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Employee Turnover…on Demand!
I put a pen to paper recently to create a list of the jobs I had by the age of 27 and counted about a dozen: paperboy, dishwasher, grocery store caddy, lawnmower, soda-fountain jerk, men’s store retail clerk, sporting goods retail clerk, truck loader, night-club bouncer, disk jockey, teacher, motivational speaker. Took me a while to find my talents and merge them with something I was good at to find a sustainable career. I am luckier than some of my buddies, who are my age and are still searching.
Studies show that by the age of 27, the average Gen Why will be able to list over 20 different job experiences, or about one job every six months. Obviously, the boom in the service sector has left today's managers fighting over young talent; a complete reversal from the days when young applicants would fight over jobs. Young job seekers are determined to keep their career options open as long as they can.
You’ve heard of Speed Dating. Can Speed Jobbing be far behind?
Meet Sean Aiken: a 26-year-old Gen Why from Vancouver, Canada who’s in search of a career and won’t settle on one until he is wildly passionate about it. Sean, a college grad with a business degree, is purposely job-hopping from one employment situation to the next, one job a week, one week after another, for 52 straight weeks.
Since this time last year, Sean’s had 42 job titles ranging from a tattoo artist to a dairy farmer, from an exterminator to a yoga instructor. And true to the nature of Generation Why, Sean’s capturing his entire year-long job-hopping adventure on video, and broadcasting it to the world on his website, OneWeekJob.com. The media have picked up on his unique job-hopping adventure, so you may have seen him on ABC’s 20/20, CNN, or read about him in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s how Sean’s website describes his mission:
“After finishing college with a business degree, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t settle for a career that I am not truly passionate about. My goal is to gain a better understanding of what I need in a career to be happy and inspire others to go after their passions.”
My grandpa became a lifelong electrician in 1920 after his service in the Army. He was very good at his trade, although he never thought of it as his passion. Truth be told, I don’t think he was all that happy about going to work each day. But Grandpa wasn’t working to find happiness or to feel passion; he was working to feed his family.
My grandfather’s generation has long since been replaced by the baby boomers, and this year, the first wave of us boomers are eligible for retirement. And who is taking our places? Sean types; young people who aren’t ready to call any job a career until they find one they are wildly passionate about: a career that makes them happy.
But that doesn’t make their employers very happy.
Turnover is a catastrophic problem facing employers in virtually every industry in America and other western cultures. With the emerging workforce demanding passionate work-related experiences and their suitors staring in the face of a crippling labor shortage, this situation could be described as ‘the perfect storm.’
As one who speaks, writes, and consults on employee retention, I see only two solutions for managers who are searching for practical strategies for reducing turnover:
- Find young employees who enter the workplace already passionate about the jobs they have to offer.
- Develop a passion for the job within the young employees they already have.
Both are valid solutions to the challenge. And yet both require a considerable shift in the business-as-usual mindset of many aging managers and conventional organizations.
I am currently writing my third management book about the emerging workforce and, if all goes well, it will be released later this year. This new book will go beyond the well-documented differences in generations to reveal the tactics and strategies the best employers are using to boost performance and create loyalty among the young and the restless. To find out why they leave their jobs, it would be imperative to first discover what would make them stay. And there’s no better place to gather research than spend a week with the world’s most notorious job-hopper, Sean Aiken. So this week, Sean has traveled to Denver to work with me as the 43rd job he’s had this year.
Who knows? Maybe Sean will find his passion as a management speaker and author. Maybe he’ll enjoy writing my blog, writing a chapter for my new book, or in actually taking the microphone for a couple of minutes during one of my live speaking engagements.
One thing’s for certain--I’ll devote a great deal of time to my young protégé this week. I’ll show him the ropes, clarify my expectations, direct his activities and spend hours training him to do his assigned tasks. And next week – he’ll be gone.
The difference between me and you? I already know my employee is going to quit at the end of the week.
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Whys
Cracks
Friday Night Lights and some pretty deep pockets – Five years ago, the voters of Denton Independent School District (metro Dallas, TX) approved 23 new high school stadiums. Total cost: $305.4 million. Today, one of those schools, Denton High School, boasts a $20.5 million state-of-the-art 12,000-seat football field, the same artificial turf the Dallas Cowboys play on, a three-story $900,000 instant-replay scoreboard, and a VIP skybox.
VIP skybox seats and an instant replay scoreboard for a high school game? The players on my varsity football team were ecstatic if they handed each of us an apple as we boarded the bus after the game.
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Bring
Your A Game...To Work! Update
 The
workplace values training and certification program for teenagers
Eric has been working on for more than three years is currently
in the 'PreLaunch' (beta test) phase. To become certified
as workplace ready and prove to perspective employers they
know how to bring their A Game to the job, teen participants
must read a book, watch two 16-minute videos, and then pass
an exam. (The book is complete, but only currently available
to prelaunch partners). If you'd like a sneak peek at this
new online tool, visit TheAGame.com
and register using your email address and the passcode 'sneakpeak'.
Whys
Blog
Sean Aiken is writing Eric's blog this week. Get his thoughts and perspective and leave your feedback.. Read
it here.
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In
This Issue:
Resources:
| They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom. |
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Confucius |
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| You must be the change you wish to see in the world. |
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Mahatma Gandhi |
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| Not in his goals but in his transitions is man great. |
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Ralph
Waldo Emerson |
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| Some men see things as they are and say, "Why?" I dream of things that never were and say, "Why not?" |
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George Bernard Shaw |
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| Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future. |
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John F. Kennedy |
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| You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea. |
Pearl S. Buck |
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The time is always right to do what is right. |
Martin Luther King, Jr. |
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| The difference between a man and a boy is, a boy wants to grow up to be a fireman, but a man wants to grow up to be a giant monster fireman. |
|
Jack
Handey - Author of Deep Thoughts |
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The
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Wanna see how Gen Why guests are catered to by Gen Why hotel owners in the only exclusive-snowboarder/skater hotels in the world? Check out the signature rooms at the Block Hotel. http://www.theblockhotels.com/tahoe/thehotel/signature/ Take a video tour of some of these wild rooms and note the built-in amenities and you’ll agree; this certainly isn’t your father’s hotel.
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