CHART OF THE DAY: American Household Trends

Spotted this beauty on the Big Picture site a couple of days ago - a look at how the composition of American households has changed, kind of dramatically, over the last 40+ years.

Have a look:

Of course you spotted the major changes since 1970 - the percentage of households consisting of 'traditional' families, i.e.. married couples with children has fallen by over half. 

What has grown pretty significantly over that time, (and for many readers of this blog, and me too is our lifetimes), are 'non-traditional' households and people of both genders who are living alone.

And taking a couple of these household categorizations and combining them we see that in 1970 about 70% of all households included a married couple, but by 2012 that number fell to 49%.

Americans are getting married, (or staying married) less, living alone more, and have by a wide, wide margin moved away from what are now fast becoming antiquated ideas about what the traditional American family and household is.

Why post this kind of data on the blog you might be asking? 

I don't know, maybe because I find it interesting, (which is pretty much the only reason anything gets posted on the blog).

And maybe because I do think it is important to think about what is going on at a macro level sometimes as these trends and new realities do impact our organizations, the people we employ, their challenges and needs, and how HR will be done in the future.

What do you think? Does it matter to your organization that America has changed so dramatically in the last few decades?

Happy Thursday.

More on the STEM talent shortage, or lack thereof

Fall weekends are for two things, watching my beloved New York Football Jets display their unique brand of ineptitude on fields across America (big non-relevant aside: I am starting more and more to come down on the site of Malcolm Gladwell regarding football and its eventual and likely marginalization. The only football game, college or NFL, I watched all weekend was the Jets vs Bucs, and in that game alone in the first half, two Jets players wobbled off the field, pretty much incoherent from blows received to their helmets. Multiply that by hundreds of games, many played by little kids as young as 7 or 8 and try to count, you can't, the number of kids/teens/collegians/men who are absorbing ridiculous and repeated trauma to the head each weekend. I don't know. Most of think boxing is a crazy sport. But we are ok with football. Sorry, that was a long aside), and catching up on some longer reads from the week I did not have time to really review.

The piece I'd like to call your attention to is titled 'The STEM Crisis is a Myth', an absolute takedown of the notion that currently the American economy is suffering, and will continue to suffer from a dearth of workers with the needed STEM skills to fill current and expected demand for them (or more precisely, the skills themselves). The author, Robert Charette, makes a compelling case that there is not, in fact, a STEM worker shortage. If anything, there is a surplus of STEM-capable workers, both from the amount of STEM graduates that are produced each year, and from the upwards of 11 million STEM-trained workers that for one reason or another, are not working currently in STEM roles.

Chech the below chart from the piece to see where Charette is coming from:

Do the math, (no pun intended), if you like, but when you break down the estimates of new STEM jobs being creating against the numbers of new graduates and existing STEM-educated workers it becomes harder and harder to make the 'shortage' case.

Additionally, it might be in tech and other firms best interested to play up the shortage narrative.  Why?

From the piece:

Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the “best and the brightest,” and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to “suppress” the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.

 And STEM wages are 'in check', check this nugget from the article:

And over the past 30 years, according to the Georgetown report, engineers’ and engineering technicians’ wages have grown the least of all STEM wages and also more slowly than those in non-STEM fields; while STEM workers as a group have seen wages rise 33 percent and non-STEM workers’ wages rose by 23 percent, engineering salaries grew by just 18 percent. The situation is even more grim for those who get a Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering. The Georgetown study states it succinctly: “At the highest levels of educational attainment, STEM wages are not competitive.”

It is a complex and even controversial subject, but in light of all the available data, it gets harder and harder to make the 'shortage' case, and in fact, it gets more dangerous if it perpetuates to the point where it serves to help create a real shortage in the future, as students decide to avoid these fields in the future.

If you're interested at all in these issues, I encourage you to take a few minutes to read 'The STEM Crisis is a Myth', maybe bookmark it for new Saturday though!

Have a great week!

