HR Retention with Generation Y

The following excerpt from “The War for Talent” is something where old-skool HR management struggles.

Gen Y Generation Y—people born after 1980—whose outlook has been shaped by, among other things, the Internet, information overload, and overzealous parents. HR professionals say that these workers demand more flexibility, meaningful jobs, professional freedom, higher rewards, and a better work–life balance than older employees do. People in this group see their professional careers as a series of two- to three-year chapters and will readily switch jobs, so companies face the risk of high attrition if their expectations aren’t met. As one HR director explained, “The millennial generation doesn’t want to work 100 hours a week. These kids want a different deal; they have seen their parents work all their life for the same company and then get fired. They are not interested in killing themselves for work.”

So the gen Y doesn’t always get portrayed positively. Yet HR has to face the fact that these people are our new knowledge workers. The generation Y wants the TRUE win-win situation in relation to their work situation. They provide knowledge to the company, and in return the company will have to provide a decent platform for this generation to grow. The financial side alone just doesn’t cut it with them, they want to be part of “Enterprise 2.0“!

Gen Y, the Knowledge Worker 2.0!

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=i-am-knowledge-worker-20786

| View | Upload your own

The 7 habits of highly effective people

Check out the following slide set by Marina Noordegraaf (Note: Dutch blog)

“The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves”

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=7habitsversie5-1211384232341228-8

| View | Upload your own

After distilling the presentation, the key residue is the following:

• Be proactive “You are respons-able: able to choose your respons!”
• Begin with the end in mind
• Put first things first
• Think Win/win
• Seek first to understand, then to be understood
• Synergize “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”
• Sharpen the Saw

Sensible Units

When browsing WebWare I stumbled upon a small service called SensibleUnits. It’s mission statement: Convert boring units to real objects as you type!

Remember Steve Job’s keynote speech on the iPhone sales? Okay, maybe you don’t… Yet during his speech he announced that Apple sold 4 million iPhones during its first 200 days on sale. Off course that doesn’t say much, so he visualized it by saying that was an average of 20,000 units per day.

Or remember the introduction of the MacBook air? (fragment @ 3:15)

20.000 units per day is something very visible, a laptop that can be put in an enterprise envelope is too. So understand that your audience wants something to compare it too.

Another example; On the first anniversary of this blog I said the following.

This has made the blog grew with 152 posts the last year; that’s about 3 posts a week.

I guess 3 posts a week was a bit more clear than if I had only said “152 posts / year”… It’s all about making messages stick! 😉

Representational Systems : Visual, Auditory & Kinesthetic

Introduction
As human beings we experience the world through our physical senses: Vision, Hearing, Touch, Taste and Smell. In NLP the senses are split into three groups and referred to as Representational Systems (rep systems). This term relates to the fact the brain uses the senses to build our internal representation, or model of the world around us.

• Visual : the things we see
• Auditory : the things we hear
• Kinesthetic : the things we feel (touch/emotion), taste or smell

Preference
You can start finding out about the way that you are using your senses by taking a trip down memory lane… Simply remember something pleasant; perhaps about a situation where you were on holiday. What’s the your first though or sensation in the instant that the memory comes to mind? Whatever your first thought is, it will fit in to one of the “VAK” categories (rep systems).

For example, when remembering a beach holiday, some people’s first recollection will be seeing the blue sky and bright sunlight (visual); others might remember hearing the sound of the sea or noise of children playing (auditory); some will remember the feel of the warm sunshine, the smell of hot-dogs or the taste of ice-cream (kinesthetic).

Whatever your first thought is, it will offer a clue to your preferred (or leading) rep system.

What the client really buys…

You might remember the author of the following slide set from his “Death by Powerpoint” presentation. Check out the following he made as a quick reference to “Brainstorming“.

“Brainstorming is … what the clients really buy. — Ethan Rasiel, The McKinsey Way“

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=brainstorming-for-fund-and-profit-1197076310239179-4

| View | Upload your own

Are you a Lizard?

Check out “Do you and your lizard live in a van down by the river?” at Cubicle Nation. It’s a great blog about the Lizard Fear of people.

