Even the most adept managers may not be prepared for the rigorous demands of managing young employees.
On most weekday mornings a group of young people in their late teens and early twenties forms a ragged line outside the Northeast Food Service Division offices of Horn & Hardart Co. in New York City. They wait on Sixth Avenue for a chance to work in one of the company's 10 Burger King and 11 Arby's franchises in Manhattan and Brooklyn. For those who can pass a simple test of basic math skills, the jobs are usually there. By lunchtime in fact a new employee can be trained and serving sandwiches and french fries to customers, as a franchise manager supervises.
The length of the line varies daily. But it seldom disappears, because many of the new employees don't stay around very long and the need to replenish the ranks is constant. "When you hire a kid, you never hire just what you need," says Mike Bottu, operations vice-president of another Burger King franchisee, Creative Foods Corp., owner of 22 Burger King restaurants in the metropolitan New York area. "If you need 10 to cover lunch, you hire 6 to 10 more. You never know when 6 are going to quit."
On most weekday and weekend evenings another kind of line forms outside the doors of Spit, a punk-rock club owned by Patrick Lyons near Boston's Fenway Park. Once inside, the customers dance and drink under the watchful eyes of 30 employees, most in their twenties and all, says Lyons, genuine devotees of the "punk" subculture.
To work for Spit a prospective employee must undergo at least three interviews, each 30 to 60 minutes long, with Lyons and members of his staff. Every new employee is expected to master a 70-page manual of basic procedures, covering everything from whether workers can chew gum (they can't) to the most tactful way to deal with a customer who has just thrown up on himself. Individual job descriptions must be memorized and adhered to as well. The job description for bartender runs to 8 pages. "I firmly believe that you have to give young people a regimented, structured situation in which to work," says Lyons, who is 28. "Young people laek discipline. If you give them a long rope they will not only hang themselves but also hang you with it." Employee turnover at Spit is low, the waiting list of job applicants is long.
Diverse as their approaches and results seem, both Lyons and Burger King have evolved relatively suceessful methods of dealing with a problem that plagues many businesses: managing kids. Many discussions of how to manage employees assume that a business is dealing with people, whatever their age, who possess motivation, maturity, and a sense of responsibility in the work-place. These qualities can come from pure professionalism or can be a function of obligations an individual has outside of work, such as supporting children or meeting mortgage payments. To define the problem as one of managing kids is to focus on those young people who have limited cureer ambitions and in most cases no outside obligations to motivate them at work. A kid needs a job -- that is, a paycheck -- but not necessarily this one.
Putting kids to work is one of the greatest challenges confronting management in the United States: The unemployment rate for people age 16 to 24 is 18.25% -- more than twice the rate for older workers. And businesses in such fields as retailing, restaurants, recreation, day eare, und many types of manufacturing and wholesaling find that kids are the only workers they can afford to hire for many jobs.
Yet few business schools or consultants offer help in the munagement of young people. Experts feel that "as long as there's a big supply available, you can find people who meet your needs," says Ronald C. Pilenzo, president of the American Society for Personnel Administration.
The experiences of many businesses often prove that assumption wrong. Employers report that the young people they hire are consistently difficult to manage -- with four key problems:
* Because they haven't defined what they want to do in life, kids easily become bored.
* Because they lack experience, kids have surprising gaps in their knowledge and an exaggerated opinion of their own capabilities.
* Because they lack dependents and muy be able to live with their perents if they choose, kids have little incentive to keep a job and, therefore, to maintain the necessary discipline.
* In major metropolitan areas, at least, many young job applicants lack a strong work ethic.
To some extent the complaints have an all-too-familiar air of adult hand-wringing about the downfall of the younger generation. What many managers see as causes of problems with their young workers may in fact be the effects of poor hiring practices, a failure to understand how to structure incentives to appeal to young people, and a lack of structure and clearly defined goals for young workers.
Lyons argues that anyone can employ good workers by hiring more or less as he does. The key, he says, is careful interviewing. Spit and Lyons's other clubs in Boston look for "upscale employees" -- people Lyons thinks will ultimately go on to be successful in other fields, such ns law or commercial art -- and avoid people who themselves patronize nightclubs. He asks job applicants about hobbies and extracurricular interests such as music, then typically asks job seekers to state three short-term and three long-term goals "Having goals indicates a person is organized," Lyons says. Moreover, he adds, a person with goals is unlikely to steal, because he won't want to risk being caught and ruining his long-term prospecs. Lyons also probes for dishonesty in other ways: Long interviews enable him and his staff to probe for contradictions that indicate lying. And he orders a lie-detector test if he is still suspicious after an interview.
Even the most rigorous hiring practices won't ensure good performance unless the manager understands that incentives for kids frequently differ from those for workers with heavier responsibilities. Joe DellaMonica, president of Creative Foods, recalls the case of a young employee who he thought showed great promise. "A kid who goes into the fast-food business and sticks with it can be earning $25,000 a year by the time he's 25," says DellaMonica. "The best ones have an opportunity to invest and can make up to $100,000 a year, a few years ufter that. I told this guy what the opportunities were, and he said, 'Great. When can I start?' A few weeks later I saw him and he told me he'd quit. I asked him why and he said, 'I found out you have to work Saturday and Sunday nights."
Rick Mourey, 31, the owner of WMC Grinding Inc., a precision grinding company in Santa Fe Springs, Calif, recalls similar problems with some of his young employees. Mourey believes that he must provide a kind of parentul leadership even to those employees who are just a few years younger than he is, by encouraging them to pursue excellenee even if their ambitions aren't profoundly important to the company itself. Rather than discussing abstract principles when "all that these kids are interested in is getting a little Toyota truck," Mourey says, "you have to say to them, 'If that's what you want, then work for the best little truck there is."
