Posts Tagged Generation Y
Your organisations next Facebook policy
1.a. If at any time during your working day you find yourself with a free moment, it is company policy that you MUST logon to your favourite social network and have a play about. Do this until more work arrives. No exceptions.
I’m getting increasingly frustrated by the attitudes of a wide-range of people when it comes to accessing websites like Facebook at work. Forgive me for incessantly saying Facebook – interchange it for your favourite social network if it makes you feel better – but it is the most popular.
Andrew McAfee, speaking at the DevLearn 09 conference yesterday*, commented that we need to stop jumping on the risks associated with Web 2.0. Currently, in order to get close to any of the benefits that a website like Facebook could provide your company, you first have to jump over all of the associated ‘risks’ that get thrown at you. It’s nearly impossible to do this and even if you do succeed it will be a watered down and caveat-filled experience. Why?
It’s a mindset, one of a previous generation.
Recent UK figures have shown nearly 2.5 million people are out of work in this country. There is significant evidence that being unemployed long-term has severely detrimental effects on both family life and health. People are generally happier when they are in employment. So, reading between the lines here, we all have an inherent will to work. We go into the world of work essentially happy. Then work breaks us down, infringing on the liberties which we take for granted outside of the workplace, for no other reason than to mitigate risk. This sucks.
Eschew risk, embrace opportunity; what’s the worst that could happen?
Browsing social networks is just one liberty that the next generation of worker is going to be denied by most organisations they go to work for. Access to Facebook might not make you happier, but blocking it will almost certainly make you less happy. Social Networks are rapidly becoming a hygiene factor in the minds of new Gen Y workers.
So then let’s look to embrace the opportunity that providing access to Facebook will give us. I’m going to go beyond the normally recognised benefits (of which there are many) and move the discussion to one key area of objection: Time-wasting. If we allow workers access to Facebook they are doing personal stuff on business time and this is wasteful. Yep, I think even I can agree with that.
But let me ask you this; how are you currently measuring employee waste in your organisation? The principles of Lean operations are present in many organisations throughout the world (and many more are paying millions to develop such ideas). The central pillar of this initiative is the cutting out of waste. Some waste is easy to identify. Some waste cannot be avoided. Other waste is difficult to track, like the amount of time a worker involved in a process is not fully utilised. So then, let’s turn the tables on the software packages which track websites visited and time spent. I refer you back to my new policy:
If at any time during your working day you find yourself with a free moment, it is company policy that you MUST logon to your favourite social network and have a play about.
So we insist people use social networks and then we track usage levels to use as Management Information, tracking waste. At the same time as offering great quantitative information with regards to the amount of waste and the times at which it occurs, this system also offers a great visual aid to waste on the shop floor. If you’ve got Facebook open you’re not being utilised. How easy is that from a Line Managers point of view? What a fantastic measure of waste that would be.
Stop evaluating Web 2.0 tools from a risk point of view and start evaluating the opportunities.
*By the way, I did not attend DevLearn 09, all I had to do was follow the Twitter hashtag for a running commentary on McAfee’s keynote.
Why teens don’t use twitter and why it doesn’t matter
Teens and twitter seems to have been all the rage this week, what with Morgan Stanley’s laughable “research” from its 15 year old intern and the subsequent fall out.
The news that Twitter isn’t popular with teens will not come as a surprise to anyone who actually uses the service. As a Twitter user it’s my perception that whilst a few teens are likely to be registered with the site, very few would be considered “active” by any stretch of the imagination.
This morning I saw a blog post with the opinion that teens don’t use Twitter because it isn’t safe. I’m no youth researcher, so I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that’s BS. Some IT savvy teenagers might feel that way, but you only need to look to MySpace, the most popular of teen hangouts, to know that giving away information is de rigour for the teens of today.
The reason they don’t use twitter is this: it’s bloody hard work to derive value from it.
To get Twitter to work well for you, you need to build up a network of followers that are interesting and that share common ground. You need to look at it fairly regularly and build it into your day. You need to contribute to the discussion beyond telling people what you ate for breakfast (which you do on Facebook already). And it needs to have a focus. For me it’s eLearning. For teens the focus could well be their friends. But a teens network of friends probably all live their lives in the same building – school! I don’t know about you, but whilst I have work colleagues on my Twitter, I tend to turn around and talk to them instead of Twittering them.
And so teens derive no utility from using Twitter – its too hard and delivers too little to them, especially when compared to competitors like Facebook and MySpace.
But guess what? It doesn’t matter.
