Rapid Change: Dealing with Disruption

To create more productive and friendly work environments, companies have to change and adapt to the profile of the new workforce and its demands, while the new generation must recover a sense of effort, panelists debating “The Challenge of the Continuous Candidate” said at the Mexico Talent Forum 2017 on Thursday in Mexico City.

“The new generation has a different point of view about employment. Jobs are not a purpose for them but the means to achieve many other things,” said Arturo Graue, Human Resources Director at KPMG Mexico at the Hotel Sheraton María Isabel.

Graue was joined on the panel by moderator Ricardo Morell, Talent Engagement Leader at Softtek, Hilario Guillermo Gabilondo, Director of Experis Mexico at Manpower Group, Cédric Trantoul, Managing Director of Morgan Phillips Executive Search in Mexico and Enrique Medina, Strategy and Organizational Development Director of Human Resources for BBVA Bancomer.

The panelists discussed how the lack of a value proposition that adapts to the preferences of the new generation is causing frequent rotation in the work field. “Companies keep hiring people by paysheet while the new generations want to be collaborators,” said Trantoul. He explained that nowadays the number of entrepreneurs has risen because independent businesses have become the answer for millennials seeking growth and happiness. “Millennials are part of an environment where they can share everything -- an apartment, a car -- so they question why they can’t share their talent among companies,” Trantoul added.

For companies that want to have access to the new generation’s talent, one option is to adapt their schemes, Medina said. He explained that Bancomer has been working under the scrum methodology, where a group of professionals with different expertise gather to create one product. “The scrum team members are young people with a good educational background and we are aware that at some point they will want to leave and we won’t be able to retain them. But this is the purpose of the methodology because the position has to be occupied by someone new with new ideas,” he said.

But new employees also need to recognize the importance of effort, which Gabilondo said is lost in an automatized environment. “We have to bring back the idea that everything is earned with hard work,”he said. Tratoul agreed, adding that “companies should make clear to new employees that they have to put an effort into what they do and that not everything they do will be recognized because it is just part of their work,” agreed Tratoul.

Because the workplace now hosts different generations side by side, staff need to be trained in how to work in such an environment. “We are complaining about millennials but we should also train baby boomers on how to manage millennials,” said Medina. Graue added that before, the leadership style was to treat all collaborators in the same way but today each individual requires a different approach.