Winning hearts of ‘restless’ workers

ENGAGING millennials and making them loyal to an organization have become challenging to many Filipino human resource practitioners.

During the “Xtracting and Xngaging the Millenials: The Challenger Generation” forum at the 52nd People Management Association of the Philippines (PMAP) Annual Conference, Yu Ming Chin, executive director of Viventis Search Asia, said corporate loyalty was dying because of restless millennials.

“Money is not everything they look for. They look for enjoyable work, good company [and] good mentorship,” he said.

According to the National Statistics Office, millennials—or those aged between 20 and 34—comprise 46.7 percent of today’s workforce.

Yu said the key to managing these tech-savvy yet impatient generation was to know and understand them.

Showmanship

Viventis Search Asia, established by Yu as a leading recruitment solutions firm in the country with significant hiring in top management positions, employs 75 percent millennials.

He said millennials were multitaskers and always connected to the Internet. Yet, this group has a short attention span, he said.

To engage millennials, the information on what kind of employment a company is offering must be exciting, relevant and shareable because millennials are bombarded with a lot of information every day.

“If you want to manage them, you really need to apply and have real showmanship to get their attention,” Yu said.

Successful ways to help retain millennials in the workforce include empowering them by giving them time to work on their choice of projects, giving them encouragement and regular feedback, pairing them with senior mentors, meeting their desire for career progression and offering more flexibility in schedule and telecommuting options or increased or unlimited vacation time for consistent performance.

Yu said HR leaders must cultivate real teamwork between and among different generations in the workforce.

To assist mentorship, HR practitioners must instill a mindset of authenticity and leadership in the older management, he said.

Felix Dan Lopez, vice president of corporate human resources at JG Summit Holdings Inc. and Lito De Guzman, vice president of human resources at GlaxoSmithKline Philippines Inc. challenged both emerging and veteran HR leaders to trust each other.

“I challenge the emerging ones to trust the more seasoned ones and truly believe that our dynamism, our vibrance, when you couple them with the wisdom, with the maturity of the more seasoned ones, [then] it would be perfect,” Lopez said.

Critical talents

He also said some of the ways to expedite the development of critical talents in the shortest period of time was to assign mentors and coaches to young talents and then observe their collaboration.

“We have [sent] 60 people to different countries already because we want these talents to learn from the job quickly,” he said.

The medium-term or long-term strategic rewards system also do not work anymore,       Lopez said.

He said rewards should be targeted and personalized. Performance reviews should also be coupled with performance conversations, he said.

In HR metrics, the concept of turnover should not focus on the number of people a company loses, rather it should be on who it loses, he said.

Lopez has 14 years of HR experience, first in San Miguel Corp. and later in JG Summit Holdings Inc., where he became the vice president for corporate human resources at 34.

De Guzman, 2010 People Manager of the Year, said he sees a lot of potential in the emerging HR leaders in the country.

Mentors and coaches should also trust and listen to them, noting the veterans’ tendency to stick to traditions in managing things.

“I think it’s really combining the strengths of this generation with what we have,” he said, urging veteran HR leaders to “risk more.”

Emerging HR leaders in turn can also learn from the systematic and structured way of thinking of the more experienced generation, he said.

With a successful HR career of more than three decades, De Guzman started as a personal assistant in Union Carbide Philippines. He later became a member of its management committee at 23.

Today, aside from being vice president for human resources at GlaxoSmithKline Philippines, he is also the chair of the Pharma HR Group, the organization of HR practitioners within the pharmaceutical industry.

PMAP President Obet Policarpio and Vice President Jesse Rebustillo, who is also assistant vice president for classified advertising at the Philippine Daily Inquirer, managed this year’s conference with the theme, “HR Pilipinas: People Agenda and Beyond.” The PMAP conference was held last October 12 to 14 at the Marriott Grand Ballroom Manila.

PMAP is a professional organization of over 1,800 member companies and executives engaged in human resource management and industrial relations work.