Morgan Stanley’s intern actually came up with a far more salient comment about teen life than his “teens don’t use twitter”. Teens like free. They go out of their way to get something for free. In other words, you’ll never make a penny out of them, so why bother?
Twitter has something which not many other social networks can claim. A user base of work-age professionals who value the service as a part of their working day and have a bit of spare dosh.
That’s why you shouldn’t worry about Twitter’s future cash flow…
Will my company die if it fails to adopt web 2.0 tools?
Yesterday I ran a workshop in-house at the learning HQ of an international professional services firm. The basis of the session was to intro people to the web 2.0 and the underlying theories and philosophy which mass-media so often fails to document.
The audience was very good and they took to the new ideas I was presenting them with relative ease. I wrapped up the session with a Q&A and I was asked this question:
Will my company die if it fails to adopt web 2.0 tools?
Good question – one that I believe needs to be answered in three parts…
Firstly, organisations need to understand that there are actually dangers in trying to adopt every web 2.0 tool out in the marketplace. This is the “paedophiles in the playground” effect; the idea that companies end up chasing around youngsters with promises of their new web 2.0 tools. Companies still need to make rational business cases for the adoption of web 2.0 tools. They are not the answer to every problem, don’t force it!
Secondly, the tools of web 2.0 aren’t nearly as important as some of the underlying philosophies of the subject. Web 2.0 tools come and go at an unbelievable rate. Thinking one new invention will be so significant as to make businesses who do not adopt it go bust, is probably unrealistic and is a once in a generation occurrence.
I summarise the core philosophies of the Web 2.0 in 3 C’s.
Content – which is mostly, if not all, user generated.
Context – the web as a platform where the medium adds significantly to the message.
Collaboration – the idea that you can never have too many chefs!
I do think there are potentially important changes to working cultures in adopting this sort of approach, one which promotes vastly more openness amongst other aspects. But this is a rather soft statement, one so sweeping as to perhaps be unrealistic in the majority of corporate cultures.
Which brings me to my third point in answering the question, which is a more tangible aspect - Generation Y.
Most people see the link between Generation Y and the Web 2.0. Organisations can see that this next generation of workforce is going to expect these sorts of tools to be available to them when they get to the workplace. And it’s not a bad point, perhaps some will. But not every member of Generation Y is on Twitter (in fact there is evidence that Twitter actually appeals to older generations). And people who are entering the workplace for the first time have no idea what to expect; if you tell them that Facebook is for home, not for work, they are going to believe you.
Far more significant for business is an underlying trait that actually defines Generation Y. And that’s Loyalty. Or rather, a total lack of it.
The habits of employment amongst Gen Y are vastly different to their predecessors. Gen Y don’t want to work at one company for life. They want to explore, to succeed, to earn more, to experience different environments, to broaden their horizons. To put it short, they are brazen careerists. And thanks to the socio-economic environment of countries like the UK, this lack of loyalty suits their lifestyle perfectly.
Gen Y can’t afford a mortgage. Gen Y typically has to move to the city to get a good job. Here they will more than likely rent as they will not have the funding to take on a mortgage (and of course, this new life might not work out, so who wants a house right away). It’s likely the house they rent is actually worth more than the house they grew up in, the one that their parents worked at the same company for 30 years to pay for, so where is the incentive? Gen Y probably won’t get married and have kids until they reach their mid-thirties. And so we have this 10 year plus gap where Gen Y intends to live life whilst grabbing as much money and experience as is humanly possible.
And it’s in this time that your company will suffer. You will train these people up to know your industry, to innovate and excel and to become little pillars of knowledge and skill in their own right. And then they are going to leave. You can offer them more money, it probably won’t matter. And this is going to have an enormous impact on your organisations collective knowledge as it walks out the door every year.
Which means you need to relocate the knowledge to somewhere it won’t disappear.
The web 2.0 philosophy is offering organisations a chance to move closer to the holy grail of becoming “Learning Organisations”, where collective knowledge is not a function of the tacit knowledge individuals carry with them, but of the explicit knowledge available on systems. It makes knowledge part of the walls. And if Gen Y are really as keen as people think they will be on web 2.0 tools, then they will be willing participants in taking knowledge and making it explicit in the form of wiki’s, blogs, podcasts, videos, bookmarking tools and everything else.
So, to answer the question, will my company die if it fails to adopt web 2.0 tools?
The answer is no. Your company will not wither and die if you fail to adopt these tools, but that’s because the tools themselves aren’t that important.
If we change that question around and ask, will my company die if it fails to adopt web 2.0 philosophies? The answer is yes. And that’s a much bigger problem to address than installing a few new bits of software.
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