Employee of the Week - '75 Stingray Edition

I am not a huge car guy, (some close friends might know that recently I flirted with purchasing a sweet white 2003 Ford Crown Victoria because I thought it would be fun to cruise the freeway and have everyone I approached from behind think I was actually a State Trooper, but I digress), but I found this recent story about the intersection of car culture and employee recognition and rewards pretty fun.

In Michigan, home of the American auto industry, a chimney sweeping and cleaning company named Doctor Flue has put a new spin on the traditional 'Employee of the Week/Month' certificate or plaque on the office wall and replaced it with, get this, use of a 1975 Corvetter Stingray that the selected employee will have use of for the week of their recognition.

Additionally, the Stingray has been fitted with a custom car wrap in the Doctor Flue corporate colors, and has a vanity licence plate that reads 'My Week.' So as the employee of the week rides down the road showing off the '75 'Vette he or she will help spread the corporate message and brand, and also to help promote Doctor Flue as a fun and rewarding place to work. 

I don't want to make too much of this story, I did think it was kind of interesting and fun and that is why I decided to post about it on the blog today. But it does give us another reminder of what should be pretty obvious and apparent but often is not - that many of the time-honored and traditional ways that our organizations try and recognize and reward employees could benefit from a fresh dose of creativity and new thinking.

Getting a mention and a kudo in the company 'all-hands' meeting or having your name etched onto a plaque that hangs on the wall in the corporate lobby is nice. It's even pretty cool. And lots of companies still do those kinds of things.

Cruising down the road for a week in a custom 1975 Corvette Stingray with 'My Week' on the tag is much, much cooler. You'd spend the entire week talking to people about the car, where you work, how you came to get use of the car, etc.  You'd probably be really proud of both where you work and what you specifically accomplished to garner the recognition and reward. No one drives around town waving their 'Employee of the Month' certificate out of the window.

And that is pretty cool.

Happy Wednesday.

Every environment has too much information to process

Most of the folks reading this will probably agree to both of the following statements:

1. I am a frequent multi-tasker.

2. I think I am pretty good at multi-tasking.

Because we pretty much have to be, right?

There is always too much going on, too much work to do, too many family and personal commitments (I bet someone is reading this post right now on their smartphone while 'watching' one of their kids play soccer or in a dance rehearsal), too many things to read, too many social networks that need attention - you get the idea.

And the truth of it is that in just about every situation we encounter (save for any time spent in long-term solitary confinement), we are always juggling, choosing, focusing on some, and trying to eliminate other messages and stimuli in our environment. Think about the simple, everyday act of driving a car for example. You are simultaneously monitoring road conditions, gauges on the car's dash, the weather, traffic signals, other drivers, pedestrians, those idiots on their bicycles that give you dirty looks when they're the ones who are the menace, and more. 

And some of you have become so good at it that you can add applying makeup or carrying on a Twitter chat (not recommended), while behind the wheel.

But I think the driving example is a perfect illustration of how we trick ourselves into thinking we are actually much, much better at multi-tasking that we really are. We get deluded into thinking we are good at it, or we simply accept the fact as a given that we have to be good at it, and continue onward in fruitless quest to be great, (or at least pretty good), at everything at all times.

And now there is new research that suggests that not only are we not as good at multi-tasking as we think we are, that prolonged multi-tasking actually makes us worse at multi-tasking itself - kind of a counter-intuitive spin on 'practice makes perfect.'

Check this excerpt from the Priceonomics blog - a look at some recent Stanford University research into multi-tasking and it's effect on task completion and task juggling.

People generally recognize that multitasking involves a trade-off - we attend to more things but our performance at each suffers. But in their study “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” Professors Ophira, Nass, and Wagner of Stanford ask whether chronic multitasking affects your concentration when not explicitly multitasking. In effect, they ask whether multitasking is a trait and not just a state.

To do so, they recruited Stanford students who they identified as either heavy or light “media multitaskers” based on a survey that asked how often they used multiple streams of information (such as texting, YouTube, music, instant messaging, and email) at the same time. They then put them through a series of tests that looked at how they process information.

