By Jo Scarlett, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, BTGS.
Have you ever tried emailing a teenager? You don’t get much of a response, I can promise you.
Whilst that might not matter too much if you’re emailing them to see what they want for their birthday, it might be a different story if you’re a board member asking for a critical piece of information.
By 2020, we’ll have five generations working alongside each other. In many organisations, the leaders will be of an older generation than those lower down the hierarchy and increasingly organisations operate in a virtual world, introducing new collaboration challenges.
With each generation comes a different communications preference. ‘It’s good to talk’ was BT’s advertising slogan of the early 1990s. Picking up the phone to a colleague was swept away in the age of email, which remains the dominant form of business communication. But with more than 100 billion emails sent and received every day[1], I know from my own bulging inbox that it’s easy to lose track.
The advent of presence-based instant communications and social media is now upon us, with Skype for Business, Yammer and Chatter just some of the tools available. It’s easy to get a quick response to a question based on knowing who is available. I can even share my screen or hold video conversations.
But even these modern business tools can’t keep up with the consumer world. Teenagers I know never call each other, they certainly don’t email or text, and Facebook is something their parents use. They use WhatsApp, Snapchat, Line, and a whole host of tools I’ve never even heard of. Users are becoming better at identifying what they want and don’t want to engage with, so much so that the average span of attention for a human is now eight seconds – less than a goldfish. [2]
Why should you care? Well, those teenagers are entering the workforce in the next couple of years. They won’t be constrained by corporate email platforms, locked down mobile phones and limited platform access.
That introduces challenges for BYOD, for data protection and privacy, and changes the unwritten rules and expectations. No longer can I fire off an email request and assume it’s being picked up.
In BT Global Services, our graduate community are reverse mentoring our leadership team on digital and social media skills to help them overcome the digital divide. It’s something we’re passionate about, especially as our latest group of apprentices and graduates enter our team. But you can’t change a culture overnight.
The next few years will be a learning curve for both ends of the generational spectrum.
Discover how we can build better conversations between your people with our collaboration solutions.
[1] http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Email-Statistics-Report-2013-2017-Executive-Summary.pdf
[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/our-attention-span-is-now-less-than-that-of-a-goldfish-microsoft-study-finds-10247553.html