TMS Asia Pacific Breakfast Seminar

On 10 May, TMS Asia Pacific, specialists in the travel, tourism and hospitality industries hosted a gathering of industry professionals at the Shangri-La Hotel in Sydney.

The success of this breakfast seminar is likely to lead TMS to introduce similar events in the future.

Mandy Scotney, the General Manager TMS Asia Pacific (pictured below), welcomed everyone to the seminar and immediately had people laughing by pointing out that it was probably a little unusual that a recruitment organisation was hosting a seminar with a staff retention theme!

Scotney then continued by highlighting an interesting fact – in 2008, for the first time in history, there will be more people leaving companies than joining them. General Management and Operations Management must confront this situation and develop ways to retain employees, particularly the stand-outs.

The TMS strategy is to partner with industry and not only provide the best people, but help their partners to engage their employees and retain them for the longer term.

Scotney introduced the TMS consultants and then handed over to James Adonis (pictured below right), who is Australia’s leading expert on employee engagement and the author of “Love Your Team: How to halve your employee turnover in less than 90 days!”

Adonis’s achievements have included taking a team that had employee turnover exceeding 70% and reducing it to zero, where it was maintained for two years.  He has also achieved employee engagement results that have exceeded not only the industry standard, but world’s best practice.

Recognised internationally as a premier thought leader on people management, Adonis delivers presentations and workshops and consults for organisations around the world.  Adonis (a Gen Y himself) has a depth of knowledge and professional presentation skills that belies his youthful appearance – and it is not hard to imagine him alongside Tom Peters!

We were all given an excellent overview of Generation Y, delivered with enthusiasm and passion.  A full-on Adonis covered a lot of territory; following are just some of the points made. Apologies if some are out of context:

The end of traditional hierarchy – respect is not given simply due to someone’s position in an organisation.  Respect comes from likeability and credibility, ie you do what you say you will do.

Gen Y-ers hate formalised feedback, they love informal feedback, given in a continuous manner as part of everyday conversation – which actually makes ‘em the most coachable generation ever.

30% of Gen Y expect to have their own business in the future. When you add this to the fact (above) that more people will be leaving employment in 2008, employee retention strategies come sharply into focus!

People on many occasions state that the reason for leaving is money related. If the difference in salaries is less than 15%, this is likely to be a porky to cover the real reasons…

Gen Y demand a work-life balance & do not live to work! The more intangible motivators are more likely to retain an employee longer term, and Gen Y need to be given continual opportunities.

Gen Y prefers regular face-to-face contact in the workplace, over phone & email. In fact email is their least preferred way of interacting!  This carries on into training – interactive workshops are the way to go, remove the word training from your vocabulary!

Due to higher levels of education generally, they are smarter when they join the workforce. Gen Y are hunting for the so-called ‘soft skills’ such as negotiation and selling.

Bizzarely, by creating opportunities to leave, Gen Y-ers actually stay longer. This sounds very cryptic, but I will leave this as a little puzzler for you. Based on today’s seminar, if you have a staff turnover problem, The Mole would strongly encourage you to talk with James about organising a one hour group mentoring session for your management team, or simply contact TMS to arrange this for you.

Something also happened at the seminar that made The Mole’s day – his business card was pulled out of the jar for a free group mentoring session! Only problem was, er.. no team in the sense of front-line staff at a central location, like the Galileo people sitting beside him.

So the decent thing was done, the Mole made known that he and his assistants each had their own individual burrow system comprising no Gen Y-ers and so the prize went to Katrina De Vries from American Express.  The Mole’s consolation prize was a copy of James’s book ‘Love Your Team’ which he is reading today on his way to Indaba, in South Africa.

Photos are courtesy of Matt Leedham of Whirlybird Creative, who provides brand marketing services for the travel industry.

Report by The Mole