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Talent Management Perspectives

Published September 2009

Consider Cost-Effective Alternatives to Retain Gen X

 

  Erin Green

Though employers are increasingly concerned about talent retention post-recession, their focus is often on retaining millennials instead of a more immediate concern: Generation X employees may already have one foot out the door.

"More than 20 percent of Generation X employees have already been looking for new employment in the past 12 months, which is the highest [amount of active job seekers] for any generation," said Robin Erickson, a manager in the human capital practice of Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Gen Xers' strong desire to move up to managerial positions may be the main reason for the anticipated turnover.

"Forty percent of Generation X employees cited lack of career progress as the prime motivation to switch jobs today, which is considerably higher than their survey colleagues in Generation Y [at] 30 percent, baby boomers [at] 20 percent and veterans [at] 14 percent," said Erickson.

Deloitte will publish a report later this month - a follow-up to the July report "Managing Talent in a Turbulent Economy" - that will reveal new survey data on employee perspectives by generation and region. The data comes from a global survey of employees, covering all regions - the Americas, Asia Pacific, and Europe, Middle East and Africa.

"We asked whether or not employees had plans to look for new employment, and overall only 45 percent of all of the generations said that they expected to stay with their current employer," Erickson said. "Six percent didn't know [their plans], so that means 49 percent [of employees] overall are in the process of looking or plan to look [for new employment].

"Only 37 percent of Generation X employees expected to stay with their current employers, which is 8 percent less than the overall. We also found [that] executives in the [previous] survey we did thought that Generation Y would be the highest turnover risk, and it actually turns out that Generation X is the highest turnover risk."

There is hope when it comes to retaining Gen Xers. Employers may not be in a position to promote Gen X employees, but they can use other techniques to keep them interested in staying on the job.

"Some of the characteristics of Generation X [employees] are that they value skill development and training and accumulating transferable job skills," Erickson said. "So I think that companies should not, with the cost cutting, cancel all training and development programs. They should make sure that they continue to provide ample learning and development opportunities and to get creative in terms of things like on-the-job training, job rotations [or] international assignments. I think some of those things would be very appealing to Gen X, and that might help with the fact that they're not progressing in their careers quite as quickly as they might want to."

In addition to training and development opportunities, companies can keep Gen X employees engaged using other easy-to-implement, cost-effective methods.

"A number of the most effective retention initiatives cost companies nothing," said Erickson. "Obviously additional compensation and bonuses would cost companies money. But strong leadership, job advancement expectations and guidelines, support and recognition from supervisors or managers, flexible work arrangements - those [are] the top most effective retention initiatives [after additional compensation]. And they're not going to cost companies a lot of money."