May 15, 2006

Beyond the Buzzwords Workforce Crisis

Coming Invasion of the Body Snatchers

By Reylito A.H. Elbo

AT the rate people and organizations are running job fairs these days, sooner than later; it could become a booming industry. Unlike in Japan, the United States or elsewhere where jobs are abundant-where every applicant feels free and bold enough to exercise his right against involuntary servitude.

But not in this country where slavery starts the moment you step inside a job fair-where typically, the crowd is, most of the time look like grieving prisoners in concentration camps. They endure jostling each other in a cramped space, while trying to fill-up application forms in an imaginary table and chair . . . and inexistent jobs, if not contractual posts good only for five months.

Then we ask: Do we really have jobs? Are these for purposes only of fattening the employer's database? Or if to we've believed Peter Favila- are Filipinos choosy of available jobs here?

And yet we're puzzled when experts talk about "workforce crisis" when they discuss about brain drain, high turnover rate, job mismatch, and low quality of job applicants.

In the book Workforce Crisis (Harvard Business School Press, 2006) by Ken Dychtwald, Tamara Erickson, and Robert Morison, Westerners too, are very much concerned about the retiring baby boomers and declining birth rate- which spells deficit of takeover-younger workers.

In both cultures, the most critical question comes to mind: how do organizations should beat the coming shortage of skills and talent?

The answer may prove to be with the combined savvy implementation of effective succession plan, flexible work arrangements, innovative learning opportunities, and creative compensation package where the best and the brightest can sing "If we hold on together . . ."

This is where the human resources (HR) function should play an important role. We've to realize that HR is a strategic coordinating body accepted everywhere, a fact that totally mystifies every union officer, like a round of debate with management offers essentially the same degree of action as you can find in the Congressional floor.

It's easy to imagine this-I mean the solution lies on how organizations do their employee retention program. Otherwise, it becomes scary to see this happen. It's like in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)-you know-when I was still in high school or to be accurate about it, while I'm attending a class reunion.

The movie reminds us all about how the country is losing much of its warm and talented bodies to a Thing from Space led by Donald Sutherland. And we're not talking here only of medical professionals, airline technicians, and engineers but many others.

The question rings back to us and again we've no recourse but to study "The Decision-Maker's Guide to Succession Planning."

Incidentally, this guide is not a best-selling book but a live benchmarking forum on May 30 that I'm organizing with resource persons from Lufthanza Technik, Ford Motor, Nokia, and none other than Dean Jorge Sibal of University of the Philippines School of Labor and Industrial Relations.

Really, succession planning is a wildly popular activity among major companies-a fact that totally stupefies me, inasmuch as several rounds of karaoke singing by their corporate managers when they're not playing golf.

Talking to them, I could easily say they're a bunch of bold HR experts in their own turf who experimented and made a lot of headway to say "you'll never close your eyes again" when you're faced with the body snatchers.

Rey Elbo is a business consultant specializing on human resources and total quality management as a fused specialty. Reader's feedback may be sent to 0919-808-7023 or reyelbo@pworld.net.ph.