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"From a recent conversation with Jeanne Meister, we are facing a new future in terms of demographics at work: we will soon have five generations in the workplace at once. In prior years, we have had three or four generations at a time with some but not vast differences in work behavior."
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As always, demographics are generalizations and stereotypes with the purpose to understand overall trends, not specific situations
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Do employees understand how work is done differently in different generations? Do employees understand customer needs, interaction and work styles from different generations?
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"Avant d'enseigner quoi que ce soit à qui que ce soit, au moins faut-il le connaître. Qui se présente, aujourd'hui, à l'école, au collège, au lycée, à l'université ?"
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Ces enfants habitent donc le virtuel. Les sciences cognitives montrent que l'usage de la toile, lecture ou écriture au pouce des messages, consultation de Wikipedia ou de Facebook, n'excitent pas les mêmes neurones ni les mêmes zones corticales que l'usage du livre, de l'ardoise ou du cahier. Ils peuvent manipuler plusieurs informations à la fois.
Ils ne connaissent ni n'intègrent ni ne synthétisent comme nous, leurs ascendants. Ils n'ont plus la même tête.
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Sur la lèvre aval de cette faille, voici des jeunes gens auxquels nous prétendons dispenser de l'enseignement, au sein de cadres datant d'un âge qu'ils ne reconnaissent plus : bâtiments, cours de récréation, salles de classes, amphithéâtres, campus, bibliothèques, laboratoires, savoirs même… cadres datant, dis-je, d'un âge et adaptés à une ère où les hommes et le monde étaient ce qu'ils ne sont plus.
Trois questions, par exemple : que transmettre ? A qui le transmettre ? Comment le transmettre ?
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"That's a lot like the use of enterprise 2.0 social software systems today. Older generations have an ingrained urge to avoid collaborating, having spent their lives being trained to hoard and control information. Their thick, almost-impermeable skin takes effort, time, encouragement and environmental change to break through. It isn't by chance that the need for greater collaboration is a regular theme in management meetings everywhere.
On the other hand, social software comes naturally to the millennial generation, born between the late 1970s and 2000 and raised in the Internet age. In a few years, according to Jeanne Meister and Karie Willyerd, the authors of The 2020 Workplace, millennials will be about half of the world's working age adults"
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Millennials work with large networks. They swap contexts frequently and rapidly during a typical day and use multiple modes of communication. They feel free to ask their managers and peers for candid opinions so they can improve their work. They seek social proof, some visible indication, that others are buying into an idea or activity. They see everyone in their organization as equal partners to collaborate with.
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When you're new to an organization, your relationship networks are usually limited and have little built-in trust. Millennials who converse freely with their friends socially are often told at work to stay strictly work-focused. This can limit the depth of their conversations and keep them from developing trust and extensive networks.
"“Our research shows that when you hold the stereotypes up to the light, they don’t cast much of a shadow,” says Deal. “Everyone wants to be able to trust their supervisors, no one really likes change, we all like feedback, and the number of hours you put in at work depends more on your level in the organization than on your age.”
Clearly, people of different ages see the world in different ways. But Deal says that’s not the primary reason for generational conflict. The conflict has less to do with age or generational differences than it does with clout—who has it and who wants it. “The so-called generation gap is, in large part, the result of miscommunication and misunderstanding, fueled by common insecurities and the desire for clout,” says Deal. "
If you're a boss, what do you do about employees who love to tweet, text and social network throughout the day? It's a question companies are grappling with as the generation gap threatens to create a communications divide.
In other areas, however, attitudes towards technology diverge based on age. The younger workers from Gen Y tend to be more liberal than Baby Boomers on Internet usage during work hours. Around 62% of Gen Y admitted to accessing social networking sites from work whereas only 14% of Boomers did so. As for browsing Internet bulletin boards and forums, it’s 47% for Gen Y versus 27% for Boomers. Lastly, 44% of Gen Y confess to going to mutimedia sharing websites like Youtube against just 24% of Boomers.
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” Perhaps it’s not surprising that over two-thirds (68%) of Boomers decry the proliferation of PDAs and mobile phones as a contributor to the decline in workplace manners, while only less than half (46%) of Gen Y workers agree with this assessment.
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It seems that the key here is the perception of productivity. A mere 17% of Boomers say that using laptops or PDAs during in-person meetings is efficient, versus 35% for Gen Y. Blogging about work-related issues is tolerable for just 28% of Boomers, in contrast to 41% of Gen Y who are fine with it. Almost half of Gen Y workers (47%) see nothing wrong with befriending a client on a social networking site, but only 24% of Boomers feel the same way. When it comes to befriending their colleagues on these sites, 76% of Gen Y are all for it while only 38% of Boomers think that it’s appropriate.
Now I am fairly secure in my membership in Generation Jones--I still have lots of pleated pants, for example--and I find the accusations that "I just don't get it" amusing. But the comments did make me think about the fate of the millennials as they move into the workforce. Will they bend to the whims of the workplace, or will the workplace bend to suit them?
I was trying to raise the awareness of the audience that being part of the on-line digital community (and in particular social networking) was becoming an increasing factor in how we evolve and survive as human beings, and that those who fail to grasp this will find themselves ever more isolated – cut off from the networks that are sharing, adapting and updating knowledge to create value.
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