Leveraging the strengths of a multigenerational workforce | with Dr. Mary Collins

Foreign. Welcome to show 53 of this shortlist where I am in the world, which is in Ireland, in the Northern Hemisphere. It's summertime and with June arriving yesterday, I think as it was, so came summer. So welcome everybody to our summer show. The first of it's really just June is the summer in Ireland. It's Wimbledon month. It's when the kids break up from school. It's when the sun maybe shines for a couple of days in Ireland as it has done the last few whiles and hopefully everyone's in a bit of a better mood.

Welcome.

Today we're going to be talking about leveraging the strengths of a multi generational workforce. We've got a fantastic guest who's going to be chatting with us about her insights in the multi generational workforce and we'd love to hear your comments and thoughts. If you're listening live, don't forget this is a live show broadcast each week on Wednesday at 4pm UK Irish time on on LinkedIn and YouTube. And if you're joining us live, please do join in. We always love hearing your comments, questions for our guests and whatever you want to put into the chat on LinkedIn or YouTube, we'll pick them up live. If you're not, don't forget that we are a podcast that is available on Spotify and Apple and we are up past our 50th show and there's a great back catalog of fantastic shows and interviews on the talent on the topics of talent over the last year or so. And you can find out more about the show, our upcoming shows, our previous shows, watch the videos, get the links@socialtalent.com theshortlist but onto today's show. So the multi generational workforce. So we're living longer. Yay. Isn't it great? But that typically often means that we're working longer and we're also starting earlier as more and more individuals choose not to necessarily go down the university route. So at both ends of the workforce spectrum, we're seeing it stretch. You know, there's up to five generations working in the workplace today, from the traditionalist to the Gen Z, and it's often an overlooked area of diversity, equity, inclusion, but one that is becoming more and more important to large organizations and small organizations alike across the world. And whilst obviously each particular cohort typically has its own unique strengths, it can be a difficult task to try to understand how you can leverage a multi generational team for success. So our guest today I'm delighted to have on the show is Dr. Mary Collins. And Mary's a chartered psychologist and professional executive coach who is a leading expert in the field of engaging this multi generational workforce. And on this episode, Mary's going to be sharing with his advice on how to get the best from each generation and also to delve, to delve into management strategies, looking at how both empathy and emotional intelligence play vital roles in supporting and cultivating success and foster. Finally, she'll give us some insights into the impact the pandemic has had on all of this, but through a uniquely generational lens. And that wasn't good enough. Mary just recently released a new book called Recruiting Talented People, which we'll dig into and ask her a bit later on, which is a practical guide for small to medium sized businesses on the recruitment life cycle, offering tips and insights from everything from establishing employer brands, interview processes right through to induction. And we just discovered, Mary, it's available on Amazon and it falsely claims you're writing a whole bunch of other books that weren't yours. Mary, tell us about these false claims. Mary, what's going on and welcome to the show.

Well, thank you Johnny and it's really lovely to be here and hello to everybody listening in now and also to the podcast. Really, really delighted to have this opportunity and thanks for the plug about the book. It's literally hot off the press and delighted to hear it is on Amazon as verified by johnny 5 minutes ago. So it's been, it's been a real labor of love for the last three years and I'm delighted it's out. And I've had the great honor and pleasure of working with thought leaders, including the very Johnny Campbell who have contributed to the book. And it really is aimed at small and medium businesses who don't have that sort of big recruitment machine behind them and how they can manage each stage, stage of the recruitment cycle and not, not just be reactive to their recruitment needs.

And it must be three, four years since we had our first cup of tea and conversation about this topic back at a Beelys Cafe on Graven Street. Mary, but I want to ask you about the multi generational aspect because on the same day you blew me away with insights around your observations at the time around what was Generation Z, which was only beginning to come into the work workforce, could have been five years ago even, and, and, and challenges around resilience and other topics. What has made you passionate about this topic around multi generational workforces? And you know, why has that become a thing for you over the last few years?

