Seven sleeping giants of career management

To help you explore the changing face of talent management in modern business it is imperative that you tread carefully among the seven sleeping giants of career management. Each of these seven giants must be clearly understood and respected in order to prepare and respond in an intelligent and informed manner. These seven sleeping giants are discussed below.

1 The haunting cost of turnover

The first sleeping giant is the haunting cost of turnover. Beverley Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans in their book, Love Em or Lose Em , say that the cost of replacing people can vary between 70 and 200 per cent of a person s annual salary. High-tech workers, professionals and managers cost twice as much as other employees to replace.

These estimates are not surprising, particularly when you begin to tally up some of the costs, including:

• recruitment and advertising

• travel and accommodation

• downtime while people conduct interviews and make decisions

• extra workload pressures on remaining staff

• hiring temporary staff

• downtime in productivity as the new person or team learns the ropes .

Then there is the loss of knowledge, connections and networks with the departure of vital people, not to mention the hidden intangible costs such as reduced reputation, loss of customers and brain drain. To make matters worse your ex-staff member can start producing wonderful results elsewhere, which can create all sorts of consequences in a competitive marketplace . To sum up, the reality of turnover is that all the intellectual property and know-how in the world will not make a scrap of difference if you do not have a sound talent retention strategy.

2 Chronic skill shortage

According to the US Census Bureau, sixty-one countries are unable to find the skilled people they need to perform the jobs they require. In recent years this has been very noticeable in professions like IT, management, teaching and, as previously mentioned, nursing.

Two main factors contribute to this shortfall. First, the rapid pace of change and, second, the low numbers of people in the twenty-five to forty-four age group . The implication is that finding and keeping talent is far more difficult than it was in the past.

Further evidence can be drawn from the following trends in developed economies:

• A study by Accenture found that retaining the best talent was the biggest people management challenge, 57 per cent noting this as critical. Another study by McKinsey and Company found that in 75 per cent of organizations the senior managers did not believe they had the talent to perform their current responsibilities. This is backed up by a host of other studies with very similar conclusions.

• In a similar vein, the American Society for Training and Development estimates that 74 per cent of the US workforce will need to be retrained by 2010. Likewise a study by TMP/Hudson Global Resources in Australia of 500 senior executives found that 76 per cent of their businesses require up- skilling to work effectively, while up to 66 per cent have limited understanding of or commitment to the values of the organization.

• US managerial jobs will increase by 25 per cent in the next fifteen years but the availability of twenty-five to forty-four year olds is expected to decline by 15 per cent.

• It is expected that in the next ten years, one-third of nurses in Australia will leave the workforce. This shortage is also being experienced in many other countries, for example in the USA and the UK. One major factor is the ageing workforce, with the average age of a nurse being forty-five years.

3 Higher career mobility

During the past decade there has been a noticeable change from full-time employment to part-time , contract or on-call workforces. We see this across all industries, including manufacture, retail and aviation. In the USA 26 per cent of the current workforce is temporary, part time or contingent, and this is expected to rise to 41 per cent by 2010, with even higher rates in countries such as Sweden and Norway.

This is indicative of individuals seeking greater freedom, balance and leverage of their time, resulting in them having a number of employers. At the same time employers are seeking to keep costs down by maintaining a smaller and leaner operation. As a result, a host of strategies are being employed to import know-how by other means, whether hiring more contract staff, employment of experts, acquiring consultants or changing work practices to be more flexible.

One of the consequences of mobility is the increasing difficulty in building and sustaining a unified business identity, particularly when a workforce is in constant transition. In some cases the people who worked in a business three years ago is only a small fraction of those who actually work there now. This is particularly the case in the more qualified or in-demand jobs. So, creative strategies need to be deployed to help the right talent to stay and contribute longer by giving greater opportunities to grow. For businesses such as management consulting firms, this may mean staff using an abundance of high-quality resources, tools and expert networks. In this case, employees are less interested in leaving because they are ˜handcuffed to the high quality of knowledge attached to the business.

Similarly special care must be taken to nurture and support staff who often take up new or extra responsibility when staffing levels are low. This is particularly the case in shift work or in high-pressure work. Left unattended, people can quickly experience a fear of responsibility or of becoming ineffective .

The consequence of higher career mobility means a business need to ensure people are looked after and that the best are kept. To be successful, business leaders must increasingly see employment and hiring as a win “ win partnership rather than a boss “subordinate relationship.

You can no longer see employees as people who come to work for you. It is better to reverse the mindset to ask how a business can inspire higher levels of contribution and commitment. Notable management guru Peter Drucker said, treat people as volunteers, not conscripts. As a result, businesses are increasingly exploring new and different incentive programmes such as paying for contribution rather than hours of attendance. Of course, you also need a sound approach to the protection of intellectual property, which will be discussed in Chapter 10.

4 Pied Piper effect

Job- hopping is now the nature of the beast in many industries. If you get someone to stay and contribute in a job for eighteen months you are doing well. Research by the Saratoga Institute indicates that after about two years of service you will normally experience some difficulties keeping people unless you have taken corrective action. An individual entering the workforce for the first time is now likely to have, on average, nine job changes by the time they reach thirty-two years of age. While a 2001 study of 1759 people on Monster.com.au discovered that 90 per cent of those surveyed expect to have a career change in the next five years.

