Page 27 - Retaining Top Employees

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“Employee What?!” 15

Generation X People who were born between 1963 and
1982,some of whom are still entering the workforce for the
first time
At the time of writing (2002),there are two generations of workers
who hold most of the jobs.The older group is the Baby Boomers
(those born between 1945 and 1962).They hold the greatest share of
policy-making and upper-level positions,except in some high-tech
companies,some startups,and industries often identified with
“youth”—entertainment,advertising,graphic design,etc.The other
generation is Generation X.
The designation comes from a book published in 1991 by Douglas
Coupland, Generation X:Tales for an Accelerated Culture (St. Martin’s
Press),in which he defined the years as 1960-1970. In their book
13th
Gen: Abort,Retry,Ignore,Fail? (Vintage Books,1993),Neil Howe and Bill
Strauss set the Gen X years as 1961-1981. Other dates have been
proposed.The years are just numbers,however,because Generation X
is an attitude,a culture,and—of course—a stereotype.
A major distinction between the two groups is that while Boomers
seem somewhat at ease with this designation,Gen-Xers seem uni-
formly to bristle at being referred to as such. Use the label with care!

• stock options
• BMWs (or occasionally Porsches)
• fussball tables
• free soft drinks
Even before the dot-com boom began to bust, it was
becoming clear to most people (employees and employers
alike) that this was nothing more or less than a Maslow’s hierar-
chy of needs list, adapted for modern times. The much-vaunted
stock options were no more than a “hygiene” factor like any
other element of “compensation and benefits” (and with less
impact on employee retention, as it turned out, than a basic
salary package). The fussball table and free soft drinks were
simply a reincarnation of the employee cafeteria. The BMWs
and Porsches were a direct substitute for ... um ... the BMWs
and Porsches of old.
Later in the book, we’ll examine in more detail the impact of
the dot-com era and, in particular, the hugely overstated role