Increase your awareness of the ever-changing needs of
your workforce. Put the “LIFE” back into the Life Cycles
of your employees.
Why Read This?
This management white paper contains the structure you
need to adopt in order to create the most productive
workforce environment. It is always challenging to make
room for more good ideas. Here’s the problem: The battle
for employee talent is not going to ease. This is not an
economic opinion, but a demographic fact; The Bureau of
Labor Statistics still predicts a shortage of ten
million workers within the next ten years! Attracting
and retaining a strong and productive workforce is,
strategically, indispensable, and from a profit
standpoint, invaluable. This paper can help you make it
happen.
All of us – whether personally or professionally – have
had to rely on equipment to help us get the job done.
When it’s a critical machine (your car, your computer
system, a fleet of trucks – even a postage machine), we
tend to become acutely aware of the life cycles of these
machines as well as the components that go along with
them. If we’re disciplined, we check our owner’s manuals
and schedule service on those machines at the
appropriate intervals. We attempt to keep all of them up
and running-- hoping to avoid the calamity of a sudden
shutdown.
If you’ve been in the game long enough, you can relate
to the life cycles of “office technology” as we’ve moved
from its infancy (can you even remember those old clunky
and
expensive fax machines?) to the miracle of today’s
wireless, networked equipment. I am certain if we got
together – with the strength of all of our collective
memories – we could even chart the life cycles of each
of our industries. We all seem to have a great handle on
the life cycles of our equipment, the products and
services we sell
and
our industry--but what about our people?
In my travels as both a developer of workforce
development initiatives and as a consultant in the
corporate training arena, I am continually exposed to
organizations of all sizes and shapes. If you can
categorize a workforce by size and by productivity, I’ve
seen it all, from huge employee populations interacting
and communicating beautifully to 5-person start-ups
firms with zero “big picture skills” and working hard at
putting the “fun” in dysfunction. There’s a constant
here. Something binds the misfortunate company tripping
over its own feet to the Fortune 500 behemoths running a
tight ship. From Main Street to Wall Street, people are
the constant. This management brief hopes to get you
thinking about your people – and even yourself – as
having very real and very powerful Life Cycles.
Every person on your team, including yourself, has a
“maintenance schedule” and a Life Cycle. In today’s
economy, both workers and owners have hopes and
expectations about building a career--not simply
performing tasks. The conventional wisdom believing
employees value compensation above all else is simply
untrue.
Today, employees want their work to contain some degree
of freedom and self-expression. They have a desire for
feelings of purpose and contribution through their work.
Only afterwards, do workers begin to concentrate on
wealth creation from their work. Employees go through a
series of arcs starting from orientation day and ending
with becoming a senior, full-fledged company loyalist.
This forms the Life Cycles of your employees. Ignoring
them is dangerous.
This is not another “warm and fuzzy” sermon about
managing employees. I am not about to tell you that
“people are your greatest asset”. Truth be told, the
team you have assembled may represent a great liability!
I know first hand there is nothing harder for an
entrepreneur to do than to make room for time-consuming
people-management lessons preached from the top floor of
an Ivory Tower. The average entrepreneur is already
maintaining a business, feeling pressure to grow, lying
awake at night worrying about pricing, costs and profit
margins in an age where time itself seems “accelerated”.
Yet another task added to the list is one too many.
Given this unchanging reality, what happens when
employee Life Cycles are not properly handled?
There’s a strong chance you will face costly retention
issues. This talent drain will cost your firm
approximately 1.5 times the resigning or terminated
employee’s annual salary and benefits—even more in some
cases. At the same time, you lose productivity
throughout the organization. Resources are now put to
the task of recruitment, hiring and training. Next,
there’s the issue of morale. If it’s low, it stays low.
Your people may become attracted by the lure of Free
Agency and competitive offers from other area
firms—mustering their courage, as you once did, to give
it a go on their own. Let’s not forget what we call
“opportunity cost”. This is perhaps the most silently
painful of all the retention and recruitment costs.
Opportunity costs are all of the different, value-adding
projects you could have been accomplishing rather than
replacing your staff!
Few growing companies are exempt from the perilous
position of not having enough hands on deck to meet the
needs of today’s already hard-to-satisfy customer. In
this new “hurry-up” economy, where a lack of talent and
creativity on your payroll can be tremendous
constraints, workforce stability has become an economic
necessity. In the current overly-managed slow growth
economy, the tight labor pool from which we fish will
generally remain friendlier to the fish than to the
fisherman. A Life Cycles practice is designed to bring
sharp focus on those fish already in your boat, rather
than have you only casting your line, waiting for that
next big catch.
How do you introduce a Life Cycle culture? The answer is
found not by practicing supervision, but by deploying
managerial SUPER vision. The very best business leaders
have not only a clear vision of the future, but the
ability to articulate it in a way that creates “sticky”
teammates—people bound by social glue.
These leaders know their employees crave
information—they want to be kept in the loop. These
leaders ensure information is disseminated to their
employees regularly. They recognize people, like any
other invaluable resource found in the company, require
timely preventative maintenance. Neither corporate “Kool
Aid” nor knee-jerk criticism handed out during an annual
employee review cuts it anymore. Our “knowledge workers”
want direction, responsibility, accountability and
opportunity to create a difference in the creation of
wealth for the firm and for themselves.
Most importantly, employees want a work opportunity
where continuous cutting-edge learning is encouraged.
Careers are more portable than ever. As employers, if
you can no longer guarantee employment, you need to
create an environment that guarantees “employability.”
It seems like the ultimate paradox. It may seem you are
training employees for their next job, but the reality
is you are giving them more reasons to stay “sticky”
with your company. Phrased another way, if they’re not
growing, they’re going.
You must make certain you are a competitive employer so
your people feel fairly treated when standing upon your
compensation and benefit platform. Beyond that, create a
culture valuing employees not as assets, but as the true
competitive advantage they represent. Rather than
staging periodic pep meetings, create a culture and an
active mindset in which all existing employees are
continuously being recruited and offered personal and
professional growth.
Structure a reward system which really matters to your
people. Don’t box yourself in to simple monetary
rewards— find out what your people truly value and give
them more—when they deserve it. Lastly, picture each
member of your workforce having their own bell
curve—their own Life Cycle. After you have helped them
successfully climb the steep slope of orientation and
growth, plan their next Life Cycle before they begin to
roll down the declining slope of maturity and “commodity
status.” Like a highway, create merges and over-passes
before a bored under-recognized employee builds his own
off ramp.
The Life Cycles process is challenging
indeed—particularly for managers already spread too
thin. It would be easy to say “hey, good idea” and then
never get around to embracing it. Here’s the problem—the
battle for talent is not going to ease. As mentioned
earlier, this not economic opinion, but demographic
fact. Attracting and retaining a productive workforce is
indispensable, and from a profit standpoint, invaluable.
If you aren’t the right manager to maintain a Life
Cycles culture, find a talented person (even part-time)
to be your Human Resources leader. If you already have
an HR person, make certain they’re learning and
implementing the best practices of other firms. Use the
Internet as a productive corporate resource. Consider
the services of a Business Development company or a
professional management consultant well-versed in
progressive workforce issues. The Life Cycles system is
quite a challenge, but enormously worth the effort. Help
is out there! If you’re not “incubating and hatching”
your own Life Cycle employee advocates to compete and
succeed in this post-millennial battleground, you can
bet someone else will. Go ahead, get sticky.
Traci Totino, PhD
