Generation Y and Cyber are going to hit the market soon, are you ready?
Written by Rejean Bourgault on Mercredi, 01 Juillet 2009 23:39
Are you ready? Does your enterprise realize that the Cyber Generation (15 years old or less; also called Generation internet), is already on the market? They already represent a significant portion of your sales but they have completely different buying behaviors and expectations. They will also, very soon (in the next 5-10 years), become employees in your company. In fact, 15% of the workforce today is already composed of employees that are from Generation Y (29 years old or less) and that generation, especially those in the range of 15 to 20 years old are coming in companies with brand new sets of requirements when it comes to doing work.
They are multitasking and they spend a lot more time on MSN than on e-mail. In a recent survey done in February 2009, out of 420 students that are between the age of 13 and 16 in a private school in Canada; 98% of them had an MSN address. This in itself might not be that surprising anymore. What is surprising though is that most companies in the market today block MSN and Yahoo Messenger on their corporate computers. Are you offering them an alternative? Or you are simply blocking Instant Messaging (IM) to them? Do you realize that when a teenage boy first meet a girl, he does not leave his phone number anymore but he gives her his MSN address instead? At the Gartner conference in San Francisco in April 2007, a speaker related a story where 2 top graduates, during the interview with a very large and prestigious firm, asked if they had a corporate policy to block IM, the response from the potential employer was yes. Their answer to the job offer then became: No thanks then!
Today, in large corporations, the CIO and its IS-IT team are getting a lot of pressure by their telecommunication suppliers and software companies to implement Unified Communications (UC). The premise of UC is to offer collaboration tools to employees, such as Instant Messaging and Presence (the ability to find out if another employee is currently available, busy, on the phone, etc.). The challenge for the CIO in these situations is to determine the ROI (return on investment) for UC. The problem is that we are looking at this the wrong way. First, the right people that we should talk to are in the Human Resources (HR) department. They are the ones responsible to attract new employees and they are the ones, more than anyone else in the corporation, which sees the challenge of attracting employees from the next Generation. But not only they have to attract them, they are also responsible to retain talent and provide adequate tools for their development. Today, we are taking graduates out of University and College and we give them a desk phone, a computer and an e-mail address. Wake up please! This is not what the graduates expect at all. He (or she) already has his laptop that is probably more powerful (and has a nicer design as well) than the computer you’re offering them, a mobile phone (probably a smart phone with calendar, e-mails and web browsing) and uses MSN and SMS all the time to communicate with friends and family. I am sorry, but forget the ROI in a situation like this for UC. The ability to attract and retain talent is priceless and your enterprise must get on this ASAP. Think about it carefully, tomorrow morning someone comes to you and say: for the next 7 days, you have a choice of either e-mails or a phone to do your work. Which one would you choose? If you chose e-mails, then you must start implementing Secure Instant Messaging and Presence for your company. The next Generation is already demanding it. Do you need an ROI to justify e-mail or internet access today? The same goes for UC.
The Cyber Generation is also hyper connected already, with on average at home of 1.4 video game console (XBOX 360, Wii, PlayStation 3, etc.) and 1.1 portable video console (PSP, Nintendo DS, etc.). They connect and interact with others of their age with many different mediums. A surprising statistic, 23% of the Cyber Generation already has an avatar and, for those who responded yes as having an avatar, they have in fact over 3 avatars on average. (Note: an avatar is a virtual representation (character) of you in a virtual world). A few of them even sold virtual items and their virtual characters on online marketplace websites. On average, 65% of the surveyed students (from 13 to 16 years old) had a cell phone since the age of 13 and we can easily expect this number to reach 100% in just a few years. A large majority of the phones have a camera built in as well.
As a customer, the Generation Cyber expects to have multiple ways to communicate with your company and some of the key tools they expect are Instant Messaging, SMS (text messaging on their cell phone) and e-mails. See the other article “Disconnect with Generation Y” to get more information about this.
73% of the Generation Cyber has a profile on FaceBook and, on average, students in this category have 1 social networking profile on sites like Facebook, MySpace, NetLog and others (i.e. some have none, but some have more than one profile). By the way, while we’re talking about social networking sites, do you realize that many of your employees are on LinkedIn, especially if you are operating in the high tech or telecommunication industry? On their LinkedIn profile, they have hundreds of contacts; the younger they are, the more contacts they typically have. As an example, I am 44 years old and I have about 135 contacts on that particular site, my business partner who is 29 has over 400 contacts. Do you know also, that in their contacts they have multiple customers and competitors as direct and indirect contacts? Do you know that headhunters use that site to find and get in touch with your best employees? There is nothing you can do to prevent this, as employees gladly put their complete profile up there for everyone to see and to keep and stay in touch with professional contacts but being aware of this tool is key.
Those social networking site for professionals can be very powerful if they are used properly. Here is an interesting story on the power of those sites and the expectations of the Generation Y. I was doing the annual review of my employees earlier in 2009, one by one. At the end of a particular session with one of my top talent, I showed him the final comments I made about him on our online HR database, the comments were very positive. His reply to me was: “Well, thank you boss! I appreciate all those great comments; would you mind putting them on my LinkedIn profile as well?” Think about it for a minute. For a 40+ year old manager, this is kind of weird, but when you think about it carefully, the value of my comments on his online internet profile is much more powerful for the employee than inside the corporate HR database that only 3 persons are aware of: the employee, the manager and HR. Let’s face it, for the employee, if the comments are very positive, you increase much more his marketability if your comments end up openly on the web instead of a “drawer”. Are you ready, as an employer for this type of request?
Note: we are not suggesting, by the example above, that this should become a best practice (to put evaluations online for everyone to see) as in reality, employees would only want them published if they are good and they would refuse if it was to show any type of constructive comment about how the employee can improve. We simply mention this story to demonstrate how some of the employees in the Generation Y think and to help prepare your mind.
You can download this article to share with your friends and colleagues [here].