The end of retirement

Some highlights, (or lowlights, depending on your perspective), from the recently released Wells Fargo Middle Class Retirement Study, an annual look at the attitudes, preparedness, and expectations for retirement amongst middle class American worker:

1. More than half the middle class (59%) are very clear that their top day-to-day financial concern is “paying the monthly bills,” an increase from 52% in 2012.

2. Saving for retirement ranks a distant second place, with 13% calling it a “priority."

3. Four in ten middle class Americans (42%) say saving and paying the bills is “not possible.”

4. 48% are not confident they will be able to save enough for a comfortable retirement.

And last but not least the major implication for HR and Talent pros from this pretty depressing report on the state of American middle class retirement readiness:

5. 34% of the middle class say they will work until they are “at least 80” because they will not have saved enough for retirement, up from 25% in 2011 and 30% in 2012

A pretty grim situation on the current state of the average middle class American worker you would have to say. Even allowing for some sample size error, and for the inability of folks to accurately estimate the amount of funds needed for their retirement, (and their likely life spans), which I would argue would put even more folks in the 'there is no way I can ever retire' category, when over a third of folks think they will be working until they are 80 years old then I think we have to pause and think about the implications of that conclusion.Save my seat. My shift at Walmart ends at Noon.

I know it has become perhaps even trendy to say or think things like, 'I'm never going to retire', or to look at the traditional view of 'Full' retirement, i.e. doing absolutely no work at all once you leave the workforce as a relic of our parents generation, many of whom logged 30+ years at one employer and hit 65 (give or take), and started drawing a nice monthly company pension check that combined with their savings and Social Security payments would see them nicely into their golden years. With long-term employment at one employer and guaranteed pensions no longer the norm, the entire geometry of the path to retirement in 2013 looks almost nothing like it did even 25 years ago.

But it seems to me like the folks that I hear that proudly talk about 'never' retiring, really aren't the same ones that the Wells Fargo survey is measuring. Mostly, it seems, that 'I'm never retring' people are the ones that are making that decision quite consciously and out of a desire to continue the interesting and challenging work that they have been fortunate and industrious enough to have been doing. They probably could, strictly speaking from a financial point of view, afford to retire in the traditional sense close to the traditional retirement age.

No, it seems to me that most of the rest of us, and the majority of the survey respondents, still remain philosophically attached to what is fast becoming a relic of the past, that after logging 30 or 35 years as a loyal and diligent cog in the corporate machine that you'd have at least 10 or 15 years of front porch sitting, lemonade drinking, and grandchild spoiling to look forward to, all unencumbered by the demands of work, (and some 32 year-old hotshot and clueless boss).

But this survey, and likely a dozen other we can find, tell a very different story, one that is more about the mismatch between expectation and reality, and one where we see what has long been a cherished and venerated ideal bucking up against the reality of life in corporate American in 2013.

Retirement might indeed be over in America in the very near future.

Is your workplace ready to accommodate even more workers in their 70s and 80s?

Have a great week all! 

PODCAST - #HRHappyHour 171 - Workforce Reputation Management

HR Happy Hour 171 - Workforce Reputation Management

Recorded Friday August 23, 2013

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, Steve Boese and Trish McFarlane sat down with Mark Bennett, Product Strategy Director for Oracle Social HCM Cloud, Fusion Profile Management, and Workforce Reputation Management, for an interesting and informative conversation about how concepts like influence, reputation, and social connectedness between and among employees can help organizations better understand the capability of their workforces and help individuals better manage their careers.

On the open web, the ideas of influence and reputation are not new, services like Klout and Kred have been attempting to understand, quantify, and provide insights as to who might be influential and in what areas do people have strong reputations. Taking these ideas and applying them inside organizations, and thinking more deeply about how people's interactions with one another, how they are evaluated by their peers, and what artifacts of their work reveal about their reputation and influence represent some of the most cutting-edge thinking about workplaces today.

Mark is a long time friend and really interesting guy, and I think you will find the discussions challenging and interesting at the same time. And I encourage you to think about your own workplaces and how some of these ideas might help you in your HR and Talent challenges.

You can listen to the show on the show page here, on iTunes, (just search in the podcasts section for 'HR HappyHour'), and using the widget player below, (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through). 

Check Out Business Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Steve Boese and Trish McFarlane on BlogTalkRadio

It is a really informative and 'deep thoughts' kind of conversation that sheds some light on what new ideas and technolgies promise to deliver to workplaces in the very near future.

Thanks to Mark for taking the time to share his insights!

Human Resources when there are less humans around

The below chart (or a version of it) has been making the rounds plenty in the last year or so as the American economy rebounds and seemingly continues to strengthen coming out of the financial crisis and ensuing recession of the late aughts.

