BRIDGING THE GENERATION GAP

For a pair of colleagues born four decades apart, Penelope Burns and Rinath Benjamin spend a lot of time together. Burns, 68, and Benjamin, 29, are sales agents at the Man­hattan office of employment agency Randstad USA. They sit inches apart, facing each other. They hear every call the other makes. They read every e-mail the other sends or receives. Sometimes they finish each other's sentences.

This may seem a little strange, but the unconventional pairing is all part of Randstad's effort to ensure that its twenty something employees—the flighty, praise-seeking Generation Y that we have read so much about—fit in and stick around. The Dutch company, which has been expanding in the United States, is hoping to win the hearts, minds, and loyalty of its young employees by team­ing them up with older, more experienced hands. Every new sales agent is assigned a partner to work with until their business has grown to a certain size, which usually takes a few years. Then they both start over again with someone who has just joined the company.

Randstad has been pairing people up almost since it opened for business four decades ago. The founder's motto was "Nobody should be alone." The original aim was to boost productivity by having sales agents share one job and trade off responsibilities. The system has been refined over the years, and now each week one person is out making sales calls, and the other is in the office interview­ing potential workers and handling the paperwork. Then they switch.

Knowing that Gen Yers need lots of attention in the workplace, Randstad executives figured that if they shared a job with someone whose own success depended on theirs, they were certain to get all the nurturing they required. Of course, Randstad doesn't simply put people together and hope it all works out. First it figures out who will play well with other people. To assess that, the human resource department conducts extensive interviews and requires candidates to shadow a sales agent for half a day.

One of the most compelling features of Randstad's part­nering program is that neither person is "the boss." And both are expected to teach the other.

Soon after Benjamin started, she suggested they begin to use the electronic payroll system Randstad offers to save time and reduce their paperwork. Burns hesitated: She had been filling out time sheets for the talent (as the tempo­rary employees are called) and wasn't sure how they would take to the new task. But Benjamin persuaded her it would ultimately be simpler for everyone.

These are relationships like any other, full of promise yet always vulnerable to dysfunction. And even the best ones require a lot of maintenance. As Lucille Santos, a 61-year-old senior agent in North Haven, Connecticut, says, "My antennae are always up," Her partner, Allison Kaplan, is 28, and this is her first office job. "We need to be sure that we're asking the right questions and saying the right things to the clients and talent," says Santos. "In the beginning, Allison might have been a little timid about telling applicants they weren't dressed appropriately. I gave her some explicit suggestions, and she learned from watching me." Santos says Kaplan has taught her to relax a little bit more at work.

Randstad used to have an employee retention rate of 50 percent, which is the industry standard. In the past year, its rate has increased to 60 percent. "We have determined a clear connection between being in a unit and feeling more successful and productive," says MR chief Genia Spencer.

Questions

1.      Analyse the case

2.      A sales agent for an employment agency such as Randstad would be seeking business clients to hire the agency's talent. Based on what you can learn from the information in this chapter, in the case, draft a job descrip­tion and job specifications for the sales agent's job.