People generally get better at activities they do often. But that may not be true of multitasking. Since heavy multitaskers often switch between research and emails or Facebook chats and work, we'd expect them to outperform the light multitaskers at switching back and forth between the two tasks. But they actually performed worse as their delta was higher than that of the light multitaskers.

The professors conclude that frequent multitaskers seem to “have greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment, [be] less likely to ignore irrelevant representations in memory, and are less effective in suppressing the activation of irrelevant task sets (task-switching).” More colloquially, the multitaskers were more easily distracted from a single task and worse at switching between tasks.

Let that sink in - we get worse and worse at multitasking the more we do it.

If the conclusions from this study are at all accurate, then that does not bode too well for those of us that have conditioned ourselves to be constantly hopping from one thing to the next. And technology, it seems to me, isn't really helping in this regard. Rather than trying to exploit technology to make things simpler, more clear-cut, and maybe more efficient, I think most of us are simply using it to consume more, interact more, do more, and attempt to be (virtually) in five places at once.

So let's re-visit the two statements that led off this post and re-word them a little.

1. I am a frequent multi-tasker. (ok that one will probably still be valid for a while)

2. I think I am pretty good terrible at multi-tasking, and the more I do it the worse I get.

What tips or ideas do you have to combat the seemingly overwhelming urge to multi-task?

Time heals all wounds, just not fast enough if you've lost a job

I caught a really interesting piece in the Wall St. Journal online recently titled After Divorce or Job Loss Comes the Good Identity Crisis, a look at some interesting research that examined just how long it takes the average person to get past, get over, and move forward from a dramatic life event such as a divorce or a job loss.

We've all heard and perhaps even advised friends and colleagues that 'time heals all wounds', the key question for the wounded is often 'How much time?' John McLaughlin, Untitled, 1963

Turns out it may be as long as two years for folks to get it back to 'normal' following a major life change.

From the WSJ piece:

Whether you've lost a job or a girlfriend, it won't take long before someone tells you, Dust yourself off. Time heals all wounds. Yes, but how much time?

Experts say most people should give themselves a good two years to recover from an emotional trauma such as a breakup or the loss of a job. And if you were blindsided by the event—your spouse left abruptly, you were fired unexpectedly—it could take longer.

That is more time than most people expect, says Prudence Gourguechon, a psychiatrist in Chicago and former president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. It's important to know roughly how long the emotional disruption will last.

Once you get over the shock that it is going to be a long process, you can relax, Dr. Gourguechon says. "You don't have to feel pressure to be OK, because you're not OK."

Oh, so don't feel pressure to be OK because you're not OK. Thanks Doc - that helps bunches if the traumatic life change involves the ending of a romantic relationship, where no one is going to force you to jump back into the dating scene before you are good and ready. Heck, maybe you never get back in the game. Sure, that kind of stinks, but again there are worse things that can happen. Like...

Like having the traumatic event be the loss of a job, especially if it was a good job and if you didn't see the axe coming - whether it was a layoff or even a term for cause that you should have seen coming but were blind to what was about to happen.

If the WSJ piece is right, and getting over the loss of a job might take up to two years to bounce back from, then that might be one of the reasons for the increased difficulty that many out of work job seekers have experiences in getting back to work in the last few years.

In this recovery period after losing a job, people are likely to feel depressed, anxious, and distracted - just the kind of feelings and 'tells' that will pretty much destroy a job seeker in the interview process. No one wants to be the hiring manager that signs off on taking on board the guy who was an emotional wreck in the interview.

Two years to get over a big loss, including a job.

Important to try and remember when the guy across the interview table, who suddenly found himself on the job market unexpectedly, has only had two or three months to process everything that has been happening to him.

He's tense, he might be getting depressed, and the pressure that is mounting on him at home is only getting more intense by the day.

Hard to 'get over' the trauma of a job loss under any circumstances for sure. And probably almost impossible when with every day that passes without a new job that  the 'two year' time frame doesn't seem to get closer to ending, but rather just keeps moving into the distance.