Gen Y – HR Industry Interviews

Interviews from the A Better HR Business podcast

Tag: Gen Y

How To Measure HR And Display Business Metrics [Plus A Brain Teaser For You]

At HRwisdom, we talk a lot about how to measure HR and how to get the best out of your workforce using effective business targets and measures

In one of our many free employer briefings (’15 Ways To Manage Your Employees During Uncertain Times’) we suggest the following:

  1. Clearly identify the most important business measures (KPIs = Key Performance Indicators) that will keep your business afloat during challenging times. The critical measure of ‘Break-Even’ is a good start and you could then add other measures such as ‘Widgets Sold Per Month’ or ‘Cost Per Unit’ as appropriate. Publish these three or four measures everywhere in the form of very basic charts that any passerby can understand at a glance. These charts should, at a minimum, be above every water cooler or in every lunchroom and they should be updated daily to emphasise their importance. Discuss the results at every opportunity.
  2. Apply performance-based pay, incentives, or bonuses to every job. Note that these can be non-financial incentives. Ideally, all incentives should be results of pre-determined outcomes linked to the business’s key performance indicators. Celebrate small and big wins and use these celebrations to focus staff on doing the things that have the biggest impact on your key measures.

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How To Measure HR Performance and Business Performance?

In the extracts above, we described some of the ways you can measure the performance of your human resources and of your business overall. How To Measure HR

However, we often get asked about how best to display this information?

After all, some business measures can be quite tricky to communicate to the workforce so how can we display this on paper so everyone can understand easier?

In today’s HRwisdom blog post on how to measure HR, we’re sharing some valuable information from an industry expert on how to display these business and HR metrics in the most effective and convincing manner.

This time, however, the resource is a little different and, hopefully, a little fun for you.

The resource comes courtesy of Stephen Few. Stephen consults to industry and teaches in the MBA program at the University of California, Berkeley.

How To Measure HR With Metric Displays

Stephen is a regular visitor to Australia to  run his leading-edge training and share his Graph Design IQ Test.

An HR Brain Teaser For You 

Think you know the best way to share performance results with your staff?

To test your HR metrics and business performance display knowledge, click here.

We’d love it if you shared this with your friends and colleagues (you can use the social media buttons below).

Enjoy!

HRwisdom

Training And Development Of Staff

Training and development of staff – this is one of the key issues addressed in the free HRwisdom Employee Attraction & Retention Guide available for download here now.

In HRwisdom Community Employee Attraction & Retention Guide, sixteen expert employee management practitioners from all areas of the human resources field offer their best employee attraction & retention advice.

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Training and Development of Staff

Much of the information in the comprehensive free guide goes towards answering questions around Training and development of staff.

In the wider context, the free guide has been developed to help business owners and Human Resources professionals who want to fast-track their staff management success.

Expert Advice On Training and Developing Employees

One such expert contributor is Alan Hargreaves.

Training and Development of Staff

Alan Hargreaves has spent 35 years in financial services and business consulting.

Alan’s approach to management is highly effective, yet inspiringly simple. It focuses on real issues rather than strategic principles. His innovative mix of personal and collaborative action brings immediate traction. He is author of the management book, Recharge, published by John Wiley and Sons.

Alan is a director and partner of Hargreaves Revis Wills, which provides bespoke mentoring services to senior executives. He is regularly engaged as a speaker, consultant and mentor.

In his article, Alan puts a unique service perspective on the issue of staff development. This perspective provides a powerful way to build trust and loyalty with your staff. By adopting some of Alan’s ideas, you may well be pleasantly surprised by the result.

Download The Free Employee Attraction & Retention Guide

For instant download of the comprehensive free “HRwisdom Community Employee Attraction & Retention Guide,” click on Employee Attraction & Retention Guide now.

Training and Development of Employees

HRwisdom

Managing Generation Y In The Workplace

Managing Generation Y In The Workplace

Today’s HRwisdom Blog looks at managing Gen Y staff and comes thanks to HRwisdom expert contributor, Robert Watson.

