TIDES AND POPULATION

23 October 2001

by Ken Orr

If you've spent much time at the seashore, you're probably familiar with high tides and low tides, and with high-high tide and low-low tide. Where low tide is a phenomenon that occurs every day as the moon passes by, low-low tide happens on those days when the moon and the sun are their absolute farthest distance from the Earth. When the moon and sun are aligned, then the tides move the farthest.

Tides have a way of creeping up on people. They start out gradually, but if you ignore them, you can find yourself in an uncomfortable, even dangerous, situation. Under the right circumstances, tides can become flooding torrents on the way in, or seemingly endless mudflats on the way out.

Demographic trends are like the tides. In their own way, the ebb and flow of population are nearly as predictable as the ebb and flow of the seas; the cycles are just longer. Instead of hours and days, demographic cycles play out over generations.... We face a coming low-low tide in the mature component of our labor force and an incoming tide of younger, more diverse workers.

What Should We Be Doing?

While hiring, training, and retaining will be a huge problem in the next couple of decades, there are things organizations can do to address the problem. Here are some ideas:

• Develop a long-range IT hiring and retention plan.
  
  
• Launch a study of the knowledge base of those people in the 45-60 age group.
  
  
• Start developing a "baby boomer" retention plan.
  
  
• Develop policies to allow key people to work beyond regular retirement.
  
  
• Develop a plan for migrating all of those critical systems that are not part of the mainstream technology direction.
  
  
• Look at policies and procedures for hiring older workers.
  
  
• Develop a "knowledge transfer" plan for every critical system or application that cannot be migrated before the key people retire. Make sure that this plan includes specified individuals whose job it is to capture the knowledge of the person or persons leaving. (Hint: it may be difficult to get 20-somethings to take on this task, but 40-somethings may be willing.)
  
  
• Develop a long-term plan for acquiring and training younger employees, even in traditional legacy systems.
  
  
• Concentrate on hiring the best and promoting the best.
  
  
• Don't lay off people you are going to desperately need in a year or two.
  
  
• Don't force key people to take early retirement. (You'll just find yourself hiring them back as consultants at three times what you're paying them now.)
  
  

It is amazing just how insensitive management gets when the economy starts down. The 1980s and 1990s left the US with a tremendous personnel hangover, one that we have not yet recovered from. Knowledge management pioneer Karl Erik Sveiby has a great quote, "Trust is the bandwidth of communication." If an organization is good and honest and fair with its employees, they will be loyal to the organization. If you retain your best people in the worst of times, they will be there in the best.

-- Ken Orr, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium