Workforce Learning

A newsletter by Alice Waagen (Spring 2005)
Photo by thelongwayround.co.nz, flickr.com

Welcome to the first issue of “The People Side of Business,” my new e-newsletter.

My consulting practice enables me to interact with a wide variety of people and hear about their challenges in the business world today. Since I also want to keep in touch with my valued friends and colleagues, this newsletter is my way to share with you some of my personal learning and experiences from the world of work and interpersonal relations. My goal is to provide you with something of value that you can use to make your personal and professional lives easier.

Why “The People Side of Business”?

February 2005 marks the beginning of my 8th year as a management consultant specializing in organizational learning. When I started my business, I created the slogan “The People Side of Business” to describe what I do. I feel that this focus is as relevant today as it was in 1997.

People are the common denominator for any organization. Regardless of industry,
geographic location, or customer, the people produce the business results. And regardless of the situation, motivating, rewarding and managing people is a complex and challenging task. In my work, I see tools and techniques for managing performance and output that range from the innovative to the ludicrous. By sharing these practices with you, I hope that we can all keep learning how to help people work better together.

Dealing with labor shortages

It is hard to pick up a newspaper or magazine these days and not read about the upcoming labor shortage. Essentially, these concerns about worker shortages boil down to demographics: in the next 10 years, retirees will greatly outnumber the population entering the workforce. Depending on industry and profession, the worker shortages will range from moderate to severe.

In the last few months I have been working with clients on designing programs and solutions for retaining key staff — especially the soon-to-be retirees. Unlike retention strategies from the past, retention programs geared toward senior staff need to be thoroughly researched and customized to the specific needs of the individual. The challenge of designing these programs is that they require us to rethink the last few decades of program design.

For years, we Americans have been pushing early retirement, with incentives designed to replace older, “more expensive” workers with younger, cheaper employees. Job postings with language like “energetic, hard working, looking for advancement” relate more to a younger applicant than a senior one and reinforce a suspicion that older workers may not be valued by the organization.

My personal belief is that organizations that have already begun rethinking their recruitment and retention strategies will be able to do a much better job of workforce management in the next decade than those that neglect the issue. As I learn more about successful solutions to senior retention, I will share them with you in future issues of this e-newsletter.

ASTD’s new competency model

Some of you may have read about the new competency model being developed by the American Society for Training and Development. With this new competency model, ASTD is attempting to create a unified description of the knowledge, skills and abilities needed for success by a workplace performance professional.

Ultimately, ASTD will offer a certification process similar to the certification offered to HR professionals by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).

Last month I was invited to join an international team being formed to assist ASTD in determining which items should be included in the certification exams. I am excited about working with this team, because it will give me an inside view on the details of this new model and how we can use it to measure and improve on the bench strength of our professional community. In future issues of this newsletter, I’ll let you know how the model is progressing.

Books for Leaders: Blink

Recently I read a curious book called Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is the author of the wildly popular book The Tipping Point. In Blink, which is subtitled The Power of Thinking without Thinking, he uses research from neuroscience and psychology to explain how our brains can “thin slice” the available data to make remarkably accurate, nearly instantaneous decisions even before our logical minds kick in.

Gladwell’s assertions have particular importance for those of us in people-support professions. For years we’ve been told to avoid our “gut” feelings and reactions and to analyze events purely on the basis of hard data. And yet, many of us have had experiences where, in hindsight, our gut reaction was much more useful than all the data we had collected.

Gladwell provides a scientific explanation for this phenomenon: when faced with too much information, our brains have difficulty sorting it into meaningful categories. Instead, they tend to freeze up. Too much information can thus prolong our decision-making as we struggle to make sense of all the input.

I endorse reading Blink. Although you won’t get quick answers to today’s vexing workplace issues, you will get a lot to think about and probably some ways to work differently with other people.