A Gen Y-er in the Workforce
Jeremiah Owyang asks some interesting questions in his post about the changing demographics in the workplace as Gen Y joins, baby boomers retire, and Gen X get older.
He poses some interesting questions with regards to Gen Y. As someone of that generation coming up to my 1 year anniversary as a worker I guess I should try and provide some answers and opinions on where this is all heading.
Do the once finite lines of the corporate firewall between work and personal start to fade?
Generally yes. Though this change has evolved during the reign of Generation X, Gen Y will just come to expect it and think of it as standard. I expect companies to adapt and change to meet this by enabling more flexible working generally and providing better and more pleasant working environments.
I once heard a LSE lecturer describe us as the factory workers of the 21st Century. We find ourseelves working longer hours at the expense of families, leisure time and social life, but since this is packaged as the company giving you a laptop to let you work from home, or paying for your dinner when you’re working late, this seems more like a perk than a punishment.
Who is really an official spokesperson? Is there an unofficial spokesperson?
I’m think that the role of the spokesperon is going to change radically, not so much as they come into the workforce, but rather as they begin to have spending money as a result and become targets for marketers. Gen Y is going to have a skepticism for the official message and for the spokesperson. While we haven’t been able to develop pervasive word-of-mouth technologies for the online world yet, they will likely come as social networks mature and find business models that work. This wont diminsh the power of ratings and user reviews as aggregation tools get better.
As Generation Y moves into the workforce, how will their communication habits change? How about ours? (I work with several talented ones)
Well Gen Y is going to start emailing more. While it may not be their tool of choice for social interaction it remains crucial for the workplace and that is not going to change in a hurry especially in bigger corporations. What we might see is a change in how email is used as it will no longer be the only tool available for communication. Why use email to share links when you can use a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us? Why store knowledge in an inbox when it could be in a wiki? Expect Gen Y to push these other means for communication in companies and show the Gen X and Baby Boomers their advantages.
Will Generation Y, who is accustomed to Facebook Applications, Google Docs, Rich internet application interfaces, and advanced web technology (all public) be shocked to find out how bad your enterprise software is?
Absolutely. I think companies are going to be pushed very hard to improve the user experience of the tools they use on a daily basis. Users will come to expect demand more from enterprise software and companies need to be prepared to make those investments in experience without necessarily more functionality (less is often more). Those who build these tools need to learn to sell experience, packaging it as more efficient working and happier staff resulting in better workers and lower turnover to show the impact on the bottom line.
Gen Y’s entry into the workforce may ultimately result in the end of paid software for many applications. Companies will need to learn to become comfortable with the idea that employees may be storing their work diaries on Google Calendar; their To-Do list on remember the milk; or even storing their work documents in the cloud.
How will companies adapt and changes their corporate policies to meet this change?
Corporate policies will become more flexible to accommodate more flexible working and that blurring of personal and work lives. Companies may well find it harder to protect their data, not just cause their workers are storing it somewhere up in the cloud, but also cause workers are changing jobs more and more frequently.
It’s a brave new world. And Generation Y are used to having their voices heard. It’s not that they don’t want to get to the top of the corporate ladder, but rather they’re used to taking an elevator and don’t see why they should have to climb now.
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