The Sisyphus Comments

Managing Younger Employees

With the oldest baby boomers entering into the retirement zone, progressive agencies are focusing on developing their young employees through extensive leadership development and mentoring programs. Hopefully, the next generation of prospective leaders will have the knowledge, skills and abilities necessary to assume helm of leadership when the time comes. This grooming process has served the criminal justice community well in the past and, on the surface, it seems like a sensible approach.

However, one of the weaknesses in this process is the depth of the labor pool. With the exception of top executive positions, criminal justice agencies have shown a reluctance to reach outside of the agency to fill supervisory positions, so a systematic leadership grooming program is a necessity. Fortunately, in most agencies, there is normally a sufficient number of willing and capable people in the pipeline to fill the supervisory positions that are vacated by retirements or career changers. However, executives need to consider what would happen if the people they are counting on to step up in the future aren’t there when they are needed or they aren’t interested in doing the job for which they are being groomed.

Recent studies of a cross-section of industries confirm that we are experiencing a significant shift in the work priorities of the U.S. workforce. The criminal justice community needs to recognize that its young workers also share these new attitudes. More importantly, they may be forced to reevaluate the ways they hire, motivate, and retain employees.

I must forewarn the reader that over-generalizations will follow but try to think in terms of demographic tendencies. For instance, workers under the age of 35 tend to feel much less loyalty than their older peers. Wait, before we make such a bold statement about our younger coworkers, we better define loyalty. Loyalty is the responsibility to promote or protect the interests of certain persons or organizations – like your spouse, family, employer or school.

However, it is important to understand that there are different types of loyalty. If we think of it in terms of dog loyalty versus cat loyalty, it will be a little easier to understand. Those of you who own a dog know that a dog is loyal to its owner, while a cat tends to be loyal to the house.

Younger workers tend to lean in the direction of dog loyalty, or loyalty to their immediate supervisor and coworkers – their “work family.” If you are an older worker, your concept of loyalty may be more consistent with cat loyal, or loyalty to the house or organization. This distinction is very important as it relates to retention issues since, particularly for younger employees, people don’t quit jobs, they quit people.

There is also a dichotomy between older and younger worker as it relates to their “station” in the organization. In recent years, the educational system has placed increased importance on the ability to work as a team. This approach to problem solving has many positive characteristics but the criminal justice culture has not totally embraced the concept for day to day management of the organization. Most agencies still adhere to a traditional military-style chain of command as their organizational structure and younger workers may experience problems working within this rigid management framework. They want responsibility and expect to have input right away, unlike older workers who expect people to earn their station within the organization time on the job.

Agency administrators should strive to involve younger workers in committees and teams that are charged with meaningful tasks in order get the most out of them. Whether you like it or not, there is a good chance that your younger employees may not stay with your agency so you need to get the most out of them while you have them. The agency also needs to capitalize on the “work family” relationship that younger workers develop with their immediate supervisors. Employee retention should be one of the primary job tasks and a performance evaluation rating point for sergeants and lieutenants.

Finally, agency administrators may need to rethink their attitudes about re-hiring former employees. Younger workers are much more likely to leave a job to seek out other opportunities including education, travel, or even another job. If the employee was a good worker, it makes good economic and management sense to make it easy for them to return, particularly when we consider the time and expense of training a new employee.

The bottom line is agency administrators may have to rethink the way they do business if they hope to retain their younger employees. If an agency fails to provide its younger workers with an opportunity to make decision and contribute as a team member, they will probably lose them to an agency that does.