Yeah, well I'm just so delighted this you picked this topic, Social Talented, because I do feel it's the neglected child of diversity and inclusion. You know, we've such a strong emphasis on gender, race, disability, but we don't tend to focus on age on life stage so much. So I'll take you back, Jonny, to when I was head of Talent and Leadership Development in Deloitte and at the time 80% of the firm were under 30. So it was a really exciting time. Very young, dynamic, ambitious workforce. And I was doing a lot of psychometric profiling and I started to notice some really interesting trends that a lot of the young grads coming in when I looked at their career value using Edgar Schein's Career Anchors tool, some viewers may be familiar with that. Essentially it's looking at what is most important to you in a career. And I started seeing some really interesting trends. So the one anchor that kept reoccurring as the top anchor was pure challenge. And we know that people who have this as a career value, they want complex problems, lots of responsibility, lots of variety in their roles. And the second anchor that came up on a consistent basis was work life balance. Now, I think you'll agree they're not always comfortable bedfellows. You want all this responsibility and you want work life balance. So I said I want to get under the bonnet of this. I want to just explore this. And under the bonnet I got. And I spent the next four and a half years doing my doctoral thesis looking at the younger generations in the workplace and how we can really engage and motivate and get the best from the younger generations. And I looked at engineers, lawyers and accountants as part of that study. But really there was very little difference between the professions. There was a lot of consistent messages coming through.

There's a lot being talked about out there in the press and articles increasingly becoming more focused. I think you're right about it is the forgotten child. And that's not to take away from the importance of the other areas of diversity, but you know, it's. And it has a lot of intersectionality as well around those other areas. We've noticed an increase in the amount of talk about it online. And Mary, surprise, surprise, for the shortlist we found some news articles for us to dive into. Niall, over to you for the news. The first one I wanted to look at and get your thoughts were a piece that was published in Forbes Last month on 5 Ways to Lead the multi generational workplace. I wonder if you could maybe take us through if you can. You know what you Got from this article a summary of those five ways and what your thoughts were on Benjamin Lakers, who's the writer here, his kind of opinion on this area.

Yeah, sure Johnny. I thought this was a really interesting article. I also thought it is. It can be a little bit simplistic. So one the big health warning I always start with when I talk about this is how important it is not to stereotype and not to assign or assume that if someone is of a particular generation. So for example, one of the most common ones I come across in my work is oh, someone in their 20s is really good with technology. We have a 25 year old on the team, give them all the tech stuff and then you have a 25 year old going, I don't know how to open Excel or you know, making these assumptions all the time. So again, I think, you know, it's important that we don't simplify this topic too much and there's a lot of pop psychology out there around it as well. So just to say that. So I thought this article was yet highlighted the benefits of a multi generational workforce and we know that gender and age diverse teams that back to that the multifaceted approach you mentioned, Jonny, are 80% more effective at making better decisions. So gender alone, teams who have gender diversity are 73% more effective at making better decisions. So I think that's quite, quite an interesting fact. The article also talked about the importance of collaboration between the generations and how that leads to innovation and high performance. And it is also, if you have a multi generational workforce, it should be reflective of your market in most cases. Most of us are working in multi generational consumer markets as well. So the big message for me around how to lead multigenerational teams from this article was really using emotionally intelligent leadership leaders who are aware, who can flex and adapt their style and really show empathy to people at all life stages.

Yeah, it's kind of something that I think is not just applicable to the multigenerational workforce. If you'd agree. You know, this is emerging as a theme across the board, particularly as we've had such a focus on leadership and what good leadership looks like in the last year. Mary.

Right.

You know, it's, you have to be very aware of who is in your team, what's happening in their lives, what really take an interest. But this points to understanding what are the different strengths of each member of the team, making sure that you are leveraging all the individual strengths to make the team better as a whole. I didn't really offer much practical advice as to how to do that. You know, very short five bullet points, which is kind of a bit high level for me. But I think there's a lot of. You take each of those points and you go further. There's a lot of good research and there's or great instructional kind of courses and programs you can go on that teach you each aspect of that. You know, having psychological safety in a team, being open to feedback, trying to get everyone to participate. A challenge sometimes on zoom calls these days where we're on zoom meetings and understanding the difference between a facilitator and a leader on a call and these different things, I guess we're. It's probably not just multi generational really that the advice would apply to. It's kind of like how do you get the best from people?

