APPLICATION CASE Uneven Couples With the goal of boosting productivity, the founders of Randstad established a work scheme that consists of forming pairs of employees to share the work and alternate the corresponding tasks. To ensure that younger employees work well with older ones, the company seeks to hire individuals who can collaborate in a team environment and and are willing to teach and learn from their peers. Source: Caro/AlamyFuente: Caro/Alam A 29-year-old man and a 68-year-old man. What could they have in common? How much could I learn from each other? At Randstad USA's Manhattan office, these employee combinations are commonplace. Colleagues sit opposite to each other, just inches away. Working with that closeness, they share communication (including phone calls and emails) at such a level that sometimes one of them completes the sentences initiated by the other. Randstad Holding NV, a Dutch company, has been using this idea of employee pairs since its founding more than 40 years ago. In fact, the motto of its founder was "No one should be alone." At first, what was intended was to boost productivity, making sales agents share a job and exchange their job responsibilities. Today, the pairs of the central offices work on a scheme according to which one of its members concentrates in the office for a week, while the other goes out to the street to hold sales meetings; the following week, responsibilities are exchanged. In the late 1990s, the company brought its employee-as-a-couple scheme to the United States, but when it began recruiting new staff, the vast majority of whom were in their 20s and 30s, they realized both the challenges and the potential in them in combining different generations. Randstad's managers have done their homework and know that Gen Y members enjoy collaborating with others and feeling enriched by the experience. They, therefore, deduced that those needs could be met if they were made to share the position with a colleague so that each other's success depended on mutual collaboration. Randstad doesn't just form pairs and hope the arrangement pays off. The initiative goes much further. The company is looking for staff who knows how to work collaboratively, and it does so by conducting very in-depth interviews and asking candidates to work side by side with a sales agent for half a day. Throughout the interview process, managers ask candidates to share their "most memorable moment" as part of a team. If the candidate mentions anything that evidences an individual achievement, his chances disappear. The most important thing for the organization is the ability to be part of a team. When a pair is integrated with a newly hired employee and an experienced agent, both must go through an adjustment process. One of the most interesting elements of Randstad's program is that neither member of a couple acts as a "boss." In addition, each of them is expected to teach something to the other. ANALYSIS QUESTIONS 1. What aspects related to individual behavior do you detect in the previous article? Explain.

2. What do you think of the idea of forming a pair of employees? Would you feel comfortable participating in that kind of scheme? Why? 3. What personality traits would be most needed in this type of scheme? Why? 4. What kind of problems might arise from joining a Gen Y employee with a more experienced one? How could participants in such a close work scheme deal with these problems? That is, how could each of them fit in more easily? 5. Design a survey to assess the attitude of Randstad employees

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