Category Archives: Office / HR / Employment

By Rose Miller

Many managers are finding it difficult to manage today’s multigenerational workforce.  It is becoming clear that younger employees express themselves differently from older employees. As a person in the Boomer category, I struggle too.  I’ve had to learn to adapt management strategies to fit the various generations, who work, think, train, and communicate differently.

The workplace is more multigenerational than ever before. It’s not unusual to find employees over 60 working alongside 20-year-olds, and it’s possible to find recent college graduates supervising employees old enough to be their parents.

The primary generations in workplaces today are Baby Boomers (born between 1946-1964), Generation Xers (born between 1965-1980), and Millennials (born between 1981-2000), with members of Generation Z (born from 1997-on) quickly filling a larger share of job vacancies. 

The competitiveness of Boomers and the ego-centric approach of Gen Xers are causing friction with the younger generations. Layer on a company’s need to preserve institutional knowledge, and it’s critical that older managers begin to transfer knowledge to the younger generations.  

Although we should be mindful to avoid stereotypes or try to paint with too broad a brush, there are certain tendencies that a group will commonly identify with. As a group, each generation has different values, attitudes, expectations, needs and motivators. Managers are dealing with employees with shifting views towards job satisfaction, which is tethered to employee retention. 

By Susan Elise Campbell

John Harvey, the founder and owner of the one-man search firm, High Peaks Executive Search, LLC, hunts for the world’s top scientists and executive talent in the pharmaceutical, medical device and biotech industries like a miner digs for gems. And just as striking a vein in the rock can lead to a valuable find, Harvey’s disciplined networking approach leads to a cache of candidates who are the most accomplished in their fields.

“These are doctors and scientists who are finding cures and saving lives,” said Harvey. “Most recruiting is in research and development, and the manufacturing of drugs and medical devices for pre-clinic and clinical research and for commercial products.”

Harvey started the company in 2017 after having been a recruiter for two large pharmaceutical search firms. His career prior was as director of human resources for Native Textiles when it was in Glens Falls, which remains home to a number of companies serving the three growing industries for which Harvey recruits.

“I came up through the HR field, so I have recruited for sales and human resources positions as well as for scientists throughout my career,” he said.

Success as a recruiter in this niche depends on identifying candidates with a narrow skill set, and that requires “a lot of hard work and networking,” said Harvey. 

“When you narrow down the candidates you may find there are only 20 or 30 people in the world for the job,” he said. “Then I might have to convince them to relocate.”

By Susan Elise Campbell

If executive recruiter Renee Walrath has one mission for her business and her clients, it may be “helping people and their families.” As top-level and mid-level executives and managers move from position to position, Walrath said she and her staff of nine at Walrath Recruiting, Inc. are “dedicated to the perfect fit” as they connect companies and candidates.

The pandemic touched the executive search industry like every other. Employees quickly moved to their homes in great numbers and then slowly have been called back. Now an individual may want to work remote, but the positions are no longer out there, according to Walrath.

“I have no one-hundred-percent remote job openings in the Capital District,” she said. 

Last year, in 2023, a “big chunk of organizations made the move back to their offices,” said Walrath. “Now our firm gets calls that ‘my company is calling me back in, but they are out of California or in Boston.’”

“They say, ‘we moved here to New York, like it here, and want to stay here,’” she said.

Only one of her client companies offers working at home full time, but the individual “has to live near headquarters in New Hampshire just in case,” she said.

Hybrid situations may allow some to work at home and at the office for portions of the week. 

“But certain positions need to be in the office, and it seems people always want what they can’t have,” said Walrath. “Where an individual may work is now an important factor in our recruiting.”

By Paul Post

Gerald Davis wants to open a second location for his successful heating and cooling business, and document its growth with a long-range goal of having employees partner up with him as franchise owners.

JoAnna Schwartz felt the need for more structure and better processes at Name Bubbles, an e-commerce company that makes personalized waterproof name labels and decals, to ensure the firm’s future prosperity.

These are just two of many area business leaders that have turned to Wendy Waldron to teach, facilitate, coach, lead and direct them through critical phases of their respective operations. 

She owns Glens Falls-based WaldronWorks, and is a Professional EOS Implementer for the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), whose principles have helped clients around the world overcome business problems as well as identify and take advantage of new opportunities.

By Susan Elise Campbell

Around the time Lynn A. Wadleigh, CPA was thinking of leaving the corporate world and into a career where she could be her own boss, her father, E. Peter Marshall, had decided to sell the CPA practice he had built over the past 40 years.

“I enjoyed doing financial statements for a senior management team,” said Wadleigh, whose accounting career spans more than 30 years. “But as my father was preparing to retire, I was thinking it was time to do my own business.”

Buying his firm, Marshall Associates CPAs, kept the business in the family and  serving the community Wadleigh grew up in.

This was 2018 and Marshall was in his late 70s. His practice had grown along with his family and Wadleigh, her  siblings, and their mother all worked there at different times over the decades. 

“We all remember how busy the five of us were during tax season,” she said. “Raised in the CPA world,” Wadleigh graduated from Queensbury High School and SUNY Albany and got an accounting internship at Ernst & Young in Albany. She earned her CPA designation, started a career in public accounting, and planned to stay in it.

“I had an opportunity to take a position with KADANT, part of Albany International, the paper manufacturer,” she said. “By the time my father had his CPA and his own business.”

The Atrium Financial Group, a member of the Private Client Group at Northwestern Mutual, recently celebrated the opening of its office at 11 South St., Glens Falls, with a ribbon cutting ceremony that was marked by the donation of $2,500 to the Family Service Association of Glens Falls Inc.

The donation benefited the Family Service Association’s Emergency Christmas initiative.

The new satellite office is led by private wealth advisor Sherry Finkel Murphy, CFP, ChFC, RICP.

The company said the new location allows the Atrium Financial Group to strengthen its presence in the Adirondack region, while continuing to build relationships with both new and existing clients and further develop their commitment to the Glens Falls community.

The Atrium Financial Group is led by founder and private wealth advisor William J. Newman, CFP, ChFC, CASL, RICP; partner and private wealth advisor Jeremiah J. Makey, CFP, CLU, ChFC, CASL, AEP; and partner and private wealth advisor Michael P. Mennella, CFP, CLU, ChFC, CLTC. The firm works with families and small businesses that share its values of family, commitment to excellence, mutual respect, integrity, and personal and professional growth. 

By Jennifer Farnsworth
MCW Janitorial Services has been servicing the Glens Falls area for years, so opening an office in the city seemed like the next logistical step.
Operations Manager Reed Chronis said the new location allows the company to better serve what is already a strong client base. The company cleans businesses all over the Capital Region and North Country areas.
“We have been aggressively pursuing business in the Queensbury and Glens Falls area for some time, and the response has been steady. The new office will give us the opportunity to meet the needs of customers we already have in that area as well as new business,” said Chronis.
The new office is at at 175 Broad St., Suite 188, Glens Falls.
MCW services include commercial janitorial, same-day COVID-19 disinfections, carpet cleaning, maintenance, pressure washing, painting, parking lot maintenance, school consultations, and post-construction clean-up.