Tourism is a dynamic industry that often employee youth and young adults in front-line and management training positions – it’s a natural! If we do it well, we retain them and our industry flourishes with quality and talent of new tourism professionals. Yet, each major demographic cohort is a little different. Books such a Rocking the Ages, Chips & Pop, Sex in the Snow, and Boom, Bust and Echo have, over the years provided insights for business to examine social values as it impacts generational marketing, the values of consumers and impacts of demographic shifts to enhance our thinking, our business, our ability to succeed.
We are familiar with Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), Generation X (born between 1968 and 1982 depending on the source) and now there is emerging focus on Millenials (1979 – 1997). As they represent a large part of the tourism workforce and our future customer base, take time to get to know a little more about this cohort.
The Harvard Business Review has posted a report on ‘Mentoring Millennials’ that describes how different this generation is that was raised with technology, has children as young as nine producing video and posting content to the internet (something marketers are to be doing for business purposes, yet some still don’t know how or value the reasons why); and they are the multi-task generation. So how can you benefit from these folks in your company. The authors recommenda three methods:
1. Reverse mentoring — appreciate millennials have skills and knowledge that some Baby Boomers and Gen X’ers don’t; optimize this by having them mentor managers and help advance their skill set; rather than rely on the traditional top-down approach to mentoring; and
2. Work-life balance and a sense of purpose is important — if you are a Baby Boomer, raised by parents of the from the Protestant Work Ethic generationyou may be struggling with work/life balance. Gen X’ers are getting it, Millennials require it. As a manager you have to truly set out to appreciate what they value and need in a work environment, and then align with opportunities. You don’t have to change your business – as millennials have to learn to ‘fit in’ as well but you do need to be congnizant and use their interests as a trigger to review practice and policy to see if it can be contemporized for today’s employee base.
Remember though that baby boomer still represent a great, under-tapped value proposition for tourism businesses. Senior people and those with incredible skill sets are starting to say “hey I don’t want to work 60 hours a week’ ”I want to do something that is personally rewarding” and as a result are happy to take entry positions or lower level positions as part of a partial or retirement strategy. This needs as much thinking and consideration about ‘what they value’ as do other generational cohorts. In the end, like your customers, they need/want different things – extend this thinking to your employees and you will be ahead of the game.
