I’ve just realised I didn’t post a link to last week’s Patch Monday podcast, How can women win in IT? There it is now.
Oh noes, thoze fickle “Gen Y” ppl…
…were right about job-hopping. In the big chair:
Major companies no longer value long service by their workers… The poll of 32 national and international firms found that when defining a high-performing worker, 69 per cent rated “length of service” as least important or not even applicable…
“If you turn the clock back 10 or 15 years, length of service would have been seen as a significant attribute of high performance,” Mr Tipper [Jeremy Tipper, business development director of recruitment firm Alexander Mann Solutions] told AAP on Tuesday.
“The reason for that is they had a great deal of knowledge… about the organisation and a good understanding of what’s happening in the marketplace.
“Today, because information is so much more freely available because of technology, that ‘information is power’ probably doesn’t exist to the same extent.”
Mr Tipper said the new breed of workers was less “risk averse” — they were more prepared to change jobs and they were more aware of the value and portability of their skills.
Hat-tip to the Snarky Platypus. He even wrote the headline. He also has his own blog, but is too goddam lazy to post there. We must convince him to fix this.
How do you treat your staff? Like 37signals, or like this prick?
[Update 10 March, 1030 AEDT: I’ve written a follow-up article which, while bound to piss off a few people, explains precisely why I’m so concerned about this issue. There’s also my first follow-up, written on the weekend.]
“Chalk and cheese” is how I’d describe two approaches to staff management I stumbled across this week. One treats staff as trusted contributors to a shared enterprise, the other as disposable work-droids from which you squeeze every last effort.
Jason Calacanis (pictured) has started various firms, including Mahalo, a “human-powered search engine”. (Don’t worry, I’d never heard of it either.) In How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips) there are some good tips — like outsourcing accounting and worrying more about good chairs than tables. But to paraphrase the bad ones:
- Hold meetings at lunchtime so people never get a mental break from work.
- Don’t provide phones so staff have to use their own.
- If someone shows signs of working hard, buy them a computer for home so they end up working nights and weekends too.
- Buy a good coffee machine — not because you’d like to give your employees good coffee, but to prevent them “wasting time” getting it from a nearby barista.
But that’s not the worst…
Continue reading “How do you treat your staff? Like 37signals, or like this prick?”