Absolutely, Joni. It really was, it was quite generic and you find a lot of research or a lot of articles in this field can be a bit generic. What I did think was interesting though was the UN data around ageism and how ageism tends to be polarized towards older workers and younger workers. And just to mention a really interesting study I came across Anglica Ruskin University in London where they did a longitudinal study. They had the CV of a 50 year old and a 28 year old, so with very similar skills and attributes and they found that the 50 year old was 4.2 times less likely to get called to interview, 4.2 times less likely. And a female, a 50 year old who was a female was 5.3 times less likely. So double whammy if you're older and you're a woman. So I think these are the type of things we need to tackle and we hear a lot about younger workers and having to adapt our style. I'm very interested in the whole area of older workers and I think there's a huge opportunity, particularly with baby boomers in our workplaces that have so much wisdom to offer. Dorothy Leonard in Harvard talks about deep smarts which are as close as you can get to wisdom. Like boomers have this rich experience and wisdom to share. And we know from the research on boomers, they want to give back, they want to mentor, they want to really be part of the organization.

That's funny because you mentioned the attitudes to ageism. And you know, my career started recruiting back in my early 20s. I was 20 when I started recruiting and it shames me to admit this, but it's important to admit it. When I was a recruiter and I recruited accountants, I know The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland are the publishers of your latest book. I recruited qualified accountants for large organizations and I would run my search in my database and we had a filter of age and I would source by age and above 35, I just remove, I'd remove them and financial control roles or whatever they were. I was like, well, they're too old to be doing this job and I couldn't tell you why I had that, that opinion. I just felt from a 20 or 21 year old's perspective that surely they should be doing something else at that point in their career or whatever it might have been. And whilst I'd love to think that that doesn't happen anymore, I do fear it does. And the data you shared there I think probably proves out that this stuff still happens. We still have this age bias. And I know that a lot of people I've spoken to, again I'm mid career, mid-40s, mid career and therefore I get to speak to folks on both sides of where I am. I see, I talk to a lot of people who perhaps are related in their career and they've shared with me the challenges of things like LinkedIn where you don't want to reveal your entire career because people are going to estimate your age. They're worried about the photo you put up there because that will give an indication to your age. This is a, this is a thing, you know, when you're looking for a job that if you are in that older generation and you have experienced this in your career and most of us have, you're going to be very conscious of it. And arguably the online tools don't work in your favor when they're showing photographs encouraging you to put your full career history, give dates for the university that you went to, etc. Etc. Like, what's your kind of view on what, you know, what recruiters can do or individuals hiring managers can do to try and mitigate that or to reduce that.

Yeah, and it's, it's. Thank you for being so honest, Johnny. I'm sure you don't think 35 is else now but 20 year olds. It comes back really to the whole inclusive piece. And what are, what's the business case? You know, what does that, you know, having the wisdom and the experience of older workers in the workplace. Really interesting research from Ashridge, a report called don't leave Baby Boomers in the Corner, like a play on Dirty Dancing. And when they surveyed HR leaders, what are your views on baby boomers? It was actually quite negative. It was like, oh, cruising towards retirement, lacking innovation, you know, these types of companies comments. And then they interviewed the boomers themselves and it was really quite different. There was comments like, I've never felt more comfortable in my own skin. I'm feeling really creative, I want to give back, I want to mentor. And you know, all that stuff I had going on, the child care and the elder care issues in my 30s and 40s, I don't have that anymore. So I have a lot more time and energy to give to my career. So for me this is around really seeing the benefits that having the multi generational mix can bring to your organization. And just to add as well, Johnny, I did hear from last month there's a technology company which will remain nameless, have their European head office in Ireland which doesn't really discount many of them. And I was quite shocked when I heard this that they were looking for executive coaches to bring in, but they were only looking for coaches under 30 years of age.

Seriously?

Yeah. And I just thought, wow, you're missing out on a whole cohort there.

Well, I'll counter that with another technology story and I'll name them because I think it's a really positive thing. A good friend of mine who is in his late 50s recently joined Google in his senior leadership role and he was kind of surprised he got the role because he's from a very traditional industry. He'd been 20 odd years in the same company and you know, he's older. And I asked him about it, I said like that's, he brought it up. I said that's fantastic. What's going on? He said actually it's something that he observed has been a thing Google have been doing for the last four or five years in recognition of the fact that they will be better as a company, have more innovation, better decision making if they have both older, a mix of more older individuals because they were skewed very young for several decades, but also that they had other industries coming in. And again it points to this diversity piece around diversity of thought drives better innovation, drives better decision making. And to your point, the research around when you add multisectional diversity onto into teams, you know, older individuals from different minorities put that all together in a group. All of a sudden you just have more voices that have different backgrounds which, which cannot be a bad thing, you know, and I think that's what large organizations are waking up to. I have no doubt that the big organizations that do it aren't doing it at the goodness of their heart. Mary, there's a Huge amount of evidence that says you have better decisions. You will, you will be better off having more, different, more voices. It makes sense, right? You go back to the Beatles 1000 hours type, you know, experience. The more times you've done something, the better you are at it. And by nature, you know, age is one of those prox for experience. If you've been, it's not always a good one, don't get me wrong. But chances are if you're working with teams, if you're managing longer than somebody else, there's a higher chance you've got just more experience that you can pass on. It just makes sense, doesn't it?

