Challenges Faced by Employers in Recruiting and Retaining Younger Employees
Abstract
As baby boomers are retiring from the work force, they are being increasingly replaced by the younger generation of employees. Addressing the demands of the increasing numbers of younger employees is now proving to be a challenge to organizations. For instance organizations are now facing challenges when recruiting and retaining the young generation of employees. Some of the challenges that these employees are facing are challenges of workplace diversity and how to manage it, organizing talents and ensuring that they match the talents, experience and preferences of these employees with their roles at the workplace. Further, this is a generation of dynamic people and thus it is even proving hard to retain them at their places of work. Thus, the organizations are forced to ensure that these young people are motivated to reduce employee turnover.
Introduction
Organizations are now relying on the younger employee generation as this is the generation that is taking up greater part of the employment workforce. Unlike the baby boomers, the younger employees are mostly motivated by opportunities that give them personal fulfillment. Thus their main concern is not the monetary rewards that they get as has been with most of the baby boomers but rather satisfaction in the work place. These are employees who are idealistic and thus would require an environment in which they their creativity and innovation is taken into consideration. Thus, the organizations also have to be innovative so as to be able to retain younger employees. Further, the young employees that is the Gen X and Gen Y employees are highly conscious of their social life. Thus, they may consider the chances to attend to social activities for example attending parties and other recreation activities more appealing than monetary rewards in their work place. Thereby, organizations should ensure that there is flexibility in work schedules so as to retain young employees. Further, they should also ensure that there is diversity in the work place and that their employees are motivated.
Discussion
Today, the challenge in the work place lies in recruiting and retaining young employees and maintaining successful and winning teams. While the baby boomers are highly concerned and put more value to their careers, younger employees are interested more on the balance of work life. For instance, they need their jobs to be able to accommodate their personal lives including their families. This would include flexibility in the job, multi tasking, and continuous changes (Tomar, 2006). These are people who easily get bored and thus unless this is addressed, the employee turnover increases day by day. Thus, workplace diversity is very important if employers want to recruit and retain young and potential employees. This implies that the organizations should be focused on the similarities as well as the differences that these people have. These would include issues like the education, profession, geographic location and the marital status.
The young employees are concerned with more than just the money. It is very important for the organization to help them in enjoying their roles and responsibilities at work. For instance, communication is very important. There should be effective communication and ensuring that the employees know exactly what is expected of them. They can get impatient with anyone including their employers and question them. Thus, an organization has to learn how to handle them. For instance, they are more concerned with carrying out short and small tasks and with deadlines that are tight (Mcclure, 2009). They do not want an environment in which they are being supervised all the time. This is because they always want to assume the ownership of the tasks that they perform. Following this, it is easier for them to leave their places of work and even start their own businesses where they will feel that they have the freedom that they need and further they are the bosses of their own and thus responsible for all that they do.
To ensure that the young people take ownership of their roles and tasks, the organization should offer them training opportunities. This way, they will be able to know exactly how they are supposed to perform in their assigned roles and thus avoid the issue of being overly supervised. Further, this is a generation that is interested in learning and advancing their skills. Therefore, training also enables them gain more skills that are essential in performing their duties. They are success oriented people and thus will measure their levels of success on the basis of the skills that they have gained and the development that they have had from their experience. Thus, training will be effective towards managing this diversity.
The Gen X as well as Gen Y workforce is also concerned about ethical diversity more than the baby boomers. They know that equity is very important in the work place. Thus, they see each person from the perspective that they can be able to learn from them. Their colleagues are like their resources and thus can continuously gain more and useful knowledge from them regardless of their ethical backgrounds. Therefore, the organization has to ensure that there is equity in the process of carrying out recruitment for their employees.
Team work will help retain these employees. Here they will be able to give their ideas and also be involved in decision making. Once employees are given the opportunities to participate in making decision regarding the organization, they will have a greater sense of connection to the organization and will also see the need to associate with the organization. Further, they will feel that they are being appreciated and thus this works well towards retaining them. Further, in their work, they will perform well since they will feel that they are part of the organization in that they participated in making the decisions being implemented. This gives them the courage in that they are involved as well as included.
Young employees need a place where they are given the chances to grow and also learn new skills. Thus, they need to work in a challenging environment (James, McKechnie. & Swanberg, 2011). Further, they need appreciation and rewards. However, the organization should consider well the kind of rewards that they offer younger employees. For instance, they may not be concerned more about getting rewards in form of money. However, rewarding them by taking them for holidays, recognition in both private and public for instance in annual general meetings as well as job promotions will work well for them and also for the benefit of the organization. Rewards positively reinforce them. Rewards will also include giving them positive feedbacks in regard to being successful in their accomplishments. This is a key aspect towards having even other long term accomplishments.
One of the ways of motivating young employees is integrating technology into their jobs. They have grown up in the era of technology advancement and thus would like to work in an environment in which there is high use of technology. For instance, they will email as they talk on their cell phones and surf the web. Some of the things that this generation employees will not lack are laptops, blackBerrys and cell phones. In their places of work, more preference will be given to virtual communication for example through text messages, emails and teleconferencing other than having face to face contacts or even making phone calls. Further, other than making presentations that are based on lecturing, they will prefer the use of online technology and webinars.
Workplace diversity can also be managed by ensuring that there is a conducive working environment. This is also a source of motivation to young employees. A conducive environment of work will be one in which the employees are allowed to participate in other activities and also be given the opportunity to take responsibilities. For instance, the Gen X and Gen Y employees do not want to take orders from anyone. Though they appreciate the advice given to them, they do not want to be constantly ordered by people. What the organization can do to ensure that they are comfortable and thus remain in their work places for ling is by guiding them by way of leadership but not management. Here, the leader takes parts in the performance of their employees unlike a manager who will only give orders. Further, as a leader, one should show that they are interested in the professional growth as well as the success of these young and hardworking employees.
