Young talent in supply chain: flexible, not lazy

“It’s all about people.” I hear this constantly from supply chain leaders whether they’re on an S&OP journey, a quest to become customer centric or a mission to collaborate with suppliers. The people challenge persists because process and technology, no matter how brilliantly conceived, can’t make the human decisions and impressions needed to effect lasting change.

Unfortunately, it seems to be getting worse.

Enter the millennials

Members of Generation Y, also known as millennials, comprise people born between 1980 and 1999, and as anyone supervising them can attest, they pose an interesting management challenge. This tranche includes virtually all new graduate recruits and millions of entry level staff up to age 34. It is no exaggeration to say that they are our future.

And yet, to many, they seem distractible, undisciplined and fickle. A recent Bloomberg interview with Eze Vidra, Head of Google Campus London, and Richard Hytner, Deputy Chairman of global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, digs into the psychology and demographics of this group as illuminated in a recent study by the London Business School. One of the key data points in the study is that 90% of Generation Y workers spend less than five years with any given employer. How, one wonders, do I justify investing in their development if they won’t stay around?

Our CSCO data also points to trouble with this group. Among managers surveyed since 2011, the share who say that talent management at entry level is more difficult than at other levels has risen steadily. It seems we are increasingly struggling to get the best out of our younger supply chain people.

The root of the problem may lie in mismatched expectations. Millennials, according to the LBS study, attribute only 1% importance to financial reward but 43% to work that they believe will make the world a better place. Unilever CEO Paul Polman echoed this finding in his keynote at our Leaders Forum by noting that the company gets 1.8 million applicants yearly and is the preferred employer among young job seekers after Google and Apple. Mission, which in Unilever’s case is about sustainable living, appears to matter to Gen Y.

They also don’t want to climb the corporate ladder. The LBS report identified work-life balance as the top concern of job-seeking millennials. Connected around the clock to friends and their wider social networks, Gen Y workers do not separate the workday from the rest of their lives. For those of older generations, this has crept up on us with email traffic now 24×7. Millennials know nothing different and want flexibility built in up-front.

For supply chain executives habitually trained to eliminate variability, this taste for flex-scheduling feels like yet more complexity. Our preference for adherence to plans grates against these young people’s expectation of freedom in how they choose to do the work.

Modularise to win

There may be a solution. Millennials’ desire for autonomy and purpose plus their flexibility and facility with communication lend quite naturally to discrete project assignments rather than a multi-year career progression. Increasingly in supply chain we are tasked with managing programmes with complex interdependencies and substantial uncertainty rather than basic ongoing replenishment. This is true for new product launches, system rollouts and facility scale-ups.

Modularity works as an engineering precept by isolating complexity within well-defined boundaries and then assuring integration at points of interface. Could this not also be applied to work such that jumpy Gen Y employees turn their innate flexibility into an advantage? They could be given rotational assignments, international placements and all-or-nothing projects across functions in supply chain and build their own skills, while infusing others with fresh ideas and providing late night coverage.

The other big benefit of modularity is risk isolation. Considering the retention problems with Gen Y, it may be wise to limit investment in training and IP to clearly demarcated chunks of work with ROI that pays along the way rather than years into a career.

People are your most important resource, but increasingly this means harnessing their flexibility rather than marshalling their work.