Posts belonging to Category demographics

I came across this study from Randstad US  the other day that speaks to something I wrote a feature about back in our mid-October digital edition — that younger and older workers are much more closely aligned in temperament, taste and priorities than either demographic group is with Gen Xers.

Mind you, the studies are considering two different groups of older workers, baby boomers and mature workers, but the general finding seems to be that millennials’ goals and needs at work mirror those of their parents’ generation (and even the next one back) more than they do the goals and needs of those who came just before them.

In Randstad’s “Engagement Study,” it finds employees in two demographically opposed age brackets (millennials, born 1979 to 1994, and mature workers, born before 1946) share a common vocational verdict: They both expressed a more positive outlook on their careers than other demographics surveyed.

In fact, 89 percent of mature workers and 75 percent of millennials say they enjoy going to work every day, and a majority of both groups feel inspired to do their best at work (95 percent of mature respondents and 80 percent of millennials). These workers also perceive a higher morale in the workplace than other age groups, with 69 percent of millennials and 64 percent of mature workers finding a positive energy at work, compared to just a 53-percent average among other groups, including Gen X.

Similarly, in my October Q&A with talent-management and demographic expert Sylvia Ann Hewlett titled “Rethinking Demographics,” she presents her case for millennials and baby boomers (born 1946 through 1964) being cut from the same cloth when it comes to their interests in flexible schedules and social connections, their commitments to bettering the planet and finding meaning in their work, and even the fact that they both value loyalty to their employers.

On the contrary, says Hewlett — whose research into this was published in a Harvard Business Review article, ”How Gen Y & Boomers Will Reshape Your Agenda” — Gen Xers (born 1965 through 1978) are the lone group among the three. She calls them “the generation of hard knocks … hit hardest by two or three major recessions [and] burned in underwater mortgages with young children.”

Both Hewlett and Jim Link, managing director for Randstad US, say companies need to do a much better job incorporating these similarities and differences into engagement and talent-management strategies. Link says it’s “critical for companies [to] dive into what engagement and retention drivers are aligned and not aligned [in order to] identify and prioritize the larget opportunities to improve employee engagement … .”

Such as, you might ask? For one, Hewlett suggests partnering young and old in a kind of training-up-and-training-down program. Another might involve sending boomers and millennials out together on volunteer projects.

Both say initiating programs with demographic alignment in mind will reap rewards you can’t even imagine till you try.

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In case you thought women in HR have been conquering the “glass ceiling” more than in other departments just by their sheer numbers in the profession, think again.

At least that’s what rearchers at Los Angeles-based Korn/Ferry say, based on their latest data from the Korn/Ferry 500 CHRO database, which tracks the professional moves of about 500 chief human resource officers throughout the world.

The data — which is for internal purposes only and, therefore, not public — finds 58 percent of CHROs are male, according to the company’s emailed release.

“Forty years ago, HR was considered mostly an administrative function,” the release says. “For that reason, many women would often be promoted from secretaries to human resource professionals — supporting the myth that women dominate the top ranks of HR. An even bigger myth is that HR is a leader in gender diversity in the C-suite.”

Kim Shanahan, a senior client partner and managing director of the Human Resources Center of Expertise at Korn/Ferry, says that, while there are many exceptional females in the function, the facts do, indeed, show that Fortune 500 CHROs are actually primarily male. She goes on:

There is much written about the glass ceiling for CEOs and other executive leaders. For HR executives, the demands on leaders are the same as other executive functions – kids, family, intense work schedule, travel, etc. However, showing ambition like their functional counterparts sometimes goes against the nature of the function.

That said, many of the best HR executives are bold, business-oriented, and are able to connect with all levels of the organization and all types of people. They know when to sit back and when to step up. Females typically have incredible capabilities across these areas but can sometimes take too much of a back seat when a front seat may be required.

Boards and CEOs need to continuously require diverse slates of candidates — internal and/or external – for all leadership openings. This includes ensuring that females are included in all slates for succession opportunities.