Lizard Fear
Martha says in Steering by Starlight:

The entire purpose of your reptile brain is to continually broadcast survival fears- alarm reactions that keep animals alive in the wild. These fears fall into two different categories: lack, and attack. On one hand, our reptile brains are convinced that we lack everything we need: we don’t have enough time, money, everything. On the other hand, something terrible is about to happen. A predator– human or animal–is poised to snatch us! That makes sense if we’re hiding in a cave somewhere, but when we’re home in bed, our imaginations can fixate on catastrophes that are so vague and hard to ward off that they fill us with anxiety that has no clear action implication.

“Successful people have all the luck – I just get bad breaks.”
“Lizard Fear” Example

Four Leadership Lessons

• Learn to listen : Listen to people… How how they are feeling and what they are thinking. That’s the only way to figure out how you can help/coach/manage them! Remember that when you’re talking, you’re stating things that you already know. So are you a listener?
  

  “You have two ears and one mouth. This is nature’s way of telling us that you have to listens twice as much as the amount of time you’re talking!”

• Never stop asking questions :
  

  “If normally rational people are behaving irrationally. That means you don’t have all the information they do.”

  You do not know everything, and you are unable to read minds. So ask a lot of questions to get all the information needed.

• Be decisive : The speed to make a decision is an important quality of an executive. You’re being paid to rely on your experience. If you wait for every single data point, every time, you may be seen as indecisive or weak. You have to understand your gut feelings play more of a role. Dare to embrace the unkown!
• Treat every job as your last : “People often see their current position as a stepping-stone to the next one and don’t embrace the role and give it their best. Think fundamental choices…

Attribution

The following article has it’s roots in CIO.com’s “What My Mentor Taught Me“.

The Four Simple Meeting Rules

The following presentation contains four basic rules you need to keep in the back of your head when organizing a meeting. They may seem obvious, yet a lot of people tend to forget them!

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=kvaesbefourmeetingrulessmf-1211438111291533-8

| View | Upload your own

Note: This is my first presentations using “PresentationZen” tips & tricks. I hope you guys like the outcome… 😉

The rules were inspired after reading up a lot of articles about “Stand-Up meetings”. If you’re interested in reading more, check the following articles:

• It’s Not Just Standing Up: Patterns of Daily Stand-up Meetings (tip!)
• LifeHacker
• Stand-up Meeting Antipatterns
• David Maister’s Meeting Rules

Providing the wienie!

Quote from Hear 2.0
Old man Disney was no fool. After he and his Imagineers had completed the GE “Carousel of Progress” for the 1964 World’s Fair, Walt invited a gaggle of GE executives to the studio for a peek at the show. They loved it. But Walt wasn’t so sure. “It doesn’t have a wienie!” he said. “Come back in a couple weeks and I’ll show you.”

The puzzled executives did as Walt asked. A week later they returned to see the show again. It was virtually identical to the first version – with one exception: Walt had added a comical audio-animatronic dog with a wagging tail to each scene.

It was the “wienie.” The “finishing touch.” The delightful, magnetic bonus.

The wienie isn’t what you must do It’s what you want to do. Its delightful impact arises from the sheer joy of its creation and the desire of its creator to share that joy with others. You might even reference this to “Overdeliver“. Which means doing more than you said you would, which is the secret to word of mouth.

Seamless Linux applications on Windows

Seamless Options
One of the all-time-favorite articles here is “Running your dual boot windows inside Vmware Server within Ubuntu“. Yet some might like it the other way around, and a bit more seamless? Two handy options here are “VirtualBox” & “Ulteo Virtual Desktop“.

Virtualbox
You can put Virtualbox in the same range as Vmware. They provide a performant virtualization platform. Yet one of their core features (which I still miss in Vmware, apart from Fusion) is the “seamless” mode. It means your guest OS can appear on your desktop without having to be inside a window. You can run application (say notepad) and it will appear as a single window on your desktop.
More info?

Ulteo
With Ulteo Virtual Desktop, you just have to run the application you need to use from the Ulteo panel and its window will show up like any other Windows application. Ulteo steps in to avoid the point where you need to maintain your virtualization platform (as with the seamless solution of Virtualbox). See it as an application that will (install and) maintain the seamless solutions for you. Check out their website (and the /. comments).