As already indicated, loyalty is often at its highest at a team level and not at a business enterprise level. The consequence of this is that individuals will often stick together even at the expense of the organization.

For many businesses, getting too close to staff and building a shared commitment is just too hard. This is particularly the case where the management are too preoccupied on matters other than people development and, as a result, see their staff and know-how as dispensable resources that can be hired and fired at a moment s notice.

An interesting side product of team loyalty is that turnover is not just an individual issue, it has become a team or tribal issue. As in the famous children s story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, whole teams can often get up and leave or are headhunted en masse to move to another business in what is affectingly called the Pied Piper effect. The result of such a loss of team talent can be catastrophic. Businesses are responding to the Pied Piper effect with a long list of strategies from sophisticated retention programmes to simple ideas such as in Silicon Valley where past employers are sending past employees postcards with the theme ˜Is the grass greener? to try and entice them back. In some cases people discover that the image given in recruitment by a new employer is not matched by reality, and they return in either a full-time, part-time or subcontractor capacity.

5 Working poor

One of the more disturbing trends of modern workplaces is the increased incidence of the working poor. Working poor can be defined as those people who, even after working, are unable to stay above or who remain very close to, the poverty line. This is systematic of all types of employment normally attributable to people in lower paid jobs.

Not surprising, many people in low-wage jobs do not have the education level or accreditation to get better-paid jobs. The National Coalition against Poverty in Australia and global organizations such as the International Labour Organization and the United Nations Children s Fund (UNICEF) have been drawing attention to the issues of the working poor as well as child labour, educational opportunities, Internet access and unethical business practices in an attempt to improve the situation.

There is a host of statistics and stories to support the conclusion of a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Suffice to say, businesses need to be sensitive to this problem. Just because someone is employed does not necessarily mean that they are able to sustain the quality of life they need for themselves and their family. For example, Japan has a relatively low unemployment rate compared with Spain, but both countries have child poverty rates of 12 per cent.

6 A craving for balance

Many people are currently reviewing their lives and searching for new ways to find greater balance and to do what they love. We see this increasingly where people are choosing different lifestyles or employment options. This trend is set to continue, particularly as access to cyberspace becomes more mobile.

A study commissioned by the Australian Council of Trade Unions provides extra evidence of a world trend that people are craving for balance. It found that one in five Australian workers now works more than fifty hours per week. The study found that long and unreasonable working hours were damaging families, friendships and community life. It is common for some people to go days without seeing their children and partners and, as a result, are missing out on key milestones in their lives such as birthdays and anniversaries. Understaffing and/or talent shortages have meant countless e- mails and mobile phone messages massively invading people s private time. Workers who elect to spend more time with their families are viewed with suspicion.

Younger people are also highly susceptible to hitting the wall of burnout at an earlier age if not well looked after. A 2001 study by health monitoring group Tanita Corporation found that 70 per cent of twenty to thirty-five year olds surveyed said their workloads have increased in the past two years. From personal observation I am increasingly seeing twenty-five year olds ˜washed up and opting to escape from work to recharge or start a new lifestyle. This is not surprising given the ever-increasing pressure of people to do more with less, resulting in a waning of people s health and a lack of work “life balance.

7 A boom of depression

Studies by such organizations as the Australian Medical Association and the St Vincent de Paul Society provide solid evidence that human depression is fast becoming one of the biggest health issues facing developed economies. As an example, it is predicted that in Australia depression will be the second biggest health concern by 2020. It is estimated that of the 90 per cent of people who see a general practitioner once a year, 49 per cent when surveyed showed evidence of common mental disorders. These observations are supported by similar studies by the World Bank and World Health Organization . They report that mental illness now constitutes one of the largest causes of disability for Western communities.

The implications of this last sleeping giant are profound. It translates into a vivid realization that managing stress and associated depression is now a major priority in sustaining and keeping talent. Concentrating solely on ideas and innovation is not enough. We must focus on people s mental health, well-being and relationships to ensure depression and anxiety are not left unchecked. Business leaders must foster a culture that helps people to cope and self-manage without unnecessary levels of stress and depression. Studies across the world have consistently shown a very strong correlation between stress, lost productivity and excessive working hours.

As Professor Robert Lane from Yale University says, ˜The most powerful cause of depression is not brain derailment but disruption of family and friendly relations. Friendship (the main contributor to happiness) is not a market commodity . So if you wish to help reduce depression and improve talent levels, take an interest in people, make them feel special, valued and part of a team.

Other findings on emotional health include:

• British Academic, Bill Lucas says that the brain s efficiency can be reduced by up to 90 per cent while working under pressure. Emotions and our ability to cope with pressure, have a massive impact on our ability to think, solve problems and communicate, whether we are conscious of it or not.

• People who are unable to effectively manage their stress had a 40 per cent higher death rate than more emotionally managed individuals (Eysenck).

• Bryan Stock, an authority on emotional intelligence, says that one emotion can lead to 1300 chemical reactions in the body.

• The HeartMath Research Center at www.heartmath.com has shown that spending just five minutes genuinely feeling appreciation for things in your life that you value, can boost your immune system for up to six hours.