Did you hear about this Accenture study released last month of 400 Millennial students and employees, ages 14 to 27?
Would it surprise you to learn that the results point to a digital disconnect between employers and employees over the subject of outdated technology?
Among the findings:
- 20% of millennials are unsatisfied with corporate technology
- Among technologies not currently provided at workplaces, 39% cited mobile phones, 19% open source software, 27% instant messaging, 12% online applications, and 28% social networking sites
- 75% access online collaborative tools to be more productive
- 52% feel updated technology is crucial when selecting an employer
- 6% of companies provide online chat and instant messaging applications
- 5% of companies provide RSS feeds
In light of recent articles of mine on posting blog comment policies and managing employees online, I found these statistics intriguing about millennial perceptions of corporate policies on sharing work/client data online:
- 40% of employers have detailed policies
- 31% of employers may have policies but aren’t distributing them
- 17% of employers don’t have policies
- 6% of policies are too complex to understand
- 6% of employees don’t care about policies if the goal is to collaborate with colleagues
There are many takeaways from this data but I’ll throw out two:
First, you should seriously consider if your technology and policies on tech use are limiting employee productivity. As the recession improves and companies start hiring, you can guess what will happen to your workforce if you don’t change the status quo.
Second, perhaps Jenny Beans is correct to suggest life might be easier if we regress to medieval times, responding to the below video bit of comedian Lewis CK and Conan O’Brien:
What do YOU think?
Photo credit: givepeasachance @ Flickr
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Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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{ 3 comments }
Loving the Louis CK video. He’s damn right…even though I was born decidedly after the rotary phone (I think the CD player is older then me even sadly) we definitely take for granted the tech around us. However, this tech integration has made Millenials like myself expect results fast. And thus we try and get to the bottom of a problem in the most efficient way possible because we believe in going to those who we believe know the most (corporate culture be damned). Tools like Twitter have essentially socialized the workplace and networking to some extent because everyone is on an equal playing field. Will be interesting to see further developments as time goes on.
Stuart Foster´s last blog post..Bacak Attack – A Social Media Meme is Born
I’m not surprised. The other day my friend told me about a presentation she made to a Fortune 500 company in town. She brought the PowerPoint on her jump drive as they were providing the computer…a computer that was running a much older version of PowerPoint than hers and thus wouldn’t run all of her animations. Personally I try to avoid all versions of PowerPoint but it reminded me of my time back in the corporate world. Our company had 7,000 employees and we all had to use Outlook, Word, etc. Everyone used the same programs, and they were all 2 versions behind what was available. When we upgraded, everyone upgraded. There was quite a lot of sturm und drang when we swtiched from Word Perfect and Lotus to Word and Excel. For the company it was cheaper to keep everyone on the same platform and it was a considerable expense to upgrade. But it also stifled creativity as we were all trapped with the same limitations.
People in some departments also had restricted Internet access. So if Twitter existed back then, and they could have had legit reasons to use it, they couldn’t have. That’s one of the joys of working in academia. We have many options available. I have a Mac and a Dell, multiple browsers, choice of e-mail, etc. Money is tight, but we’re encouraged to use the tools that suit our needs and it makes life both easier and more productive.
Heidi Cool´s last blog post..An URL by any other name would still work like an URL, part 2: length doesn’t matter
Haha Heidi, reminds me of my last position in local government when I was restricted from accessing GMail. But then someone tried emailing my gov account an attachment the server blocked for size, so it was either wait for the IT guy to be free or tell the citizen to email me at GMail. Guess which was quicker?
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