Old School vs. New School: It’s a Matter of Being Relevant

The new economy begs the question: Are employers trying to become relevant to today’s worker or are they still using old school approaches? If they’re deploying the old school method to find quality workers, they risk results that are much like those we have experienced in this current recession.

Oops, my bad. The Feds declared the recession was over. Okay, so it’s a jobless recovery.

New School Approach

Experience.com is conducting an interesting survey that contains what I call “new school” approaches to working.  Experience.com is a community site that started 13 years ago and focuses on helping employers connect with Generation Y workers. The company website touts over 4.2 million students and alumni as part of the community with over 100,000 employers that have engaged with the Experience Network.

One particular question on the survey asks about the frequency of feedback job candidates expect to get from their managers and the choices were as follows:

• Annually
• Quarterly
• Monthly
• Daily

Given that Experience.com’s mission is to match employers with Gen Yers, I suspect most participants in this survey will want daily feedback from their manager. I chuckled because I know a lot of Xers and Boomers who think daily communication with an employee is rediculous. But is it? 

Make it Relevant

Improving communication and communications channels is one approach employers can take to becoming relevant to today’s worker. Communication cannot occur in a vacuum nor can it be sporadic. It must remain constant in order to drive employees, no matter what generation, to on-brand behaviors. But let’s be clear, we are assuming the brand behaviors have been adequately communicated through a robust internal communications strategy.

In a BusinessWeek.com article published May 28,2009, Greg Lederman of Brand Integrity takes the position that employees need a morale booster and it starts with management. Lederman states that when managers are busy protecting their jobs, making layoffs and thinking of ways to survive, workers start to lose faith in the organization. And when that happens, engagement is not a high priority.

Old School Obituary

The old school way of engaging workers is dead and the obituary will read something like this:

We tried to tell the world that we have the best employees but we did nothing internally to help our employees become the best. We thought the annual performance reviews would be enough to drive on-brand behavior but we discovered that more people left our organization for a better opportunity. It never dawned on us that some of the best employees left because they weren’t clear what direction the company was going in because leadership failed to communicate goals and objectives. We lost some of our best employees because they could not get along with the rogue manager whom they complained about numerous times. Because we had no mechanisms in place to monitor the manager’s communication with our best employees, we didn’t have a clue things were that bad. And so as we try to emerge from one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression, we are left scratching our heads as to why our competition blew right past us and is now thriving in this new economy.

So a heads up with some new school thinking: Begin to explore opportunities to get employees to embrace on-brand behaviors because it’s often been said, ‘An engaged employee translates to an engaged customer.’ Companies should take a fresh look at what kind of culture their manifesting. Do employees feel they can be innovative and creative? Or are they stifled because of a top-down management style?

And finally he question to leaders who think the hierarchal-type of organization is still effective: Why are you so afraid of giving up control?