Elly Kog, Director Human Potential, KBC

The influence of demographics on human resources

More and more, human resources departments have to take into account demographical trends. Elly Kog explains: "We have investigated how the labour market evolves, and we have figures about how many graduates are entering the market and how many baby boomers are retiring. We know how many people we need and we try to predict how many of them we can attract. For this purpose we use internal data like the age of our employees, but also external data like demographic statistics." If you look at all these statistics, you can see that KBC (as well as other companies) will have problems attracting enough people, Elly stresses: "The baby boomers are leaving the labour market between 2010 and 2020. At the same time, the influx of graduates should remain stable from 2010 to 2015. Demographically speaking, the real problem starts from 2015 on, when the influx of graduates will decrease substantially. So within next ten years, employees will become a scarce good: all companies will be fishing in the same increasingly small pool of graduates." 

To counter this trend, KBC wants to valorise older employees as long as possible. Many people want to retire when they're 60 or even younger. "Now this often results in early retirement, but these possibilities will surely become more expensive or will even disappear. We will really need those people, and so we are thinking about introducing systems for extending the active career, for instance people can save a part of their salary from the beginning of their career, to have the possibility to work 80 % at the end of their career while keeping the same salary. Of course this is all still in a study phase."

Various generations

It's not always easy to let different generations work together, because they have their own values and are attracted by different aspects of their job. According to Elly, these differences should be accepted and even valorised. She gives an example: "I strongly believe in mentorship: an experienced employee that transfers his experience on the job feels valued. Of course you have to watch out for doing this in a patronizing way, because younger employees want to be challenged. We already do a lot of on-the-job training for our younger employees, but we have to tap more into the mentorship concept. This way, the generations can learn from each other and reach a better mutual understanding."

The younger generation also needs another approach. KBC has observed that when people leave KBC (the numbers leaving KBC voluntarily are generally rather low) a larger proportion of young people are represented within this small group. "When we do exit interviews with them, we often hear that they receive too little feedback from their manager, and that they experience too much uniformity in their career. Young people expect that their career will develop faster if they are ambitious and perform well. That's one of the things we stress now in the training of our managers, because the manager's behaviour really determines the working atmosphere."

So that's why KBC began with the young professionals program, a special program for all new employees with a Master's degree and less than five years experience. "They all get followed up extensively during five years, and we orient them faster or slower depending on their performance. Their career opportunities and their salary depend on it: someone who is doing better than the others will get a higher salary raise and a more challenging job. The other side of this is of course that we lay off underperformers much sooner. Our motivation is to be able to differentiate as soon as possible, which is better both for KBC and the employee."

Individuality

Another trend is that the (younger) employees want to have more choices in their salary package. KBC is currently addressing this with a pilot phase in the ICT department: employees who don't have a company car attached to their function can choose to get a car instead of a part of their salary. "We show them what the consequences are for their net wage and extralegal pension if they choose a car, and then they can make a responsible choice themselves." From next year on, this choice of a car will be rolled out to other departments, and from 2012 on there will be other possibilities, e.g. a higher extralegal pension.

Elly sees this switch to more individual choices as an inevitable evolution: "The people we hire are not uniform, but employees with different talents, different goals and different priorities. These priorities can also change in the course of their life. For example, if a woman wants to slow down her career temporarily because she wants to spend more time with her children, this should be possible - of course within certain boundaries - and it should also still be possible to get her back on track when her priorities change again."

Specialists and generalists

"We always have found it important that employees are able stay their whole career with us if they fit in. But in years past we thought that people would lose motivation and become bored if they remained too long in the same job.  That's why we train our people as all-round employees and let them change roles regularly. But also here we need a more diversified approach: we do need specialists and need to give them career opportunities as specialists. For example, some of these people say: I'm an actuary, and I want to work as an actuary my whole career. We now take into account that some people have a generalist career and others prefer a specialist career."

KBC is also increasingly focused on people’s strong points, as opposed to their weaknesses.  Elly explains; “In the past we used to focus people on their weaker points but that is clearly demotivating.   Therefore, we now help people discover what they enjoy and what they are good at. Then we look at the type of job that matches their talents and interests. If they can develop their strengths, they will be more motivated and satisfied employees.”