Boomers know how to make money & Gen Y knows how to use Social Media... How can the two work together?

http://twitter.com/brettkopf

http://twitter.com/brettkopf

This is easily explained by the fact that most managers are older, since people rise up in the ranks during their careers. Most 25-year-olds rarely have to attend meetings, let alone run one effectively.

Try running a meeting sometime where everyone's surfing the web and IM'ing their friends, and let me know how you feel about PDA's & laptops in meetings then.

The then older generation didn't trust these fax apparatus as all should be send by a signed letter.

Every generation has problems adopting new technologies in business.

You say as much in the way you phrase the results:
"Gen Y workers generally don't see a problem accessing personal web sites from work - like Facebook and blogs. In fact, 62% of Gen Y professionals access a social network from work, but only 14% of Boomers do. "

If you see social media as personal, then it shouldn't be used at work. BUT do Gen Ys see it as personal? They understand that their personal network of "friends" is essential to their careers. They get job recommendations and learn about new opportunities from this network. As long as Boomers hear of these as "social" tools, they won't see that they are also "career" tools.

So how do we bridge this divide? As a Boomer myself, I've found that trying to get other Boomers into tools like Twitter is hard, if I try make them be users at first. A more gentle introduction is to have Boomers use tools they are comfortable with, like email, to observe social media, and see all the great career related conversations. I set up Google Alerts for friends that track their interests on sites like Twitter and Flickr. All I have to do is show them tricks like searching for their keywords with site:twitter.com added. I then point them to my free Google Alerts tutorial to learn more.

I remember teaching internet classes way back in 1995, before the Web really became mainstream. What worked best was to show people websites for their exact interests. We have to do the same thing now with social networks.

I just had this discussion during easter. Consensus of people over 30 is that anyone using their phone at work in "stealing", to which I protested, unsuccessfully.

The notion that the modern, 2009 workplace is like a 1950s era tuna cannery, or a car assembly line, is alive and well. Boomers in positions of authority think you punch a clock, perform labor at a fixed rate, the cans of tuna go flying by, each can means X cents of profit...then you punch out and stop thinking about work.

Trying to convey the notion that creative thoughts for work, problem solving, etc. is a 24/7/365 mental task just doesn't register.

This is going to get worse before it gets better.

In this "new" world, you either carry your weight to justify your job, or you're gone. Everything else is crap.

What's a white collar job? Many Gen-Y people actually work unconventional jobs like new ventures, many in web 2.0 driven ventures. Being online is like breathing for some people so how do they even know they spend 2.38 hours on activity X and 4.763 hours on activity Y? Where does that come in? Aren't those in the legal profession the compliant, stereotypical sort anyway?

One cannot even begin to discuss anything meaningfully if the data that the discussion is based on is, well, for want of a better word, bogus and poor quality.

But hey, this is just one Gen-Y's opinion, what do I know?
http://www.techsoomer.com/breeding-nation-techsoomers/

I think there's a great deal of value in considering the generation gaps in workplace dynamics. Older managers need to know how to engage younger workers (there was a graet talk at TED last year about this, but I don't remember who gave it/its title), and younger workers likewise need to understand how to work with the older ones (and the next batch of youngers). But sadly, this study can't really help us. We need surveys done properly, with well-documented sampling strategies and valid analysis plans.

Lot's of Boomers are into high tech. Steve Jobs and Bill gates to name just 2. We get it, we just don't want to admit it.

The generation gap I'm seeing is not one of technology per say, but one of attention. Technology has allowed split attention streams to become commonplace and accepted in Gen Y. In this paradigm, if person A and person B are having a conversation (in physical reality, or by sms, or IM, or twitter), then they are likely in the middle of many conversations, so if A suddenly receives communication from a new person C, then person B merely reengages in on other their previous conversations with say, D. At some point in the future, A and B's attention will return to each other, and their conversation will continue as if it had never left off.

Boomers on the other hand are working in the paradigm of "don't answer the phone during dinner." Or, "'m giving the person I'm talking to my full attention".

