Remodeling Corporate Culture for the Digital Era

While the Millennial generation dominates headlines declaring the latest trends in technology and their applications in the workplace, it’s worth remembering that it was the Baby Boomers who introduced the “e” in email, e-learning, and e-commerce. The foundations of the Digital Era, which forever changed the way we work, shop, learn, and play, were laid by innovators born between the mid-1940s and the 1950s.

The past half-century has been a period of building great businesses founded on technology-driven processes that run by the clock and the calendar. In the new millennium, however, technology has been redefined — as has the employee. It’s no coincidence that employees entering the workforce today wear no wristwatches and carry no calendars in their wallets.

As the great entrepreneurs of the Boomer generation flock to retirement resorts, the great innovators of Gen Y move into their positions, a joyously different breed of human being in a corporate landscape where Millennials seem strange to management and managers seem hopelessly antiquated to their new employees.

Many organizations traditionally have tracked progress and success in terms of hours billed, rates charged, quantities delivered, or expanded facilities. Millennials, on the other hand, can’t grasp the concept of a “clock watcher.” For the most part, they do not distinguish between work hours and personal hours — it’s all one life for Millennials.

Always On

That’s because they carry the digital devices they use at home into their work. Their preference is to work whenever and wherever they are most productive, and technology has allowed them to succeed in that pursuit with handheld devices that place an office full of capabilities in their pocket. The BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) phenomenon is creating security headaches for IT staff, but it’s helping 21st-century companies experience their own boom.

Millennials shun museum pieces like landlines, conference room calendars, time sheets, and “The 6:00 News.” Rather, they thrive on instant messaging, Skype, Kinect, social networks, and texting. More than any previous generation, they are totally comfortable with talking to strangers and colleagues half a world away — they probably already are friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter.

Social networks, furthermore, provide a communications path for a generation who couldn’t care less about privacy issues and readily declare and share every aspect of their lives, from breakfast to business proposals.

“Communicating” is not a function or activity for Millennials — it’s an environment. It’s just always present, always available, and always necessary. These workers may never have heard a dial tone. They grew up with a mobile phone on their belt and at their ear.

These are the students who drove English teachers nuts with insertions like “IMHO” and “LOL” throughout their compositions. They are the first generation in a century not to plead with parents to take them to the Department of Motor Vehicles on their 16th birthday — and to buy them a car, as well. These young adults spend the majority of their lives in the virtual world, and they don’t need to drive to stores, movie theaters, or even schools. It’s all “e-vailable” to them on that device in their pocket.

The desire for constant connection among the Millennial workforce, however, is exactly the characteristic most valuable for businesses that operate globally. Having a workforce that delights in instantaneous communication, always on and continually reaching out to new social contacts, can provide a tremendous competitive advantage to businesses today.

Smart businesses, therefore, are prioritizing ways to attract these emerging, technology-driven workers, as well as modifying their corporate culture to ensure they stay.

Different Motivations, Different Rewards

Overriding these efforts of business managers should be three considerations that may require dramatically new ways of defining work ethic and work processes:

1. Finding ways for employees to engage with the company will become paramount. Research studies reveal that when employees are engaged, businesses experience better customer service, more product innovation, and improved productivity. When businesses measure engagement and determine how best to improve it, managers are better able to ensure that every worker understands and is focused on their value to the company’s overarching goals. Engagement helps drive employees toward corporate objectives because it becomes a challenge to be met with technology.
2. Managers and supervisors need to recognize that the activities and rewards that motivate Millennials differ from those that motivated past generations. Above all, Millennials need effective communication methods and a corporate culture that values them for their expertise rather than for compliance with traditional processes. Employers should encourage Millennials to bring their own devices to work — and then collaborate with the IT department to accommodate them. Employees could be rewarded for posting on Facebook and Twitter and utilizing these networks for collaboration among offices and globally. The corporate culture may need to be flipped to reward risk-taking instead of safety. Many offices in progressive companies today resemble a coffeehouse or campus union more than a traditional cube farm; Gen Y employees prefer to work wherever they want, in a manner that is both casual and collaborative.
3. Accountability still matters, but the way we measure it needs to change. Handing out certificates for perfect on-time attendance needs to yield rewarding, perfect online projects. Productivity may need to be measured by the output of digital endeavors, rather than the hours recorded on a timesheet.

Organizations can find help in reshaping their corporate culture and work processes from consulting firms that have studied operational efficiency in workplaces with generational differences. These firms have developed programs to facilitate a smoother and more effective transition. Most important for the manager, however, is the need simply to realize that the world has changed. It’s time to auction the bulletin boards and notepads on eBay and prepare our businesses for a digital workforce and a different way of managing our business.