There is intense pressure for CEOs to have diverse executive teams and most are working diligently to ensure they meet these requirements. At the same time, they are also facing intense complexity in terms of their businesses. They are putting a premium on those with strong change-management [skills and experience] and ideally a track record of working closely with a board of directors. Therefore, some of the dynamics in terms of the CHRO numbers are in direct conflict – the supply/demand curve is a little off.”

For further discussion’s sake, here’s our HRE cover story from March 2012, “The Feminization of HR,” that, while concurring women aren’t necessarily dominating HR’s top spots, makes a solid argument for that changing soon, based simply on the plethora of women in the HR-leadership pipeline.

And here is a recent Leader Board post by Senior Editor Andrew R. McIlvaine about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wanting to start what she calls “Lean In Circles” at workplaces throughout the country to help women fight the often-invisible, often-internal barriers impeding their ultimate top-leadership climbs.

She has this to say about women being their own worst enemies in her soon-to-be-released book, Lean In:

We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in. [The result is that] men still run the world.”

I guess, going by Korn/Ferry’s data, you can count HR as still part of that world … at least for now.

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It appears agreeing on a proposal to require company boards in the European Union to be made up of at least 40 percent women is a bit dicier than some thought.

At least that’s what’s implied by Viviane Reding’s comments in this New York Times report about the European Commission postponing its decision on the proposal due to tough opposition and concerns over its legality. The proposal was initially scheduled for a ruling Oct. 23 and will now come up for discussion again on Nov. 14. (Here’s an earlier Times story that provides more background on the proposal.)

As Reding, the European commissioner for justice, said in the Oct. 23 piece, the figure being considered ”is still 40 percent. But the way to arrive there has been looked at in a different way.”

The debate ”was very intense,” she said, explaining that the discussion on the legality of any quota was one reason the meeting that day in Strasbourg, France took the several hours that it did. No doubt other reasons included Reding’s proposed penalities and sanctions that companies and organizations would face if they failed to improve their boards’ female representation.

According to the story, the issue has divided the European Union, with Britain leading the countries that regard the proposed rule as counterproductive and unworkable. Other countries taking that view include The Netherlands, Malta, the Czech Republic, Latvia and Bulgaria.

I went searching for the latest rundown on where all countries — including the United States — stand on female representation on boards of directors. Not a whole lot out there, but I did find this paper (free download included) by University of Pittsburgh School of Law professor Douglas M. Branson, An Australian Perspective on a Global Phenomenon: Initiatives to Place Women on Corporate Boards of Directors. According to his report on research he did:

The statistics indicating the representation of women on corporate boards vary widely from country to country. Norway, which passed its controversial quota law in 2003, in effect mandates that 40 percent of a public company’s directors be women by 2008, a goal which has been achieved.

According to Catalyst Inc. [a New York-based organization promoting inclusive workplaces], in the United States, the proportion of women on boards of large, publicly held companies stands at 16.1 percent, but with the proportion stagnant from 2004 onward. Portugal has the fewest females on corporate boards of publicly held corporations, accounting for just 6 percent.

Overall, the 2010 European average was 11.7 percent but, again, the numbers varied widely. After Norway, the highest five were: Sweden (28.2 percent), Finland (26 percent), Netherlands (20.9 percent), Denmark (14 percent), and the United Kingdom (11.5 percent). Besides Portugal, the laggards included Italy (3.6 percent), Luxembourg (6 percent) and Germany (7 percent).

Two years [2010 to 2012] have seen significant change, to between 13 percent and 14 percent. France, which adopted a quota law early in 2011, is thought to be responsible for half or more of the EU increase, with the percentage of women directors increasing from 12 percent to 24 percent in 14 months.

On the Pacific Rim, Australia leads among the countries from which statistics are available, with 13.8 percent. New Zealand follows with approximately 10 percent. Others in the queue include Hong Kong (8.9 percent) and Peoples Republic of China (7.2 percent). The caboose is Japan (1.4 percent).

Not sure where I stand on all this. Not sure quotas ever really improve the overall makeups of organizations or countries. My guess, though – having not been invited to that fiery Oct. 23 meeting – is that the lower-scoring entities “may protest [the most], methinks,” to (sort of) quote Shakespeare.

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Updated: 3:54 p.m.

