Posts Tagged “Communication”

The 80 million Baby Boomers are approaching one of life’s major milestones – retirement. And many companies are preparing for the brain drain that will cause. Ready to step in are the 46 million or so Gen Xers.

But there’s a new generation on the horizon – affectionately called the Millennials. Born between 1982 and 2000, they are 76 million strong and now are beginning to graduate from college and flood the job market.

Millennials have been described as tech savvy. In a 2007 book by Reynol Junco and Jeanna Mastrodicasa, a survey 7,705 U.S. college students showed:

97% own a computer

76% use instant messaging

15% of IM users are logged on 24 hours a day/7 days a week

34% use Web sites as their primary source of news

28% own a blog and 44% read blogs

49% download music using peer-to-peer file sharing

75% have a Facebook account

Given the generational differences between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials – and don’t forget the Gen Xers – employers will be challenged to integrate these generations into their workplaces as the old and new worlds collide. So what will that mean for communicating to them?

Likely it will mean increasing message multiplicity by combining more traditional methods – company newsletters, e-mails, and memos – with more modern methods, like blogs, RSS feeds and text messages to their cell phones. It also might mean developing ways to personalize each and every message to a Millennial recipient.

This would mean implementing technologies to gather data on their own employees’ habits and usage to create individual user profiles. With their propensity for sharing details about themselves through things like Facebook, MySpace, and receiving banking updates on their cell phones, one might assume this to be an acceptable endeavor on the part of companies. However, these are waters that haven’t yet been thoroughly tested.

During the course of the reorganization, the president, HR head and Finance head conducted a number of “alignment” sessions with the organization’s top two levels. These sessions were meant to explain the rationale for the change and define the roles of those executives in moving the reorganization forward. Nonetheless, mixed messages were common when those executives spoke to their functions. Just as bad, employees told us repeatedly that senior managers were absent or silent during the most stressful periods of change.

Obvious shortcomings in the vision were, no doubt, a primary driver of the mixed messages. Unfortunately, poor leadership, political maneuvering and an unwillingness to confront unproductive behaviors created far more turmoil in the workforce than was necessary.

In the end, the team knew they had few options in addressing unhelpful behaviors from such senior executives. All the same tactics (those alignment sessions) would need to be employed, with one important addition. At the project’s initiation, the team would measure senior executive support by surveying their functions. Scores would be publicly provided to senior management “in the spirit of transparency.” Of course, transparency was only part of the rationale. Creating a sense of competition and peer pressure would become the safety net to ensure appropriate performance.

There is a continuum along which organizational changes can be planned. On one end are top-down approaches with planning done by small groups behind closed doors. The organization implements what it is told to implement. At the other end is including as many employees as possible in designing pieces of the new organization, and then tasking those same people with implementing the changes they designed. The former is exclusive, the latter is inclusive.

This company took a more inclusive route as it mirrored their culture. Directors and senior managers designed their organizations, level by level, and were then responsible for implementing the design. This choice was intended to take advantage of line managers’ more intimate knowledge of their areas and people, while at the same time building their buy-in to the change process.

The approach’s down side was employees feeling it was taking too long. Impatience led to paralysis.

The team had underestimated and under-communicated the impacts. At the same time management was dealing with business issues (their day jobs) and counseling their teams through the unsettling period of change (which encroached on their daily job performance), they had an additional burden of intensive reorganizational work upon them (a night job).

In short, the team miscalculated the burden on line management. By being inclusive, they passed a burden on to people ill-prepared to accept the challenge.

On the flip side, a more exclusive approach would have taken just as long, and perhaps longer. (All the kinks associated with any reorganization still needed to get worked out.) But, since employees would have had less visibility to the process and less day-to-day involvement with the work, it may have felt shorter.

In the end, the team concluded, “in the future we must carefully weigh the pros and cons of a range of approaches, choose the one that suits us best, build a fully fleshed-out plan, and then aggressively and continually communicate the methodology and its benefits to all employees.”

In other words, there is no correct answer – but whatever choice you make, set people’s expectations accordingly.