Absolutely. Absolutely, Johnny. And also we need mentors in organizations. Really interesting fact from Deloitte to great millennial studies, that those millennials intending to stay more than five years in their organizations were twice as likely to have a mentor. So if they said they were intending to stay more than five years, they were twice as likely to have a mentor. And we know the best mentors are going to be for millennials. The best mentors are baby boomers. So we need more of them.

Speaking of Deloitte, your former employer as well, I'm going to go to our second news article because this was a pretty long one and it was again published a couple of months ago. And it's entitled Wrong Numbers. And it comes from Deloitte Insights why a Focus on Age Can Mislead Workforce Development. And this I found is there's actually huge amount to unpack in this one, Mary. And this was kind of, it was in summary, kind of pointing to the danger of having that, you know, here are the five generations or four generations and here's how they think and what they do. And I'll get to the COVID element, which I thought was fascinating. It came up later in the article. But, you know, what is your take on this in terms of the initial data and perspective shared by this Deloitte research around the dangers of having this generational approach to how we look at the workforce?

Yes, and I think it is valid to have that challenge. There's a lot of challenge in the academic literature as well. And some people prefer to talk about life stage, which I think is just a different perspective on us looking at different life stages. I think what is important, Joni, is that we acknowledge the universal human needs. So, you know, we all have a need to be respected, recognized, appreciated, and even if we look at, you know, self determination theory and psychology, that need for autonomy, for competence and relatedness. So there are Sort of universal needs to be motivated in a workplace. And I think that transcends the generational stuff. But what I would say is we can. You know, there were certain fundamental factors that have influenced different cohorts in the workplace. Two of the biggest drivers in recent times have been technology. So we have the digital nations on one side and then the digital immigrants. And if I may be so bold, Johnny. I was trying to figure out how old Johnny was, to ask him had he been called for his vaccination. Because we're doing it by like age in Ireland every day.

See what you did there, Mary? See what you did there now.

So I think we're a similar vintage. We're in the, yeah, the 40s bracket, shall we say. So you will remember, Johnny, the days before mobile phones, before the Internet. You know, I think we're in a really unique position this our generation, Generation X. We have that unique perspective of remembering life before all of the distraction. And then we have the digital natives who have been brought up in this world. And you know, when we see two year olds swiping iPads, that is a different paradigm. It is the world they are growing up in. So I think that is one of the fundamental drivers of generational differences, technology. And the other one is parenting styles. When you consider, you know, how a 24 year old has been brought up versus a 44 year old, you know, on average they're going to be very different experiences.

And I have a theory on that, that in terms of the child raising things, each generation tries to do the opposite of what their parents did. So every second generation it's the same because it's like, all right, But I saw in the numbers, because I think there is a valid argument to behaviors based on when you grow up, what your influences were, what was happening in the world at the time, 100%, the media you were exposed to, et cetera. I was working a couple of years ago, around the time of the Rugby World cup with some customers in Japan and what was happening there, and it's continued over the last two years, has this been radical shift from a Japanese perspective in recruiting that in that, you know, the new graduates weren't looking for jobs for life because Japan still had this job for life culture. And you get in and you work your way up and that was just the way it was. So. So graduate recruiting was just being turned on its head already in career recruiting because they just didn't know how to. To do this model where someone would join for 18 months and then leave. That wasn't how it was done for the previous 30 or 40 years. And when I dug into it, it seems to be, and this isn't a very scientific perspective, but it seems to be driven by social media in that, you know, being in Japan and driven by Japanese culture may have been something that was the dominant influence on your cultural aspects and relationships to work for decades until the world became much smaller with the advent of social media. So if you now see yourself less as a person from Japan and more as a 20 year old, your affinity is with other 20 year olds in the world and, and you see them behaving a certain way to their employment, lifestyle. So why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you behave the same? I think that has those things. That's where technology comes into play, where that really influences people. Where we didn't quite have that with, you know, if you were from a generation with less technology, different technology, it wasn't, you know, we were probably influenced more by in Ireland, BBC and rte, you know, the TV networks and maybe you're lucky but of the sitcoms in the US and that drove our cultural references as Gen Xers. Whereas now it's maybe it's YouTube. I know my kids, the Gen Z segment of my, of my family are driven much more by YouTubers and the barriers over what network TV station you have in your home to influence you, that just doesn't exist anymore. It's much wider. So I take a point, I think it's. Sorry, here I'm talking when I meant to be interviewing you, Mary, but what are your observations like, you know, and you're working in academia as well, so you work a lot with students as well. What are some of the things you think are particularly unique around the. Well, they're probably classified as Gen Zs now, you know, graduates coming out of universities now, what have you observer are noticeable shifts between those individuals and previous generations.