A spot of good news — for men, at least — coming from Challenger, Gray & Christmas today.

According to the Chicago-based provider of executive outplacement services, the man-cession, as it has been called by those who like to use mash-ups as words, saw employment among men plummet by more than 5.2 million between November 2007 and December 2009, mostly due to massive job losses in male-dominated industries such as construction, manufacturing and financial services.

In contrast, the number of employed women fell by 1.9 million during the same period.

Now, with the economy on the slow road to recovery, men’s fortunes appear to be improving.  Of the net 2.4 million newly created jobs since the June 2009, men have landed 74.7 percent of those, including 61 percent in the last year.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for women, the firm adds.

Since the recovery started in July 2009, women have lost 268,000 jobs and seen unemployment rise from 8.3 percent to 8.5 percent. Industries heavily dominated by women are continuing to cut jobs, such as government, where women represent 57 percent of the 22.1 million Americans employed in the government sector.  At the local government level, where downsizing in the education area has been the heaviest, women account for nearly 62 percent of the workforce.

But it’s not all gloom and doom for women workers:  Women have gained 1.58 million jobs since June 2011, while men have gained 1.49 million in the last year.

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Delivering the keynote at the 5th annual Bersin IMPACT conference, held once again at the historic and beautifully restored Vinoy Renaissance Resort in St. Petersburg, Fla., Josh Bersin told the packed room that the only way organizations can thrive in an era of unprecedented change is to embrace agility.

“Within 20 years, China will be the world’s No. 1 economy, followed by the U.S. and India,” said Bersin, founder and CEO of Bersin & Associates. “CEOs will be counting on HR’s expertise to help them expand the business in fast-growing countries like India and Brazil–and it just so happens these countries are facing a paradoxical imbalance of skills and demands.”

These nations tend to have large numbers of old and young citizens, but relatively few in the middle, he said. Even in the U.S., 47 percent of the workfore will be younger than 35 by next year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Research from Mercer indicates these younger workers are twice as likely to be looking for a new job as older workers, said Bersin. “So engagement is crucial,” he said.

Amid these demographic changes, the very structure of organizations is changing, said Bersin: “Thanks to the web, managers are no longer in charge of companies–customers are.” Dissatisfied customers can use the web to quickly find alternatives and tell others about their dissatisfaction–a company’s reputation can go from stellar to tattered in record time, he said.

When the Economist magazine polled CEOs for their definition of agility, they chose “rapid decision-making, high-performance culture and flexible teams,” said Bersin. But when they were asked which corporate function was contributing the most to organizational agility, HR ranked last out of 14, well behind sales, marketing and even legal.

Moving up from the bottom of the list requires HR to be a key player in helping the organization transform itself to an agile one by “implementing systems and strategies that foster expertise, collaboration and decision-making,” he said, reinventing processes such as performance management so that goals are frequently updated, “ratings” are done away with and social rewards and recognition–in which team members, not managers, decide who will be recognized for their contributions–is standard.

Agile organizations are ones that aren’t afraid to ditch old processes, even if they happened to pioneer those processes, said Bersin, citing Seagate Technology, widely credited with creating the “cascading goals” model. Seagate decided to abandon that model recently because it was “too limiting,” choosing instead to focus on the constant updating of goals, he said.

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Men sing their praises in the workplace better and louder than women, according to this new study by researchers from several business schools, including Columbia University’s. (The PDF download link is at the bottom of the study’s release.)

Researchers say this piece of research may offer yet another reason for the shortage of women in executive and board positions. They just don’t toot their horns enough. And we’re not talking fabrication here, just exaggeration.

This release about the study quotes Vickie Milazzo, author of Wicked Success Is Inside Every Woman, saying exaggeration “doesn’t mean men lie during job interviews or performance reviews — but it does mean they exhibit a lot more confidence in workplace situations. They’re not afraid to sing their own praises.”

“It’s not about lying or over-exaggerating,” she says. “It’s about ultra-positioning. Clearly, we females need to take a page from the male playbook and make sure that we’re getting the recognition and credit we’ve earned. If you still have doubts, consider that announcing your accomplishments validates the investments others have made in you. Your boss, for example, wants to know that she bet on a winner when she hired you.”

