Why Has Our Workforce Changed So Dramatically?

– by Dennis Passovoy –

If you’re a Baby Boomer, or even a Gen X’er, you remember the IBM culture that hit its peak in the 80’s.  Baby Boomers accepted these structures as the way it is–you have to start in the mail room and work your way up.  Gen X had this mentality drilled into their heads from their parents, and started out this way, but realized that this culture was breaking down in the 90s, especially with the emergence of the tech sector and dot coms who couldn’t recruit enough people.

Gen Y doesn’t accept this at all, and they’re more likely to wonder why they aren’t in leadership positions within their first year of working at your company.

Eric Simone from ClearBlade, summed up the change in the American company in a CEO Roundtable discussion we had on June 17th.  He noted that in the 80s, the barriers to entry for building a company were massive and usually required lots of capital, and they enjoyed the side benefit of company loyalty because of the culture.

Today, many of those barriers are gone, and as a result, the workforce has adopted a more entrepreneurial mindset. But companies have done a lot to shift their mindsets to build loyalty.

This can be used to your advantage if you understand how to manage and motivate employees–they need to be treated like entrepreneurs of their own positions.

Blind leadership is not going to work in today’s workforce.  You have to develop the individual as the “whole person” if you’re going keep them engaged.

But the benefits of creating this shift will pay off in the longer term in productivity alone–and you’ll redevelop company loyalty thought to have been lost forever.  The difference is, you will have earned it.

Dennis Passovoy is the president of RFG, Inc., an Employee Engagement Advisory firm in Austin, TX that believes in inspiring and harnessing the limitless power of individuals to create unstoppable organizations.  He can be reached at dpassovoy@rfg.com.