Yeah, yeah, great Johnny. Well, I think you made. That's a really important point around, you know, the 21 year old in the 20 year old in Japan probably having more in common with the 20 year old in New York than with their, their parents. And we see that we're sort of in this borderless world now. So I think that's really important point and just to go. Because I think there's a lot of confusion around the generations. I mean if you're still talking about millennials, you really need to move on because millennials at their oldest are 40, they're like in their late 30s, 40s. So we really need to focus on the centennials or Generation Z, born 1995 onwards. So they're the newest, the youngest generation coming into our workplace. And again, really interesting generation that do require a slightly different approach and we know that they are the true digital natives. So these are the, the iPhone generation really coming in. What have we noticed, Johnny? Well, I think sadly, levels of depression, anxiety are higher than ever this generation. And one thing that's very striking is loneliness. And particularly for young women, there's a huge loneliness epidemic in the workplace that has been really amplified by the global pandemic. So we know this cohort are the loneliest, reporting the highest levels of loneliness. And isn't it interesting? Never have we been more connected digitally, but yet people are feeling just this great disconnect. So, you know, also levels of self harm. So we have a lot of issues around mental health and resilience issues with the younger generations. We also know that that whole concept of, you know, loyalty to an employer and the job for life piece, that really is no longer relevant. And if I were to sum it up, Jonny, I would say that the younger generations want access, not ownership. So what I mean by that, they want access to experiences. They want to do the backpacking around Asia. They're not that interested in getting a mortgage or getting the flashcar. They're not that interested in getting tied into an organization. I remember in my doctoral research, a really bright young female engineer and I talked to her about, you know, a permanent, pensionable job. I mean, she actually recoils. You're like, oh, no, you know, no, not interested at all. And with this in mind, I think we need to get a lot better at managing exits in a much more positive way and building that community of talent and looking at that Boomerang employee. So I know a lot of the professional services firms who take in, you know, the big cohorts of grads, they're really good at actually getting that Boomerang employee back when they've done their stint abroad. And I think we just need to focus a lot more on that and managing exits in a much more positive way.

It's funny you mentioned, I was on a call this morning with Kingsley Akins, who joined us last week on the show and Kingsley were talking about this and he brought up the Reid Hoffman position. Reid Hoffman being the founder of LinkedIn, former CEO of LinkedIn. And he was saying back in the day they used to his approach to interviewing was he would interview potential candidates for the organization and ask them, how can we, if you take a job with us, help you find your next job, as in your next employer. And he's been a big advocate in the last decade of this concept of, you know, you know, journeymen or journey women. And you know, this concept that people are coming into your organization for a time, how can you leverage that great time and their network and then help them move on and keep in touch with them and perhaps have them back. And it that's a new enough concept, you know, where retention is still such a focus as opposed to how can you really develop a great relationship with that somebody you know, they can have a high impact, move on, maybe come back or influence others to come back to your business. By the way, quick shout out from Aaron Dillard, who's listening, who's saying amen to your comment about stop talking about millennials. So you've got the support of our listeners in, in that one for sure. Mary I want to move the conversation, if you don't mind, on to the last year and the pandemic.

Yeah.

Because the Deloitte article we referenced earlier does go into this and it talks about it and you you touched on it a little bit about, you know, what we're see last year. You know, the data, I thought from this Lloyd article, just to come back to it for a second was really fascinating because it was counterintuitive with regard to how the different generations seem to have experienced the pandemic and its impact in work. And again, I don't want to generalize and say it's the same for everyone, but maybe would you mind summarizing what you got from the article around what it shared about the insights from the pandemic particularly, and how it affect different generations?

