Are you listening to your employees?

As recently as when the latest members of the baby boom generation entered the workforce, "loyalty" was still a that described employee-employer relationships. Businesses thought in terms of attracting bright young minds and investing time, training, and money to cultivate long-term employees. Continuity, job evolution, employee growth, and long-range vision were paramount. Also, a much less volatile world inclined businesses to take a more cautious, conservative approach in developing new services and products. In the meantime, employees were looking for job security, opportunities for advancement, and incomes that would allow them to pay the bills and save for the future.

The world changed, however. Information overload, global economic competition, and rising customer expectations increased the risk of failure and the cost of survival. Businesses reacted to protect the bottom line, and employees began to think of themselves as just another commodity that had a limited useful life and could be discarded at will-or traded in for a newer model with lower costs. As businesses fought to survive by reducing costs, loyal employees faced abrupt and sometimes careerending layoffs. The effects were profoundwhile CEOs were focused on being competitive in a global marketplace, the next generation of workers was learning new rules for survival in the workforce. As children, they experienced stress at home associated with unemployment, broken family relationships, difficult financial times, and the betrayal of the company loyalty that workers counted on. When those children arrived in the workplace, they were determined to survive by looking out for themselves as a first priority.

That new generation now represents a growing proportion of the workforce. Older managers often seem surprised that these socalled Generation Xers have different attitudes about their employers, different expectations, and less commitment than their parents did. The problem is that while the perspective of the workforce changed-in the interests of survival-businesses and their leaders have been slow to understand what happened and why the workplace must change if managers are to re-establish the harmony that employeremployee relations once enjoyed. Moreover, in our changing economy, one could question whether those factors that were so important in the past are still relevant today. How important is it to hire employees who are not prone to job hop, employees who aspire to long-term jobs,...