offer readers a working model to illustrate and benefit from the new rules of the connected economy, where advantage is temporary and nothing is fixed in time or space. To access the full book summary, please visit BusinessSummaries.com.