This dichotomy of paradigms becomes a problem because each one expects the other to live in their paradigm. The Gen Yer expects that the Boomer will be having 34 different conversations going on other than theirs and so feels no qualm about dropping in and out of the conversation. The Boomer on the other hand has probably self-consciously suspended other conversations to make this one "as focused as possible" and so finds the Gen Yers tendency to drop in and out as conversational taboo. The Gen Yer of course considers the Boomers suspension of other conversations as a conversation taboo.

Long story short:
Boomers == Serial Conversationalists
Gen Yers == Parallel Conversationalists

This gap is much bigger than a technological gap. This is a gap in how we interact with one another.

We implemented it in on our team and it makes a real difference in the quality of the meeting. People are present and engaged, stuff gets done, and then we can all go back to our laptops, IMs, Twitter feed, etc etc.

If all this is doing is helping Gen X and Gen Y people planning their weekend activities throughout the work day then the technology is not helpful either to the business they work for or their career prospects in the long term.

But... I want to know if the Gen Y and Gen X using these all day all the time with continuous partial attention are *productive*. If they *get work done*. I'm not seeing it. I know myself that if I want to get work done, especially in writing complex texts and analyzing other people's reports and news, that I need to shut off the firehose.

So I'd like your surveys not to be about what people *do* but how you analyze what is *effective*. Whether they are productive! Otherwise, it's just a lot of techno hype.

IMO, the Boomers are either more connected or less connected. There seems to be very little middle ground. The ones who are connected, and understand life online, are the ones who've been using/working with computers since the stone age (before the Internet)and are the very early adopters. I've met many of them in my travels, and they're some seriously fascinating people.

I was surprised, though, that you said little about Gen X. From my observation, Gen X'ers (lots of people in my generation) can be curmudgeonly about new apps (Twitter? Why should I want to use that??) not because their kids are using it, but because it looks like just kids are using it. If it can be demonstrated how it is useful in one's life, they are very quick to pick up whatever it is and use it.

As for the attention span thing: I think that has to do with being young, having different kinds of responsibilities, and attention being directed differently. When I was young, I could work as an accountant, pick out oriental rugs, plan board of trustees dinners, and co-ordinate my own social life (albeit using rather primitive tools ;-) ) It was that I was young and didn't have the same kinds of responsibilities that I now have as an adult. So, it's not necessarily a "slowing down" or a disdain for technology, but just that what needs paying attention to differs at different stages of life (not different socio-cultural generations.)

I work from home as a freelancer. I run exclusively Linux, BSD, Solaris, *nix. I'm fluent in 15 programming/ markup languages, design graphics in many formats, have a blog, blah blah.

My Boomer in-laws have had computers for the length of my marriage (currently going on 16 years), and yet they still use Windows + AOL. Yes, you heard me. They still get hosed with viruses and malware, they still get their bank accounts cleaned out by 419 scammers, they reply to every spam and always click every ad banner that tells them to, and about every 2 years their computer "breaks" and they have to buy a new one. They're as good as married to Best Buy's "Geek Squad", whose word is gospel to them.

The fact that their son-in-law has earned his living and supported their grandkids in technology the entire time they've known him doesn't add a lick to his credibility. My mother-in-law *corrects* me when I say she runs Windows - she "runs AOL". She calls me up from Best Buy offering to buy me software. A 1000 times I've said, "That won't run, we use Linux." She cannot bring herself to speak such a foreign word. She thinks I'm possessed or in the mafia or something.

They're Boomers, and they're on computers and online alright, but that's like putting a monkey in a car and saying that it can drive.

Where we differ is that I hate chat and don't use cellphone text messaging more than I have to. I don't like to type out conversations. It's easier just to pick up the phone.

As for having people text at things like funerals. No, I'm not big on it. It removes them from the moment.

Another area where online communication is changing the experience is at music concerts. The audience is often more engaged communicating with their friends, who aren't there, than they are in the music that is in front of them. The bands notice. Gen Y performers are being ignored by Gen Y audiences.

http://bridgingculturekorea.blogspot.com/2009/01/generations-us-and-korean.html

If there's anything Gen X/Y hates, it's watching some old Tom or Terry in the front droning on for hours about stuff that could have been summarized virtually or asynchronously through social media tools. I know that sometimes a face-to-face meeting is absolutely critical, but most meetings I find myself in are for people who asked me to write a findings report, didn't read it when it (necessarily) was more than one page, and then ask me to summarize it for them verbally in the meeting.