Yes. So I think this article really correlates a lot of other emerging research we're seeing around the impact of the pandemic, Jonny. And we are seeing that the younger generations are struggling a lot more. They found it a lot more difficult to adapt to the new reality. Older workers reported higher levels of flexibility and adaptability in relation to the pandemic. And just to share a little story with you, I was speaking to a HR director of one of the big banks here in Dublin about a year ago now, and it was probably March, you know, when we were all told you have to work from home. And she was telling me that she had to get they had to get the security guards to get the younger generations out of the building. So people in their early mid-20s, they really did not want to leave the office because when you think about it that's their social life. That's. They're, you know, where they. They have their connection. They could be living in flat shares. Work is such a massive part of your life at that stage of your career as well. And I thought that was really, really interesting. Whereas some of us in. In different generations, I know people in my generation, particularly a lot of women who've been crying out for years for flexibility, wanting to work from home more, and finally they were getting that opportunity. So I think that was one thing that, that really struck me around the. The flexibility and the adaptability of the older generations.

Yeah, it's funny because you mentioned, you know, the life stage alternative to the generational piece. I really like that because I was watching and, you know, again, show my age. I was watching the Friends reunion last week. Did you watch the Friends reunion?

Yes.

Like. Like, how does he get the Friends reunion to a conversation about talent? Well, let me tell you how I get into conversation about talent. So I was watching that and it struck me there was a line from one of the. One of the. The. The actors in the show, and she or he said something along the lines of, it's about that time, a decade, typically, of your life, when your friends are your family. And so Obviously your first 20 years, your family are your family. Then there's the next 10 years where your friends are your family. And then you. You maybe start your own family or partnership or, you know, becomes maybe more about your family and siblings again. And it is a unique time. And I think that is probably the. It correlates with age. Of course it does, but it is. It is that what's going on in your life. And, you know, when your friends are your family, your work friends are a big part of that. You know, when you're maybe moved on from that part of your life at whatever age it is, you don't perhaps rely on those individuals. And also from a networking position position, you've built a strong network, you've made connections, so you can afford to probably take a year and a half off. Whereas if you're. If you haven't, or you're only in the middle of doing that, that's tough, Mary, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, Joni. And Professor Martin Seligman, who I'm sure many of your viewers will know, arguably the father of positive psychology, he puts it really nicely. He talks about the expansive stage in our lives, which is that exact stage you're talking about when we have lots of, you know, we're out in the world, perhaps starting our career looking for a partner, you know, in that travel, that expansive stage. And then as we move through life we move to more contrast acting stage and Seligman's work from the pandemic research has shown that it's people in the expansive stage have suffered so much more than those of us more in that contracting when we're a bit more settled with the mortgage and the family and whatever. So yeah, I think it's been really tough and I think there's a, you know, as we move back into this post pandemic workplace, I think leaders really are going to have to step up around supporting the connectedness of the younger workers.

So I want to maybe ask Niall who's to bring in a graph that if you don't mind you maybe you can talk us through this is a framework that you'd advocate for engaging younger generations. What you call the Motivate framework. I wonder if you could walk us through this at a, at a high level as a kind of tool that perhaps some of our listeners and viewers could use.

Yeah, great. So this was the output of my doctoral research of getting under the bonus. And again, if anyone's interested, I have a really short article that I'd be very happy to share that goes through this in more detail. But the Motivate framework is really a synthesis of all of the key themes when I looked at the engineers, lawyers and accountants in my study. And the first thing, what is really going to motivate and engage these younger generators generations? Meaning and purpose. Having a really doing meaningful work and having a real purpose coming to work each day. The second is opportunity and challenge. And that's around providing opportunity for feedback and challenging work. And that sense of I'm growing my skills here. The T refers to timely, honest communication. And this is not your biannual performance appraisal. This has to be, you know, really regular, really, really, you know, feedback, feedback, feedback. If you're to take one message around younger generations, you know, really getting a lot of feedback is so important, then we have values, you know, working for a values driven organization. We know millennials are the most socially conscious generation. And bearing in mind that by 2025, 75% of the global workforce will be millennials. 75%. We also need to really prepare for the centennials, as I said, and the centennials are in our workplaces right now. We've got graduates, we've got interns, we've got co ops coming in. So being very much a values driven organization, energy management, now that refers to working with this is around really well being and working with the energy flows of each person on the team. If someone wants to put their laptop on at 11 o' clock at night and work through till 3am if the role allows, that is what came through as a really important theme in my study. And then we have terms and conditions so we know equality is very important, that people are treated fairly and then that attentive management and investing in personal career path. And just to share with you, Jonny, there's the first study that was done on the centennials in the workplace. It shows what are the top three things they're looking for. And I thought this was fascinating. So number one is supportive leadership, number two is positive relationships at work. And number three is flexibility. So it's all around that, you know, I want to be in that almost paternalistic type of environment where my manager really has my back, is looking out for me, is supporting my development. I've got really good relationships in work and I also have that sense of flexibility.

