![\"\"](\"https:\/\/clemson.world\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Siemens.jpg\")
<\/a>Six Clemson University marketing students\u00a0 presented the findings of their undergraduate research project on passing institutional knowledge from baby boomers to younger workers at Siemens\u2019 headquarters in Atlanta.<\/p><\/div> The result was a 600-page interview transcript that they then meticulously sifted through, focusing on key words and themes, to find actionable items to present to Yates and his colleagues. What happens to a company if it abruptly loses a significant percentage of its most experienced employees? This is the conundrum companies across the U.S. are facing as baby boomers \u2014 the 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 \u2014 approach the end of their working lives. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":19165,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[297,1872,2287,2384,2595,2770,2776],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-19093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-these-hills","tag-baby-boomer","tag-marketing","tag-presentation","tag-research","tag-siemens","tag-summer-2018","tag-summer-2018-in-these-hills"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2018\/06\/Siemens.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19093"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=19093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nWhat happens to a company if it abruptly loses a significant percentage of its most experienced employees? This is the conundrum companies across the U.S. are facing as baby boomers \u2014 the 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 \u2014 approach the end of their working lives. Siemens, one of the world\u2019s largest manufacturing and electronics companies, and its energy management division has turned to a group of Clemson students to mitigate the impact by researching ways to pass invaluable institutional knowledge from outgoing baby boomers to incoming Millennials.
\nKevin Yates, leader of the energy management division for Siemens in the U.S. and Canada and a 1994 Clemson graduate, identified the problem when he took a step back and realized a good portion of his most seasoned employees will soon retire, and there was no plan in place to address their absence.
\nHe knew just the place to go for help.
\n\u201cAt Siemens we value our strategic university partners, and Clemson is certainly one of those. Once I became aware of the\u00a0Watt Family Innovation Center<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0creative inquiry\u00a0<\/a>program, I felt it was a natural fit to engage their students and\u00a0 faculty to help us solve a real-world challenge,\u201d said Yates. \u201cA year ago, our business and human resources partners knew that we had a problem to address and, though we were working on it internally, we recognized the value of getting outside expertise to most effectively transition this knowledge. I knew it was a perfect opportunity to get a cross-functional team in academics to work with us.\u201d
\nSiemens made a donation to the university to fund the project, and assistant marketing professor Anastasia Thyroff and associate marketing professor Jennifer Siemens (no relation to the company) were tapped to create a creative inquiry undergraduate research project to find solutions.
\n\u201cThis is a huge problem, and Siemens is incredibly invested in figuring it out,\u201d said Thyroff. \u201cKevin is innovative \u2014 he\u2019s on top of this, which shows great foresight because the whole country is going to go through this.\u201d
\nAccording to a study by Pew Research Center, which broke down\u00a0population estimates<\/a>\u00a0released by the U.S. Census Bureau in April 2016, there are now\u00a074.9 million living Baby\u00a0Boomers, who were defined as anyone age 51 to 69 years in 2015. That balances almost exactly with the 75.4 million living Millennials \u2014 the generation including anyone who was age 18 to 34 years in 2015 \u2013 who will step into the open positions left behind as Baby Boomers begin to retire en masse.
\nThyroff and Siemens engaged six marketing students for the project and spent the first half of the semester teaching them methods for marketing research. The group practiced interviewing, running focus groups, ethnography (the study of living experiences) and coding.
\nAt the end of the first semester, Siemens offered\u00a0 summer internships to seniors Tanner Parsons and Helen McDowell, students in the project.
\n\u201cThey treated their internships as ethnography, so through the process of learning about what it takes to be an intern at Siemens, they were helping us with our study,\u201d said Thyroff.
\nThe two internships offered a valuable glimpse at two very different company locations, said Thyroff. McDowell was in Siemens\u2019 marketing department headquarters in Atlanta, which provided a prime opportunity to collect broad data about the company. Parsons spent the summer at a Siemens\u2019 branch office in Tampa, Fla., working with a tight-knit group of seasoned sales engineers. He was able to observe the organic relationships that develop in the smaller pockets of a large corporation that are often the glue that holds a company together.
\nMeanwhile, the team interviewed 41 Siemens employees, each with either less than five years or more than 10 years of experience with the company, individually and in focus groups. They combined the transcripts with the data collected by Parsons and McDowell during their internships.
\n\u201cOne unique aspect of this project is that it forces students to be accountable to another entity, not just their professor,\u201d said Siemens. \u201cKnowing that they are coming up with strategies that a company might actually implement is immensely rewarding to students, and also to us as teachers and mentors.\u201d
\nThe students\u2019 research revolved around three questions:<\/p>\n\n
\nThey took their findings to Siemens\u2019 energy management headquarters in Atlanta to present them to a group of about 20 high-level managers.
\nDespite some nervous jitters, the students thought the presentation went smoothly, thanks to many late nights and grueling rehearsals leading up to the big day. Afterward, the managers kept the students for another hour for a question-and-answer session, peppering them with inquiries and follow-up suggestions as they would for any of their business peers. The students conducted themselves as professionals and had no trouble fielding every question.
\nThe result of the students\u2019 work was a list of actionable items, some of which could be implemented immediately, to help the company keep its momentum as it loses its most tenured employees.
\nOne recommendation was for Siemens management to encourage new hires and seasoned employees to socialize. On-the-clock social gatherings ensure higher attendance than after-hour gatherings and encourage more meaningful relationships \u2013 a point that might seem obvious on the surface but has much deeper meaning in the context of knowledge transfer.
\nOther recommendations included treating interns as full-time employees, which encourages investment in the company, and getting rid of the many work-space cubicles\u00a0 for a more open office environment.
\nAll of these changes, the research suggested, would facilitate more organic mentorships, leading to mentors passing on the kind of knowledge to their younger counterparts that can\u2019t always be typed up and handed over.
\n\u201cThere are a number of aspects to this,\u201d said Cris Higgins, head of human resources\u00a0 for Siemens energy management, mobility, and building technology divisions. \u201cIt\u2019s not as much about practical knowledge, but more of the tribal knowledge that these senior employees have from being here from 10 to even 40-plus years. I myself have over 20 years\u2019 experience and trying to pass that knowledge on to another HR person is not accomplished with a one-time meeting. Not only do you have to transfer knowledge, you have to transfer your networking, your relationships, and your \u2018know-how\u2019 of getting things done.\u201d
\nThe caliber of research was so good that it was easy to forget it was done by undergraduate students and not a marketing research firm, said Thyroff.
\n\u201cWe have to keep reminding ourselves that this is a student project,\u201d she said. \u201cThe students took incredible ownership. They worked hard and did such a good job that it\u2019s hard to believe they aren\u2019t marketing research experts. They\u2019re learning as they go, and they are doing a phenomenal job.\u201d
\nYates agreed with Thyroff\u2019s assessment.
\n\u201cThey absolutely delivered and hit the mark,\u201d he said. \u201cThe value they created, given their limited experience, was outstanding. The research they have provided has been very insightful. There were several \u2018a-ha\u2019 moments from our staff during the presentation.\u201d
\nThe findings of the study thus far have been very valuable, yet it\u2019s a three-year project. In 2018 Thyroff and Siemens will assemble the next team of students to build upon the findings of the first group and turn up further revelations that will aid companies across the U.S. and the world.
\n\u201cHow this program works and what we get out of can be a model to closely look at across the rest of Siemens throughout the U.S.,\u201d said Yates. \u201cI look forward to continuing to work with Clemson for the next two years to learn even more.\u201d
\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=1_b7MAOhj9E#action=share<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"