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.

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.

Respecting Employee Diversity

It has been previously mentioned that the larger the organization, the more diverse the workforce and the more varied the type of personalities that are present. In addition to ethics training, a highly-effective and complementary practice is to offer diversity training as well.

By recognizing employee differences, celebrating them, and teaching individuals how to respect them, it is more likely that teams will be more collaborative and employees will be able to work together more effectively.

There are two primary goals for diversity training:

1) eliminate values, stereotypes, and managerial practices that inhibit the personal and professional development of diverse employees, and

2) allow diverse employees to contribute their best efforts for achieving superior organizational performance.


As with ethics training, there are a wide number of exercises and workshops that organizations can hold to encourage more effective diversity management. When individuals within a company are able to respect each other for the behavioral choices they make, as well as for the cultural differences they may have, a more cohesive unit can be formed for greater efficiency.

The Essentials of Business Ethics by Denis Collins takes an in-depth look into the many ways companies can incorporate an ethical mindset into their business. To access the full book summary, please visit BusinessSummaries.com.

Emotional Intelligence: The New Science of Success

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to control and use one’s emotions in a constructive—rather than destructive—manner. This allows an individual to achieve his best performance, while inspiring others.

EI is a composite of many other qualities, such as effective oral communication and an ability to respond well to setbacks, which distinguish the competent from the truly successful. While success has basic threshold requirements—technical skills, for example—the truly crucial characteristics are those that enable people to manage their emotions rather than be derailed by extreme or upsetting circumstances.

Fortunately, there are strategies to improve one’s emotional intelligence. It is important to understand the four domains of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Self-awareness and self-management are related to one’s own personal competence, while social awareness and relationship management have to do with one’s competence in the social arena. One can improve behaviors in each of these domains to develop better overall emotional intelligence.

Ready to increase your emotional intelligence? More resources are available at BusinessSummaries.com. BusinessSummaries.com is a business book summaries service. Every week, it sends out to subscribers a summary of a best-selling business book chosen from among the hundreds of new books released in the United States. Simply go to http://www.bizsum.com for more details.

Moving to Telework

Why move to telework? Telework has environmental and cost benefits.

According to a Harris poll, U.S. workers waste an estimated $4.3 billion in energy costs each year and generate 32 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions from this energy consumption. From a business prospective, the benefits of telework include gains in productivity, the ability to access a global talent pool (including people with disabilities who find it difficult to work in an office environment), lower overhead costs, and a hedge against the risk of natural or manmade disasters.

The authors liken a successful telework leader to a symphony conductor who brings together a diverse group of musicians to play a complex piece of music successfully. The leader must be able to get all employees (both those who telework and those who do not) to work off a common platform of clear, open, disciplined, and deliberate communication.

Before even implementing a telework arrangement, the leader must ask if the workforce or team has the skills, abilities, commitment, and time to learn and use both the technology and communication skills required for telework. Then, if the company decides to implement telework, the leader must make sure that all employees understand both the why and how of telework.

The authors’ advice is to communicate, communicate, and communicate again. Since everyone processes information differently, it is important to use many different means of communication (e-mail, company blogs, podcasts, etc.) for the same message.

Closely linked to communication is change management. Leaders must work through barriers of resistance for many employees to accept telework and for telework to be successful.

Change management might include celebrating small successes, using hard data to create a case for change, and using interpersonal skills. An organization’s or team’s culture is important to the success of telework.

Culture can propel people forward in the desired direction or serve as a roadblock. Culture influences and reinforces behaviors without the need for formal documentation or guidelines.

When telework is in conflict with the corporate culture, teleworking arrangements are likely to fail.
Recognizing an organization’s culture requires recognizing what the organization truly values.

For an organization that values a lot of face-to-face time, telework is a hard fit. The authors note that although successful telework cultures vary, they generally have several things in common.

Looking for more resources on that will help boost your career? Look into business book summaries found on BusinessSummaries.com.

Organize According To Your Priorities

Living a clutter-filled life requires no particular skill – anyone can get the hang of it. Who is the most likely to be unorganized?

It’s those who have not identified their priorities and established supporting goals.

To organize effectively, it helps if you identify your priorities. Otherwise, you’re organizing without a goal.

Priorities are broad elements of life.

They are so basic that you can often misplace them somewhere in your go-go schedule. Start identifying
your priorities, and you’ll realize that much of the clutter you have collected does not serve you or support what you have deemed to be of importance.

Much of what you have assembled in the places and spaces of your life is useless!

The five-step procedure that follows is simple and direct and will help you to establish priorities.

1. Write down everything that is important to you, assigned to you, or that you seek to achieve. Feel free to make this list long and involved.

2. Several hours later or even the next day, revisit your list. Cross out those things that, on second reading, are not that crucial. Combine any items that appear similar to each other. The object of this second encounter is to dramatically pare down your list. If you have too many priorities, you are likely to feel anxious and frustrated. We can’t all be Superman.

3. Now, restructure, redefine, and rewrite your list if necessary; seek to streamline it. When in doubt, toss it out. If you’re unsure if an item belongs on the list, chances are, it doesn’t.

4. Put your list away and take it out the next day or the day after that. Now review it as if you are seeing it for the first time. Can any items be combined? Can anything be dropped? Should anything be reworded? As always, if something seems as if it is not that important, it probably isn’t, so feel free to drop it!

5. Go ahead and make a working list of what you feel are your priorities at this time. Yes, things will shift and change as time marches on, but this is your list for now.

The 60 Second Organizer is a valuable resource and a daily action guide to help you become a more organized person in your workplace and make it a total and effective lifestyle. To read a book summary of 'The 60 Second Organizer' please visit BusinessSummaries.com.

Assessing Your Own Work Performance

Is it human nature that we don’t stop to assess our performance most of the time? We’d rather plow ahead, hell-bent for leather, to what’s next, whether or not we’re proceeding wisely in pursuit of a given task or goal.

However, when it comes to generating innovative ideas, self-assessment is a valuable tool. If you’re in a meeting, especially one you’re conducting, record the conversation for playback later, perhaps while you’re driving!

As you listen to what transpired. Ask yourself:

• When people suggest a new idea, are you cutting them off at the pass?
• What happens when you suggest a new idea?
• If your idea doesn’t get an immediate warm reception, do you prefer to toe the line rather than rock the boat?

When you have some time, letting an idea marinate can help you gain perspective:

Put your idea in a drawer. That is, put the notes, folders, documents, and what have you in a drawer and don’t open it for a couple of days. Later, revisit the idea and see if it still seems as valid and worthwhile as when you first devised it.

Bounce your ideas off of others. This activity is recommended throughout the book, as other people’s reactions can give you valuable information about how good your idea is and what you may need to do to sell it to others.

Give it a five-time review. Review your idea on five separate occasions. Anytime it seems as if it doesn’t have sufficient merit, go ahead and chuck it. However, if it survives five intermittent reviews, proceed at full speed. You probably have something worth developing.

This article was based on the book, "Leadership in High-Performance Organizational Cultures" by Stanley D. Truskie, PhD. A book summary is available on BusinessSummaries.com.