And I think the last year and a half has probably driven more of that. I hope it's, you know, it's opened up the opportunities, as you said, to certainly flexibility. The fact that we're all going through this massive, you know, crisis together hopefully has driven more empathy between managers and their teams and that will last. But you would hope that this is perhaps, you know, we're turning the page on a new chapter of how organizations lead and the relationship between not just the different generations, but anyone in the workplace and how they're managed and how they're engaged in the business. Mary, I want to just jump for one second, if you don't mind, into the book because I know you poured your heart and soul into it. I know that you're glad to get it done and I won't ask you for your advice on anyone else looking to write a book book what yours is done. I want you maybe to, if you don't mind, to give me a little bit of a summary about, about the book. We'll remind people that not even mind bringing it back up on screen again. That's Recruiting Talented People by Mary Collins, which is available on Amazon, Charter Cat in Zarland or anywhere where you can find it on a good Google search as we did earlier on today. But maybe could you tell me a little bit about, you know, again, who's this aimed at and what does it.

Yeah, well, thank you so much for. I still feel, you know, you get that imposter syndrome and you see your name. I'm like oh my God, is that really mine? This book, Johnny? I mean, my real, my real wish with this book is that it is a very practical guide. So it is filled with templates, with best practice, with case studies, and it is aimed at SME leaders who, you know, really just have been reactive. Okay, somebody's left like, so let's refill that role. And when I was asked, approached about writing it a few years ago now, I really thought, gosh, is this something I want to give my time to? And I'm so glad I did because we spent so much of our lives in work and we know when we get that fit right, it can be transformational in our lives. But when we get it wrong, it really can be so detrimental to everyone involved. So this is a guide to help SME leaders really with the starting point around what is your employer brand and just getting them to think about that. And then I'm really keen on the whole concept of talent grazing. You know, when you're, you're always looking for great people. And in one of your previous sessions, Jonny, you spoke about, I thought it was a brilliant, I think it was the Lego Eunice's shortlist where you get the example of somebody receptionist being part of if he or she spotted somebody with a good attitude. So that concept of, you know, you're constantly looking for good people right through to how do you know workforce planning, like, let's set your five year plan, let's have a look at how you can do that resource planning through to, you know, even if you don't have a significant budget, how can you make really good hiring decisions? What are some of the more creative ways around the hiring process? And really through to that onboarding piece which we know is so critical, having that first impressions really, really do last right up to the 100 day plan. And there's guides there and templates to help. What sort of question should you be asking somebody sort of first month in? So that's it. It's sort of the life cycle of the hiring process.

I love the theme because for a lot of companies of that size, they don't necessarily have a team or even one person dedicated to recruiting and the ancillary areas. They might have a HR person dedicated full time and so largely the business owner or some of the senior managers, perhaps the manager of the biggest team generally takes that on her shoulders. She's got to do all this stuff, but she's never been trained in this. She doesn't have a guidebook. And I guess it is a guidebook for those individuals. But I'd argue, I think over time we're going to see perhaps other people who in larger companies also read this as we see that mixing of TA professional and hiring manager working together as a team. I think it's a good educational handbook for those individuals as well. So if you're working in a large organization and you're running a large team, I wouldn't say it's not for you. It may not have been written directly for you, but I think there's a huge amount that any leader in any organization could get from this to give them a real good overview of recruiting, onboarding, the important aspects of managing teams as well and how it all connects together. Would that be a fair point?

Yes, yes, I think so, Jonny. And you know, there's some really good insights as well from, from thought leaders in the sector. And we do also cover off the multi generational piece. You know, how can you ensure that you're appealing to all generations in the hiring process?

