Feeling the squeeze

So, we survived six weeks of school holidays through a mixture of travel, TV and the odd board game and finally opened the 2012 desk calendar.

But spending too much time away from the office might be a danger for career-prone Gen Xers, who are not only fobbing off a raft of highly ambitious and thus far childless Gen Ys and slamming into a whole generation of highly experienced baby boomers who, according to BIS Shrapnel, are postponing retirement because of a fall in their savings.

And if it weren’t already getting crowded enough, the very first Generation Z high school graduates are about to embark on that muddling mixture of part-time work and tertiary study or traineeships, which are an increasingly distant memory.

So what is it that Gen Xers have in their favour?

The only thing I can think of is that sheer exhaustion forces us to be creative and productive all at the same time and to transfer management and team-building skills back and forth between the home and office.

I’ve joked before about friends who use Gantt charts to organise birthday parties, 360-degree feedback to manage behaviour and active listening to resolve conflicts at home, but the simple fact is that anyone who deals on a regular basis with either toddlers or teenagers needs time and behaviour management skills that rival a seasoned MBA.

The real challenge for the Australian economy at this stage is that there remains a mismatch between the skills we need, the skills we have and where these skills happen to be. And while the Gen Xers are the least likely to move for work, due to family commitments, we are pretty adept at learning new skills and adapting the ones we already have to a new industry or environment.

Where this makes a real difference is in the implementation of processes that are genuinely more productive, as opposed to simply creating more stuff by spending more time at work. Most of the debates surrounding productivity get stuck in the definition of making people work harder and not smarter –- and trapped as we are between looking after young children and elderly parents, we simply don’t have the time to put in more hours and need to figure out ways to do more in the time we have.

Not that this is going to make any difference if Baby Boomer bosses are measuring productivity through time spent in the office, rather than focusing on outcomes, as is often still the case. However, it’s a mindset and measurement that will need to change if productivity is genuinely going to rise, as it will need to as we transition from an economy where there are more than three working people for every retiree to a point where there are fewer than two.

And oddly enough the solution may actually involve spending more time at home, and less in the office, letting people do more of what they enjoy and less of the forced stuff they dislike. Either way – there’s an interesting year ahead.

Do you agree? Write and tell me your views.

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