Milazzo even offers up some examples of how women and men differ in work situations. They’re definitely worth looking at.

Ernesto Reuben, assistant professor at the Columbia Business School and a lead researcher, says the gender difference uncovered in his study is hard to tackle.

“It almost calls for direct intervention because men’s overconfidence is honest,” he says. “It’s not just a matter of telling men not to lie — because they honestly believe their performance is 30 percent better than it really is. Similarly, it’s not as if you can simply tell women they should inflate their own sense of overconfidence to be on par with that of men.”

He says recruiters should consider taking male candidates’ claims about past performance with a grain of salt. Employers who aren’t aware of the tendency for men to unconsciously inflate their performance could mistake that overconfidence for true performance, and overlook better female candidates. “It calls for a bit more sophistication on the part of hiring committees and recruiters,” he says, “to understand there are gender differences in how people evaluate themselves.”

So what’s the takeaway for HR professionals? Well, for the ones who are female, I’m imagining there might be some personal eye-openers, like there were for me. In general, maybe some lunch-and-learns, perhaps? For both genders? The added enlightenment – and possible encouragement on the part of female employees – couldn’t hurt overall corporate performance, I’m thinking.

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I look on this as a sign of the changing times. Starting in January 2012, the Center for Work-Life Policy will be going by a new name: the Center for Talent Innovation. Its flagship project, the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force, will also now be known as the Task Force for Talent Innovation. (Here’s the full name-change announcement.)

You might not think this is significant, but I do.

When I came on board as Human Resource Executive^®’s managing editor in 2000, work/life balance probably topped the buzzword list. Employers, it seemed, were just starting to take this conundrum seriously — parents, namely moms, whose full potential as productive and often top-talented employees was being compromised by the more uncompromising 40-plus-hour, office-bound workweeks.

Now, I take this switch to suggest we’ve graduated to a more inclusive concern about the talents of both genders. Working dads are just as compromised as working moms, I’m thinking the thinking goes.

The Center describes its reason for the name change as twofold: “to drive groundbreaking research that leverages talent across the divides of gender, generation, geography and culture; and to create a community of senior executives united by an understanding that full utilization of the global talent pool is at the heart of competitive success.”

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founding president of the Center, says her organization ”is deepening its scope and reach; these last two years, we have ‘gone global.’ ”

She also says the name changes “are driven by enormous growth in the span, scope and stature of the organization. Eight years ago,” she says, “the CWLP was a small, U.S.-based nonprofit centered on women’s retention and acceleration issues.

“Today, it’s a global think tank with representatives in San Francisco, London and Mumbai, and projects in Brazil, China, India and Japan. … Men are newly center-stage in our work. When we look at ‘the X Factor’ — 33-to-46-year-olds — or ‘Asians in America,’ we focus as much on men as women.”

I’m fine with heading in new directions. I’m fine with the notion that concern for women has graduated into a much larger concern for the full realization and utilization of talent overall. I get it that we’re all on a global stage now.

I just hope no one is lured into thinking that that old “conundrum” of the late 1900s and early 2000s — that women leave careers more than men out of concern for their children and that workplace fexibility still isn’t flexible enough for them to reach their full potential and still give their children the lives they deserve – has really been solved.

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Not the greatest news for women leadership in business, if you go by recent reports from Catalyst, the New York-based organization dedicated to expanding women’s opportunities in the global marketplace.

According to the 2011 Catalyst Census: Fortune 500 Women Board Directors, Executive Officers and Top Earners and prior Catalyst censuses, women in corporate America have made no significant gains in the last year and are not further along the corporate ladder than they were six years ago. Youch.

Here are some of the more discouraging statistics, based on responses from 497 U.S.-based companies: Women held 16.1 percent of board seats in 2011, compared to 15.7 percent in 2010. (If we were rounding these, which we usually do, they’d be the same.) In both 2010 and 2011, less than one-fifth of companies had 25 percent or more women directors, while about one-tenth had no women serving on their boards.

