Points of Interest: ACM CareerNews: Tuesday, May 22, 2007
"Attracting the Twentysomething Worker" Fortune, May 15"The arrival of Generation Y in the workforce is causing a re-think of nearly every facet of office life, including how to dress, how to interact with colleagues, and how to understand the work-life balance. To older workers, the nonchalance and sense of self-entitlement of the average Gen Y worker can be disconcerting, if not downright annoying. As the article points out, members of Generation Y are different in many respects from their predecessors, from their upbringing to their politics to their worldview. ... These Gen Y workers are motivated, but in ways that are almost incomprehensible to the older generation of managers and executives. With their designer coffees, technology gadgets and yoga mats, the members of Generation Y are both opinionated and imbued with a sense of self-entitlement. Instead of working 60 hours a week and working behind a desk wearing a suit, they prefer to dress as casual as possible and work with mobile gadgets or laptops in comfortable, creative spaces. Already, companies are working to accommodate these workers, usually by addressing the work-life balance."
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033934/
"The Key to Managing Stars? Think Team" HBS Working Knowledge, May 14"A new study ... addresses questions about the performance of star knowledge workers, focusing on the factors influencing performance as well as the best practices for inspiring, nurturing and recruiting these stars. As these researchers explain, past performance can be a useful indicator of future performance. In addition, they found that the quality of colleagues within the organization has a significant impact on the ability of workers to maintain a high level of quality. ... When it comes to star performers, the key ingredient in their success is an organization full of high-quality colleagues. Thus, when considering a career move, it is very important for these top performers to evaluate the level of support they will receive from their colleagues in different parts of the organization. For managers, it is imperative to understand that producing top-quality knowledge work requires collaboration and flows of information among a network of top performers. That means any one decision on hiring and retention can have a real impact on the performance of top employees in an entirely different part of the firm. It also means that it is not enough to have a few star performers scattered throughout the organization. ... As the basis of competition shifts to superior knowledge and information, organizations must attract, leverage, and retain the best knowledge workers possible. They must also understand that star knowledge workers are not the same as star athletes, in that their skills are not always portable to the highest bidder. Since star performers rely to a large degree on the quality of the colleagues that their organization provides to sustain top performance, they may not be able to replicate their top performance in any organizational context."
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5617.html
Original Article:
http://www.acm.org/careernews/issues/v3_i6.html