A New World for the Work Force

There is all kinds of complaints from company owners and manager about the ‘new generation’ of employee. Being a Director myself I see it every day, and I kinda concur.

I’ve watched all kinds of YouTube videos and read blogs and books on the subject. They pretty much agree, it is a new generation of workforce that need to be handled differently. They generally say that employees now need to feel that they belong and make a difference and that their opinion counts.

Operationally though, this is much easier said then done.

Back to basics…In a time not so long ago we did this already and it worked well. People stepped up and helped each other out, now though with wages rising all around and a much higher competitive workforce this is even becoming a challenge.

It seems that the new, lower wage employee, is only their for themselves. They don’t plan to ‘step up’ even if you fulfill the ‘I can make a difference’ suggestion. They want to come to work, know exactly what is expected of them and do that. There is not too many that want to move beyond that box.

I’m going to try to ‘take it back to basics.’ Since this seems to be the current mindset, let’s do that and spell it out all the ‘general orders’ for their position for the day and hold them responsible for that. Hopefully that, combined with a ‘ I can make a difference’ job environment will inspire people to want to move beyond that black and white box.

In the past I feared that the ‘spell it out’ approach would do the opposite and encourage people to stay in the box, and in the past it probably would have. But with this new employee maybe this can help get us back on track.

I’ll report back latter with how this works out for us. One fear is that the ‘veterans’ may not be as open to this new paradigm, but we will take it one step at a time and see where it takes us.

What are your challenges and thoughts in regards to the ‘new’ employee, leave it in the comments below, i would love to hear what has worked and not for you.