There are ways to manage the new breed of intellectuals who are trained to respect and follow business rules and processes even before they start work

A business is only as good as its people. It is no wonder then that over 60 per cent of total corporate expenditure is spent on people-related costs — a huge proportion versus other lines of business.

Every business hopes that such high investments on human resources would shape the desired skills and attitudes, resulting in optimal productivity. This creates a high performance corporate culture. Many organisations are realising that they must transform their business functions, systems and process to achieve this goal, particularly within HR.

According to the global firm, Mercer Human Resource Consulting, over 75 per cent of firms worldwide are involved in HR transformation projects. This is a finding from the company’s ‘HR Transformation Study 2004’.

This global transformation is seeing a fundamental shift in the way human capital is managed. At the core of this transformation, businesses are busily embracing advanced HR and business solutions that create smoother business processes and more efficient work styles.

Befitting such changes in the work environment, the 21st century employee is also fast gaining in sophistication. They represent the new generation of knowledge workers, who bring the value of their newly acquired skills and in return, demand more from their employers. They want innovation but insist on measurements. They are process-based but need flexibility. How do you best manage this new breed of intellectuals who are trained to respect and follow business rules and processes even before they start work?

Is your organisation tuned to nurture these young but vigorous business minds? Or will yours be an environment that will shock them and send them rolling back into the last century?

Here are some of the traits that make up the profile of a typical 21st century employee:

Self-service Individual

21st century employee: “I want to have better control of my work day. Why all the red-tape when I am savvy enough to do it myself with self-service business systems?”

New technologies are making it possible for employees to execute a variety of transactions at work without any human intervention. Many employers offer their employees what is called self-serviced applications. Employees can make choices about benefits options, view on-line pay slips, enroll in learning, enter timesheets, perform self-assessments, indicate work preferences, skills and qualifications, request leave, and apply for jobs. Imagine the time and effort saved.

Performance-based

21st century employee: “Work is more satisfying when it is performance-based. I set goals jointly with my reports and incent them towards their aims. These are tracked online and as such are rid of any inherent ambiguity. My dashboard keeps the process transparent and everyone gets measured fairly on achievements. Most importantly, the outcomes influence remuneration.”

The performance-based 21st century employee is deeply interested in doing things that can be measured. Management-by-fact is this employee’s style. New generation HR systems provide managers and even employees with an intelligence dashboard, which guides them with performance metrics. Such metrics are often tied to appraisal systems that are also increasingly becoming online tools.

Entrepreneurial

21st century employee: “I treat my employer as a customer, and treat my role as a business enabler. I’d like the business to give me a lot more control and flexibility with the way I manage my department. While I believe departmental goals must be aligned corporately, we’ve got to be innovative at the same time. But this can’t happen if the underlying business systems are rigid and do not afford us the flexibility to change processes.”

Imagine a sales manager who needs to change his or her ‘go-to-market’ strategy from being product-based to one that is customer-focused. Doing so would result in significant changes in processes. All of a sudden a detailed and an analytical view of the customer-base becomes crucial, not just a product list. This has budgetary implications, not forgetting reporting and a slew of other requirements. Unless a business system is built with flexibility in mind, it will seem like a trip back in time for the 21st century employee.

How do employers respond?

The world according to 21st century employees is fast and fun. They keep their options open and tend to gravitate towards an environment where there are synergies between their goals and their employers’. It is for this reason that employers need to pro-actively equip their businesses with appropriate processes and systems that would make 21st century employees welcome.

To meet these demands, the HR imperatives of attraction, retention, and enablement are key. An innovative HR leader will align with the needs of these employees by following these three principles:

1. Seek new “carrots”

It is a widely known truism that competitive salary is only one, and often not the greatest, of the means to attract and retain employees. In the US and Europe, successful enterprises have found ways to compete in the job market by developing innovative changes to find new candidates, offering attractive benefits, and link rewards with outcomes. For example, companies are adopting best-of-breed online recruitment systems to find both internal and external candidates. HR departments are now offering flexible benefits packages that offer benefit “points” to employees that can be cashed in for vacation, health, or car allowance depending on the particular needs of the individual. Balanced scorecards and online appraisal systems are allowing managers to provide a clear line-of-sight from top down, so that employees see the impact of their efforts both in the overall company performance as well as on their own paycheck.

2. Equip line managers with enriched information

It is one thing to offer managers benchmarks to determine salaries, team and individual objectives and development plans. For global companies, most of the answers can, and often should, be found around the corner in similar departments and roles in the global enterprise. Common job grades and salary scales can be established and tracked in a global repository, allowing line managers the ability to base salaries on like-for-like comparisons with their overseas counterparts. This sort of global alignment can also provide opportunities to identify internal candidates from overseas offices.

When setting objectives, a manager will be much more effective if the corporate and regional objectives are clearly defined and communicated. Many organisations are using global employee repositories coupled with balanced scorecards to help them cascade these objectives to their direct reports.

When building development plans, rolling out a new product or embedding a new policy, managers should not be limited to costly face-to-face training. Instead, they should be able to identify online and self-service training options from a global training repository that is directly aligned with corporate objectives and linked with assessments and key competencies. With the right tools in place, managers will be able to ask very specific questions about the skills and competency levels of their staff, and assess effectiveness of the corporate training programs. For instance, a manager should be able to get a quick and accurate answer to questions such as “How many of my staff are qualified to provide support our a latest products?” or “how many employees have viewed the iLearning course and passed the certification test for our Business Ethics module?”

3. Learn from your enemy

Competitive companies often learn how to market their products and services more effectively by seeking advice from their staff who have previous experience at their competitive company. Why should HR be any different? Workshops and surveys of such employees can yield untold rewards in terms of new programmes and services. By learning how the industry leaders are able to attract, retain, and enable their workforce, the HR department will provide value by devising competitive HR initiatives that will increase the number of candidates coming in while reducing the brain drain caused by defection to their key competitors.