Managing Gen X and Gen Y Employees -Lessons learned and emerging trends:
Generation X (aged 26 – 46) and Generation Y (aged 18 to 28) form the core of present day’s and the future contact centre workforce. Gen X and Gen Y are highly educated, technologically literate, networked socially and optimistic about their future. They have high and sometimes impossible expectations of their leaders for guidance and career aspirations for their success. They have also grown-up in times of economic prosperity and have limited coping skills for today’s more challenging economic environment where they have to interact with Baby Boomers and other generations including the silent generation before the baby boomers. The aging of the workforce and the increased focus on ongoing healthcare, retirement and pensionable benefits within the organization is causing many organizations to review the cost of carrying high costs for staffing within the new economic model.
In leading contact centers, complaints are increasingly seen as sources of valuable insight, rather than irritating distractions. In today’s climate however, the value is created not by dealing with one complaint at a time, but as groups, expressing the true “Voice of the Customer”. How do best-in-class, customer-centric, businesses extract this freely given value? Skills such as encouraging customers to talk and provide feedback to you, managing customer responses to feedback & complaints and listening to the ‘Voice of Customer’ and setting priorities within your contact centre involves several key elements for a winning recipe.
The current turmoil has spawned a great sense of urgency for businesses to respond by reducing their workforce and trimming capital spending as they scramble to cut costs and preserve shrinking profits. Many face the reality of restructuring and downsizing, including business giants like AIG, Sony Corporation, and Nortel who had announced massive restructuring plans. For many business leaders managing large-scale restructuring, it is easy to get lost in the challenges of immediate financial & organizational pressures, without giving much thought to maintaining employee engagement, motivation, & strong employee relations. This can affect employees' long term performance and also have a detrimental effect on your business - something shareholders and investors are keen to avoid. This presentation will take you through the systematic change processes that will enable organizations to move forward and positioned for growth in the economic recovery period
The war for talent has also begun and more organizations are seeking innovative ways to recruit, train and retain talent within the Gen X and Gen Y as the Baby Boomers are planning their retirement and succession planning programs for the transfer of skills, knowledge and expertise. Nowhere is this more critical than the contact centre industry which historically has struggled with high attrition rates. Coupled with this new phenomenon that appeared a decade ago at the turn of the century, many thought leaders and strategists within key industries have approached their national leaders to focus on skills for the new economy including technology spending and leadership training in colleges and universities. Subjects like environmental sciences and biotechnology inspired new innovative ideas like voice recognition and intelligent routing within a contact centre. Seamless data flowed through sites and time zones to enable and empower employees to serve and manage customer relationships 24X7 days.
Indeed the industry has been shaped significantly by these Gen X and Gen Y ideas fuelled by the inspiration from the Baby Boomers. Never has the world seen collaboration and innovation amongst 3 (perhaps 4) different generations in a workplace environment. This means the leader or the manager has to be equally equipped with the knowledge, skills and tactics to survive in a most unforgiving workplace environment. The shortage of talent has placed added stress to HR managers and Contact Centre leaders where outsourcing as an option creates other challenges. What to do? So little time…this seminar will be able to shed some light on key tactics and strategic options you can choose to avoid the problems that other organizations faced a few years ago. Two case studies will be reviewed as well.

In this seminar, Mohan will discuss the lessons learned from some organizations and the emerging trends that HR departments are commonly seeing within the workplace environment specific to the contact centre profession.
1) Daily Interactions with Gen X, Y and Baby Boomer Employees
2) Expectations of workplace from Gen X, Y and Baby Boomer Staff
3) Career Aspirations, Pay and Work-Life Balance, Can they co-exist?
 
Date: April 29, 2010
Time: 2pm EST
Price: $79.99 USD