It shows how despite corporate profits, expressed as a percentage of GDP, continuing to set records, that those record profits have not (taken in aggregate), translated into lots of new jobs, as the labor participation rate shows.

Source - FRED 

As the chart pretty clearly shows, aggregate corporate profits (the red line), after plunging to a low at about the middle of the recession, late 2008, have rebounded considerably, and now are at all-time record levels as a percentage of GDP.

The employment rate however, after taking an equally dramatic fall throughout the entire recession, finally stabilized at a far lower level than pre-recession, and despite, (or some might argue what has been the primary driver of), rising corporate profits is showing no signs of regaining its former levels of around 62%.

Profits are up, way up even, yet corporations are achieving these profits with far fewer workers than before, (and paying them less, generally. We could also factor in wage growth or lack thereof to make that point at well).

There are lots of reasons for this - technological progress, increased automation, continuing reliance on relatively cheaper foreign labor, diminishing influence of labor unions, the aging of the workforce, etc. but the bottom line seems to be an ever-growing bottom line with less and less actual people needed to make that happen.

No doubt if you are one of the workers in the 'right' kind of job, you are probably doing pretty well or are on the way to doing pretty well. But if you are one of the people that might be in a field that has simply figured out to continue to drive profits without as many people, then things could be looking kind of grim.

Where does all this leave you as an HR/Talent pro?

A lot depend on the company/industry you are in. But in aggregate, certainly, when there are less and less 'humans' in the workforce, then corporations will figure out they need less and less Human Resources people to help look after them all. I have talked with a few HR leaders lately that are seeing both the size of their labor forces hold steady and their HR/EE ratios holding an extremely high levels.

Advice?

Make sure you are spending a decent chunk of your time and energy on things that are truly additive - technology that will help employees generate new ideas and innovations, marketing and recruiting strategies that will let you land more than your share of the best talent at the expense of your competitors, and even in an 'addition-by-subtraction' way, elimination of silly rules, policies, or processes that in any way get in the way of employee performance.

And you could spend some time figuring out what kinds of planning, services, training, development, and team building activities that 'resources' like our pal Baxter needs and you might ride this out a little longer.

Have a great weekend!

VIDEO: The robots are a lot like us

What a week. I am beat.

Let's take it into the weekend with a laugh - check out the video below, titled Shelved, from the Media Design School of Auckland, New Zealand. (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through).

Shelved gives us a look at what the future might hold for the incoming robot workforce - oddly enough it seems to resemble quite a bit the human workplace of today.

Shelved from Media Design School on Vimeo.

Awesome, right? "Replaced by a human!' And did you catch the key role of the HR lady?

Have a great weekend everyone!

Work, and the Impending Robot Uprising #1

Launching a new series on the blog this week - well not exactly new, since I have been writing about robots, the impact of increased robot automation on workplaces and jobs, and how if we don't watch out, pretty soon all our base will belong to them for quite some time now. But then I figured that the combination of the robot uprising, and my need for a steady source of reasonably interesting content for the blog warranted a more structured approach to collecting, classifying, and most importantly - providing an easy way for our future robot overlords to see that I am, actually, on their side, the future 'robot' content on the site. So then, this is the first 'official' piece in the new series, 'Work, and the Impending Robot Uprising'.

From the 'Jobs that the robots are not really doing, but could easily take over if given the chance' category, I submit for your consideration the 'job' of Entertainment Rreporter.  Take a look at the video below, (yes, it is from The Onion, but don't let that unduly influence your opinion), and then ask yourself honestly if robots could indeed replace all manner of entertainment industry 'journalists': (RSS and email subscribers will need to click through)

iInterviewer: Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola Talk Their New Movie, Inevitable Deaths 

Not that bad, right? And if you leave out the Onion's need to make the interview more of a gag than a true reflection of the typically horrible and banal celebrity interview  - 'How did it feel to work with such a great cast?', then I think you can pretty easily see that a robot, (and not even that powerful a robot), could step in for what passes for the in-depth and biting reporting that most entertainment shows pay high-priced human talent to produce.

I know what you're thinking - this is a goof, it's the Onion after all, and I'll never get back the approximate three minutes I've spent reading this post.

All of those reactions are fair and valid. At least the 'lost three minutes of your life part.'

But if you're still hanging in there with me on this, here's the payoff.

It does not matter what industry, job title, function, or process you are involved in. If what you do is easily repeatable, if the people that do the job are pretty much indistinguishable, and if it doesn't really matter who does the job, only that it gets done - then you or your job is a candidate for the impending robot uprising.

We laugh at the robot interviewing the actors. Until we realize a human reporter would have asked the very same questions.

And not been as funny.