Over to Robert . . .

Weekend papers regularly feature stories about “Generation Y” – the group of people born between about 1979 and 1999.

Managing Generation Y In The WorkplaceOnce a group attains a label, it follows that writers compile the quirkiest features of that group and turn it into literary entertainment.

However, being a business manager you have probably seen some of these people applying for jobs and perhaps you have even employed some and noticed that they are somehow “different” to your regular workers.

So, it will help employers if they can have an understanding of the characteristics of Gen Y.

Gen Y are commonly described as:

  • Very confident of themselves
  • Impatient
  • Quick to learn
  • Positive about the future, and
  • Spending significant amounts of time socialising using computers and mobile phones (and you thought they were wasting time!).

What if you are recruiting Gen Y people?

Unlike their parents, Gen Y don’t look in the newspaper waiting for job vacancies to appear each Saturday. No, they actively use search engines on the internet to spot advertisements and have them automatically sent by RSS feed to their mobile phones. Gen Y can literally send in their CV one minute after the job ad has been posted.

As an employer, you should be using the internet as your primary method of advertising vacancies.

Having said that, it can be smart to use a two-pronged approach.

First, place a small newspaper ad which shows your company name (brand), the job title, a reference to the more comprehensive internet ad and just enough words to excite Mum and Dad into telling their son or daughter.

Second, your internet ad (or website) should contain details to excite the potential Gen Y applicant:

  • Use fresh and bright colour so that your vacancy looks different from the bland text-only ads
  • Show photos or a video of your existing employees smiling at work (an informal but free method of recognising your best employees!)
  • Talk about growth and exciting future developments because Gen Ys want to see that your business is not stagnant
  • Mention technology where appropriate, and
  • You still need a basic description of what the work entails, remembering, however, Gen Y will be wanting to see if your workplace looks like an interesting and fun place to be. As an example, do school kids join fast food outlets because they want to cook 1000 burger patties in a shift? No! They join because they want to be part of a fun-loving team of young people.

What if your business already has Gen Ys?

With Gen Y, be aware that their loyalty to anything is often fragile. If they don’t like your workplace, they will leave and then start looking for other work (although we’ll wait and see what impact the global financial downturn has upon this characteristic). In contrast, the older generations would hang on in a lousy job until they had secured another job.

To a large extent, you need to entertain the Gen Ys, and there is a way to do this which will tap into their impatience and their need for fast-paced learning.

Consider setting up a Learning Log which is a plan of all the topics needed to be mastered before a person can be considered for the next position. Although the topics might be broad, the individual sub-topics will be small and very quick to learn. Training policies help plan for such learning.

An Example: A Supermarket Business

Level 1 Check-Out Operation

  • Opening the register
  • Greeting the customer
  • Operating the conveyor, scanning and packing bags
  • Transactions – Cash, Credit cards, EFT, Cheque
  • Failed scans and Sale items
  • Shutdown and Balancing the till

Level 2 Front End Supervision

  • All aspects of Check-Out Operation, plus
  • Accessing the safe
  • Handling returns
  • Responsible sale of cigarettes
  • Dealing with abusive customers
  • Confronting suspected shoplifters
  • Emergency evacuation drill coordination
  • Rostering of staff.

In the past, a business might train all of these things in a single four hour session of mostly theory.

However, with Gen Y you would use a staged approach, with separate lessons over a period of time. Each mini-lesson would have a small amount of theory, then a walk-through of the appropriate Standard Operating Procedure and, finally, an appropriate number of hours doing the activity under the watchful eye of your most experienced supervisor.

Short, sharp lessons building up towards the end point makes for a program which engages the Gen Y employee.

The Bottom Line:

Rather than shaking your head in frustration at Gen Ys, your challenge is to tap into their many strengths so that your business can ride the fast wave into the future.

HRwisdom