Column: Win the war for top talent and successfully manage the 2020 Workforce
Published October 16, 2014
COLUMN -- By 2015, approximately 50 percent of the world’s working population will have been born after 1980 (known as gen Y or millennials); this group expects to be courted and treated in ways unfamiliar to older generations.
According to a Greer Institute Workforce and Talent study, the 2020 workforce is both “the most educated and culturally diverse of any generation” and “notorious job-hoppers who dislike bureaucracy and distrust traditional hierarchies.” Given this, it is crucial for leaders to understand how best to motivate and engage this 2020 workforce and win the war for top talent.
Digital natives are entering the workforce en masse, and by 2020 many of the old school, pen-and-paper types will be on the way out. The relationship between employee and employer is also changing. If you want folks to stick around you’d better at least match the kind of tools and technology on the job that they have access to at home.
Pair this relentless consumer-grade expectation for mobile, social, and globally-accessible tools with ubiquitous access to work, and you can see the perfect storm that is challenging HR and IT leaders to deploy technology solutions to attract, retain, and manage their workforce while creating a collaborative, engaging employee experience.
To prepare for the globally distributed, highly collaborative, always on-the-go 2020 workforce, you need to start building the kind of workplace that can harness all this new technology. The Greer Institute calls it Workforce 2020. One of the most impactful places to start is changing the way your company plans for, hires, and engages its talent by understanding what is already possible with today’s cloud, mobile, and social technologies.
To learn more, read the full transcript of Melvin's live Q&A discussion with our readers.
Melvin Greer is Founder and Managing Director of the Greer Institute for Leadership and Innovation, focused on research and deployment of a 21st Century Leadership Model™. With over 27 years of global leadership experience, he is a recognized expert in creating innovation culture, organizational change, and leading highly motivated teams. Greer has been awarded the BEYA 2012 Technologist of the Year Award and has been recognized for his outstanding leadership and technical contributions to cloud computing and service-oriented architecture. Greer also serves as Senior Fellow and Chief Strategist Lockheed Martin and Adjunct Faculty at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, College of Engineering. He is also a member of the International Monetary Fund / World Bank, Bretton Woods Committee. Greer is a frequent speaker at conferences and universities and is an accomplished author.