The young generation of employees has a “work hard, play hard” mentality (Javitch, 2010). Therefore, they need to work in an environment in which there is room for growth. Therefore, it is important that the organization offers them goal statements that are clear. However, this does not imply keeping them fixed in their work. There needs to be reasonable liberty that gives them guidelines and allows them to achieve these stated goals. It is important that the employers build on the interests of these employees. This gives them the perfect opportunities that they need for their growth on the job. Other than benefiting and satisfying their interests, the organization is able to benefit in that they will work hard. This will thus be effective towards increasing the productivity of the organization.
The young generation of employees does not also want to be fended since they have the strong believe that they can do it for themselves. Therefore, they need places where there are opportunities for making personal choices. Options should be provided for them so as to retain them in the workforce. For instance, these include options that allow them to make formulations of new processes, to choose between tasks, to be able to show their creativeness and innovativeness in making conclusions and to be able to deal with work related challenges. This will be essential towards achieving their success and that of the organization and it also includes the use of personal employee resourcefulness and at own will.
Structuring is also of great importance in an organization. The organizational structure will help in the recruitment and retention of young and potential employees. For instance, if the top organizational management as well as the group leaders are old employees, chances are high that they will not be able to work well together. For example, a 62 year old leading a group of 23 year olds or even working with them in the same department. This is most likely to bring conflicts in the organization. Conflicts will arise in that being of different age generations; they will hold very different ideas as well as opinions. Thus, once the conflicts arise, performance will consequently be poor. Further, since the young people are not concerned more of their careers, they will leave the organization following such conflicts. The organization thereby looses out on very potential employees.
As much as Gen X and Gen Y employees appear to have confidence in performance of their tasks, they still require the contribution from management. This can be by way of positively challenging their abilities, interests as well as achievements. Challenges are very important towards enhancing ones performance as well as their thinking. Because they tend to be creative and innovative, positive challenges help them in realization of their weaknesses, the opportunities that they have and even greater potentials in them. The management also contributes towards their performance by creating good relationships that bonds the work force and the management. This gives the employees confidence and can thus ask for direction when needed and know that they can always rely on the management incase there is a need.
Alleviating work related stress is also a key aspect towards retaining young employees. Among the causes of work related stresses is the failure to match talent, experience as well as education with the role of the employee. Stress will only lead the employee to have their focus on other feeble situations and thus shifting from going their job and further doing it right. Therefore, management should shun from the previously held belief that once employees are kept nervous on their jobs they will be induced to have higher levels of performance. This does not apply with the younger generation employees. Further, work related stress is costly to the organization since it will spend to respond to the poor performance that its employees will exhibit. This can be observed in increased customer complains and loss of the organization’s reputation and consequently loss of business.
Thus, the organization should ensure that they match job with talent, and experience. This can only be achieved if the recruitments are done in a good and transparent way. Another way of managing young employees is by minimizing the levels of employee layoffs. Frequent layoffs will keep workers worried since they may be the next ones out (Sirota, Mischkind & Meltzer, 2008). Thus, following such organizational acts, employees will tend to look for employment in other places where they do not work in fears of beings layed off from work. Further, such acts will also prevent the organization from attracting the young and potential employees.
Young employees want to work in places where they will feel the performance of the organization. This can be taken from the perspective of gain sharing. Working smart is all they want other than just being forced to work hard. Gain sharing is thus a tool that leads towards the development of the organizations. For instance, employees want to get a share of the savings that are acquired following improvement in the performance of the organization. Furthermore, it is these employees who have worked towards that acquired improvement. Thus, this will help towards promoting a positive culture of change something that young employees want since they are a dynamic group of persons.
Gain sharing can be further managed by employee involvement. This involves the use of teams in which people will be able to give their suggestions and ideas and thus collective decisions are made. These teams are approved and have the support of top organizational management. Thus, it will encourage sharing and working together. In addition, the teams are a source of encouragement to each other, and also give each other an opportunity to learn. Since learning is one of the needs of younger generation employees, gain sharing by means of employee involvement through teams will help organizations to attract and retain potential and performing employees.
Despite having the need to regularly change their jobs, job security is also a powerful need. This is because there are overwhelmingly high numbers of people at work. Thus an organization should avoid causing psychological problems to their workers by not offering them security. Such organizations where employee job security is considered will attract and retain the best employees.
Conclusion
The previously held traditional approaches that helped maintain the employees of the baby boomers generation are no longer effective in the modern work place. The younger generation of employees has higher expectations for instance workplace flexibility, effective communication, integration of modern technology and employee security. These motivate the young employees to work effectively. Thus, just as their needs are met, the overall organizational needs are also met and thus leading to the increased productivity of the organization.
References
James, J.B., McKechnie, S. & Swanberg, J. (2011). Thinking about age in employee engagement. Journal of Organizational Behavior, Jan 2011.
Javitch, D.G. (2010). Motivating Gen X, Gen Y workers: A primer on how to get the most out of younger employees. Retrieved on May 3, 2011 from: http://www.entrepreneur.com/humanresources/employeemanagementcolumnistdavidjavitch/article206502.html.
Mcclure, G. (2009). Managing young employees: recruiting and retaining them. Retrieved on May 3, 2011 from: http://www.todaysengineer.org/2009/Mar/managing-youth.asp.
Sirota, D., Mischkind, L.A. & Meltzer, M.I. (2008). The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want. Pearson Education publishers limited.
Tomar, A.A. (2006). An analysis of generational diversity in the workplace. MercyCollege publishers.
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