TM - March 2008 - (Page 41)

require an organizational cultural change, but as long as the output is there, downtime is not a bad word. “Employers haven’t really done a good job to date preparing talent managers,” Smith said. “If you think about it, talent managers probably are from a different generation. They could be Gen Xers or boomers. This cross-generational issue, and how organizations are preparing their cross-generational story of one Canadian client who, when the city of Ontario enacted laws making it illegal to smoke inside any public building or place, transitioned employees into the new regime by setting up smoking rooms. “I was talking to the HR director at Atomic Energy Canada Ltd., and the biggest regret he had was that they got rid of those smoking rooms,” Rosenberg said. “He told me the senior vice president said he’d had great feedback on issues they were looking at from this guy he talked to in the smoking room. He said, ‘Who is this guy? What is he a manager of?’ The HR Talent managers must establish director looked him up on the employee clear goals regarding deliverables and list and found out he was on the custodideadlines, be less rigid about enforcing al staff. He was the janitor, but they were just talking as addicts, not as labels, and a specific work structure and avoid they were able to implement a lot of watching to see who’s sitting in his or her ideas because of the unofficial, unstrucseat looking or behaving a certain way. tured communication going on in the smoking room. The idea of where performance lies is, ‘How do we create the smoking room without the smoke?’” employees to understand and deal with some of One way to build this metaphoric smoking room is these issues, is a growing trend.” to create and promote off-site events that build Many organizations are preparing talent managers for engagement and bring together disparate employee this work shift with development activity such as populations outside of work. Rosenberg said this not coaching and reverse mentoring. Smith said some of only allows employees to engage with one another Accenture’s new-generation workers have real power in different ways, it can build loyalty — but only if to teach older workers about tools available in the the culture will accept and sustain this type of attiorganization that can help them be more effective. tude and activity. “Reverse mentoring is a role that hits right at the heart of this issue. Managers don’t have to feel they need to be 24x7 or eight straight hours on one thing. It’s OK for managers to deal with some of this in a different way,” he said. Create a ‘Smoking Room’ Fact: Employees are going to engage in non-work related activities on the job. The new school of thought suggests talent managers should adapt to the flexibility of younger employees entering the workforce because imposing potentially outdated and unnecessary structure in the name of increased productivity may create the opposite effect. Therefore, talent managers must decide how to create an environment that will give workers what they need and simultaneously promote the high performance the company requires. Some companies are creating special renewal rooms where employees can go to relax and refresh, but there are simpler solutions that don’t take up real estate. “High-performing cultures offer things for the employee that go outside business,” said Michael Rosenberg, principal at OYG Consulting Inc. “They give people flex time and ways to work because they recognize very clearly that you can’t function at a high level if you’re burned out. Within any workplace, you need a certain amount of flexibility and chaos, some unstructured things.” Rosenberg illustrated his point with the following “SAS is a good example of a company that really creates a culture that does this. When Jim Goodnight started SAS on Wednesdays, they’d bring in M&M’s for everybody. When people start eating the M&M’s, they start talking,” Rosenberg said. “On-site day care works, too, because people have kids in common, and that creates dialogue. Many friends are friends because their kids are friends. The day care becomes the smoking room and gives people the space to talk as friends, not just in a strictly professional atmosphere. This impacts performance because it builds trust.” The point to any adaptation of the traditional work value system is to ensure employee productivity and creativity are not stunted. Talent managers want to create a culture in which the final measure of performance is how employees perform against established objectives and competencies to provide value for the organization. “Are you doing what needs to be done? That’s the bottom line to me,” Reeves said. “If you can accomplish things, there’s a level of reasonableness about chatting on cell phones during the day. I’ve worked places where they shut off Internet access because they didn’t want people surfing the Web, and that doesn’t do anything to enhance employee morale. As long as there’s honesty, openness, sort of a transparency and people aren’t hiding in corners talking on cell phones and running downstairs to an Internet service to check their home e-mail, I think it’s just a reality of the way we live.” talent management magazine www.TalentMgt.com 41 March 2008 http://www.TalentMgt.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of TM - March 2008

TM - March 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Human Performance - The Paradoxically Gifted Leading Edge - Reverse Engineering: Shifting Focus to HR's Cause Learning Connection - Sharing Talent On the Hunt for Talent Unlock Employee Motivation Through Personality Testing HR Crucial to Executive Compensation Process Downtown Management: Surfing May Not Be Slacking Think Tanks Aid Government in Talent Management Creating Consistency: Enterprise-Wide Succession Plans Battle Retention Deficits With On-Boarding Sunbelt Rentals: A Mid-Level View of HR From the Trenches Butterball: No Chicken When It Comes to Talent Management Advertisers' Index Editorial Resources Full Potential - Choosing Change

TM - March 2008

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