What is it with you people and 8.30am?

Tim Osborn Jones at Henley Business School argues that it may not be effective to categorise talent into specific generations – talent is all about those that have choice in the labour market.

A focus on ‘task not time’ characterises Generation Y workers writes Tamara Erickson in the March 2008 edition of the Harvard Business Review. Generation Ys love to work ‘asynchronously – any time, anywhere’ says Erickson, reporting one subject of their research as asking ‘What is it with you people and 8.30am?’

There are indications about talented individuals, people with choice in the labour market, and the post-‘baby boom’ generations. They are more individual (focused on self-fulfilment), more values-driven (seeking alignment with organisational values and authentic leadership),
more technological (impatient with others less so) and more team centric.

Predictably, however, there are complications: individuals, are after all factors of their own personality, life-stage and career-stage and do not always fit neatly into generational categories. Further, we perhaps too readily underestimate the needs of the other partner in the employment relationship, the organisation, driven by external environment factors, globalisation, demography, competition and uncertainty. There is no sign of, and no reason to expect, a new consensus on employment as in the post-war period. Human resources, and particularly types of talent in short supply, are a source of competitive advantage and employers need to be innovative and flexible to attract, engage and retain talented people.

Studies around the millennium suggest, despite the downsizing and delayering of the 1980s and 1990s, that most talented people still want a relational psychological contract (social exchange, high trust, long term), rather than a transactional contract (economic exchange, high pay for high performance, short term), with their employer. Even so, we need to move away from an exclusive reliance on length of service and ‘face-time’ as the criteria of loyalty, commitment and performance. We need to develop and sustain different perspectives, modes, perhaps even sub cultures within the same organisation.

So, for example the notion of ‘binge-workers’, as I have discussed before in Edge, an Institute of Leadership & Management publication, who invest as much passion in their life as their work, captures some of the dynamism and contradictions inherent in the employment of talented younger generations. Binge-workers identify strongly with the values of their employer, their engagement is measured by quality of output rather than length of service and they look for personal fit with their colleagues, but when any particular project is finished they may choose a little of the good life (eg, world travel) to go with the good work in the here and now. Managers must change the mindset that capability is defined and demonstrated by commitment over a long period of time.

That’s the rub, in managing talent, as for so many things in organisational life, it is the manager that counts. The famous Bath University study of the link between HR and performance, highlighted the need for policies on ‘ability, motivation and opportunity’, but critically also effective implementation by line managers.

Succession planning is key to engaging and retaining talent, and back in fashion but only line managers can make it real. Delegation, nominations to talent pool schemes and identification of credible successors must be integrated as performance criteria for executive bonus payments.
To conclude, I select one example from Adrian Furnham’s delightful and typically irreverent, new book, Head and Heart Management (Palgrave, 2008). Drawing on the apprenticeship tradition, Furnham urges the re-discovery of ‘managers as masters’, who ‘having found the right person, are able and willing to teach, groom and develop him or her’.