There’s more. In both years, women of color still held only 3 percent of corporate board seats. And the number of women holding executive-officer positions actually went down, from 14.4 percent in 2010 to 14.1 percent in 2011.

The salary picture is no brighter for these women executive officers, either: In 2010, women held only 7.6 percent of executive-officer top-earner positions, a percentage that actually went down a tenth of a point in 2011, to 7.5 percent. That leaves men accounting for 92.5 percent of top earners in the year we’re about to usher out the door. Lastly, in both years, nearly one-fifth had 25 percent or more women executive officers, yet more than one-fourth had no women executive officers at all.

How can this be? Hard to say. Ilene H. Lang, president and CEO of Catalyst, says that — considering another Catalyst study demonstrates sustained gender diversity in the boardroom correlates with better corporate performance — “continued obstacles to progress make no sense.”

I know in my 11 years here, we’ve written many stories suggesting top-talent, high-performing women are rethinking the corporate-ladder top-leadership track because of its detriment to their very delicate work/life balance. But I would have thought corporate America would be further along than this by now in helping women solve those challenges — through greater flexibility, leadership development, telecommuting and teleworking options, coaching and mentoring, you name it … just sayin.

At least, on a positive note, a more expanded look by OnlineSchools.com shows more advancement. According to this recently launched “Women at Work” infographic by the Foster City, Calif.-based digital resource for online education, some 78 million women are projected to enter the workforce by 2018, with 10 percent of women over 25 holding an education beyond a bachelor’s degree in 2009, compared to only 1.7 percent in 1960.

OK, well, there’s that. I just hope those 78 million are being supported better by then.

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Research companies eager to hire more female and minority scientists to their mix may want to consider these latest findings of the Bayer Facts of Science Education XV survey.

In this, the 15th such survey by Bayer Corp., 413 science, technology, engingeering and mathematics department chairs were polled from the United States’ leading research universities and those that produce the most African-American, Hispanic and American Indian graduates.

Researchers found that, although American women entering college are the best-prepared academically to successfully graduate with STEM degrees, women and underrepresented minorities still lag way behind Caucasian and Asian males in actually securing those degrees and going on to work in those fields.

The survey asked respondents to shed light on the educational environments in which this shift occurs and found a noticeable lack of encouragement for females and minorities to pursue these studies by departments still headed up by mostly male (87 percent) and Caucasian (88 percent) chairs.

“One of the greatest challenges most universities face is changing the cuture of teaching and learning in STEM courses,” says Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who chaired the National Academies committee that produced the 2010 report, Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America’s Science & Technology Talent at the Crossroads.

“Too often,” he says, “we in higher education believe high quality is related to how many students are weeded out of STEM courses. Instead, the emphasis should be on rigorous course work coupled with support, together leading to larger numbers of students succeeding academically.”

Greg Babe, Bayer’s president and CEO, says this latest research “adds an important, unheard voice to the national discussion about how we as a country need to broaden student participation in STEM to include more women and minorities.”

Although the release about the study doesn’t detail the part corporate America should play, I would venture to guess if more universities heard from more employers dissatisfied with the numbers of women and minorities graduating from these programs and coming to them as qualified job candidates, the impetus to change that culture might be that much greater.

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New research from Boston College’s Sloan Center on Aging & Work finds that employees 40 years old and older are the most engaged and demonstrate the the highest level of organizational commitment. It also finds that those 50 years old and older are the most satisfied with their jobs.

The Sloan Center’s Generations of Talent Study gathered data about work experiences from 11,298 individuals working for seven multinational companies, at 24 worksites in 11 countries. The researchers divided the countries into “old-developed countries,” or those with older populations and developed market economies (Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, the U.K., the U.S.) and “young-developing countries,” or those with younger populations and developing market economies (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa and Botswana).

In both sets of countries, workers 40 years old and older reported higher levels of engagement, organizational commitment and job satisfaction than their younger colleagues, the study found. It also found that job satisfaction is highest among those 50 and older and nearly as high wtih those who are younger than 30.

“Contrary to popular opinion, older workers are the most engaged, and forward-thinking companies need to begin strategizing about how to capitalize on this asset,” said Dr. Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, the Sloan Center’s director.

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