So Mary, we're at that point of the show where we ask our guest to leave us with one more piece of advice because you've littered us with advice and tips and articles to read and authors to look up and people to, to research and thank you so much for that. It's fantastic. Marion, you know, there's obviously a wealth of knowledge, you know, that goes into what you've produced here today and in the book as well. And I'm personally very excited to, to hopefully have you join the platform with some new courses we plan for the later, later in the year for social talent users. So any social talent users listening if you've enjoyed this. Mary's coming soon, but I was wondering if you could you leave us with one last tip, one last piece of advice that either you have been given by somebody else through your career or something that you now give to others from your experiences in your short career so far.

I'll be nice.

I'd say that name halfway.

Yeah, there's a whole lot of career left, isn't there Johnny? The whole second half is there? Yeah. And I am going to say radical empathy. You know, it's so interesting. Empathy levels have dropped by 40% in the last 20 years. Like it's staggering, isn't it? Forty percent in the last 20 years. And you know, I spend a lot of my life in working with healthcare leaders and the undergrads. When medical students start they have have really high levels of empathy and year on year that empathy just goes off a cliff and it's the same in most professions. So I think particularly coming out in this post pandemic world, we really want to focus on building our empathy. And I'm calling it radical because it needs to be radical. And I like to think of empathy as a muscle. You know, we know you can develop empathy with focused, consistent effort. And the best way to develop empathy is to really work on your listening skills. So my invitation to everyone today is the next time you have a conversation, if it's with your 3 year old or your 90 year old grandmother, the next time you're having a conversation, put the technology away and really give your full time attention and presence to that person. And I think we've got really, really poor at listening. So let's try and develop that empathy muscle. And especially in the workplace, I want, you know, with the younger generations experiencing so much anxiety, depression, stress, you know, that we do show empathy to everyone in the workplace but I think particularly people in this coming back to the new world of work, people who've really struggled, that we do show that empathy. And finally Jonny, I'm going to say empathy for ourselves because it's been really, we have all been living through this is like the crisis of our generation for all of us. And you know, all leadership does start with self leadership. So I'd encourage people to show empathy to themselves as well. And that self care piece is so important.

Thank you so much that Mary and two things from that one is I always wondered what would be called the generation after generation Z and and I'm worried they might be called generation Covid because that might be the defining thing for them. But your point on listening is fantastic as a driver of empathy. It's something that only came up with in our business. Last week one of my colleagues was asking me about an article I shared many years ago. I dug it out on listening and one of the top tips or the leading tip it led with was around listening. It was saying that people think listening is all about not saying anything. But actually one of the top things in listening is making sure that you follow up up after you listen with, with, with, with follow up questions. And that's a way to demonstrate that you have heard the person. So deep listening is not just about shutting up, it's about truly listening. And then your follow up questions will demonstrate the fact that you have heard the person and you're involved. So I think it's great advice. Now is the time for listening. Mary. Really been a pleasure. It's flown by. We're gonna have you on Again, you don't really have a choice, Mary. So we'll get you on because there's tons more topics I know that you we've already chatted in person about and I'm dying to get back for a cup of coffee, cup of tea in person, maybe a wee cake in beauties and graves and streets. Let's hope that soon, Mary. But it's been a pleasure to have you on show 53. I will chat to you again soon.

Thank you so much to Johnny and the Social Talent team and thanks to everyone for listening. Thank you.

Thanks Mary. Thank you for listening. We're going to be back again next week for episode 54 as hopefully the long hot summer continues. So next week, which is Wednesday 9th of June, we'll broadcast live at 4pm Irish UK time. That's going to be 11am in the east coast, the US and 8am in the west coast on solving the skills shortage with military hiring. So I'm really excited to have Karen Childress Wiley. She's executive director of Veterans of the Veterans center of Excellence at Ronstadt Technologies. And Karen is the daughter of a vet and someone who's really passionate about military hiring and has worked with thousands of recruiters and leaders in a role at Ronstadt, formerly at Monster, to basically help really kind of raise the prominence of veterans and really kind of educate the world on the power of veterans and how their skills can be really utilized across the organization and also work with recruiters and leaders to basically understand how they can, you know, you know, bring veterans into their team and really harness that wider inclusivity and diversity that's available. So really dying to hear Karen's updates on what's happening in the world of military hiring, obviously mainly from a US Perspective and our own experience, but something that I think applies everywhere in the world. So do join us next week for show 54 on that. You can find out more about our show and you can subscribe to the show updates and also find links to our podcast, live shows and back catalog blog at socialtown.com forward slash the shortlist. But until then, thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.