Another peeve is when I train Boomers on social media (again, in a time-wasting meeting instead of the 5 minute online tutorial I had already prepared but nobody bothered to watch). I get wisecracks about how "stupid" Twitter, or blogs, or Facebook are. I don't want to know how your spoiled 26-year-old Paris Hilton wannabe daughter wastes her life online. For everyone like her there are a dozen who aren't.

There are problems with etiquette on both ends.

I think a lot of the issue is intensity vs. efficiency/effectiveness. When the only way to communicate with others was to take a sea voyage or mail letters (amazingly not that long ago in terms of history), everyone would 'go back to what they were doing' while waiting for a reply - especially when letters took weeks to return. But of course, there would be more thought that went into each letter. When you were sitting in the bar deciding how to create a new nation, I am sure a lot less thought went into each exchange.

I think we are in similar types of shifts now. When you can IM with 3-12 people simultaneously, you may not be thinking as much about each response or more while waiting for everyone to 'get back to you'. At least everyone is on equal footing. The challenge is when you have some in IM mode and some in 'in person' mode, and some in email mode, all at the same time.

I find it more efficient to have 1 conversation at a time, but when there is enough lag time between conversations, my mind wanders to the other issues as well. If I can I start to move the other conversations forward. For me 'If I can' is about being polite - in a large part for my own needs - if I don't respect someone in front of me, I loose their attention and it all slows down.

Back when dinosaurs ruled the world, an I programmed on mainframes by dialup, I would try to get multiple jobs running while waiting for the 1st one to finish. It took more effort to remember what each 'test' was supposed to do, and it had physical effort (I would literally have to walk to the different cubicles of everyone that had left for the day to use their terminals to get faster response) - but that allowed me to get more done faster. Of course the real solution was to have better software, and faster hardware (although I basically had a $1 million dollar per MONTH lease computer to myself) but that was the best solution at the time.

I think a similar situation continues - when the communication style does not allow full engagement from one participants perspective, they will engage in something else. I have watched this for decades - the eyes drift on to other projects, the papers start getting shuffled. Busy people start doing something else mentally, if not physically. If it is only 2 people then they should address the disconnect and get back on track. But when you have larger groups it becomes a challenge and may not be worth the time to 'discuss' and come to the compromises needed to keep everyone fully engaged.

Unfortunately in my experience, this can slow the overall process down and increase the overall effort required. Just like walking around the office starting up different dial-up terminals took more effort. The best solution was an OS that let me have many virtual sessions one terminal.

Regards

The one thing that hasn't changed is the human being, evolution works but not that fast! Lets see in a few years who has risen to the top of Y, bet that those that resort to more traditional inter-personal skills (or manipulation!) will succeed better.

I do agree with what boomers are saying about etiquette during a meeting assuming that they are talking about the use of a laptop or PDA during a meeting in a way that does not support the reason the meeting is being called. If this is the case then what the boomers are saying is probably what most people would say in that it is inefficient and unecessary. How ever if that is not the case then the results of the study might be correct with regards to only boomers not appreciating the need for such devices during a meeting.

Could you please expand on the exact questions that were asked being that this topic leaves some questions regarding how people view technology.

Posted by: Penguin Pete | April 24, 2009 4:47 PM

Such arrogance!

Estimating how long you spend doing something retrospectively is not a study. Its a crap shoot. I can point to millions of other studies about time distortion, exageration,problems with memory and recall that completely debunk this study, but I forgot where they are.

As it is, a sample size of 700, with more than 1/3 from the legal profession is pretty poor statistically.

I got nothing from this.

It is important to distinguish between the post-WWII demographic boom in births vs. the cultural generations born during that era. Generations are a function of the common formative experiences of its members, not the fertility rates of its parents. Many experts now believe it breaks down this way:

DEMOGRAPHIC boom in babies: 1946-1964
Baby Boom GENERATION: 1942-1953
Generation Jones 1954-1965
Generation X: 1966-1978

Here is a recent op-ed about GenJones as the new generation of leadership in USA TODAY:
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20090127/column27_st.art.htm

Generation Jones has a very salient and unique relationship with technology which becomes completely obscured when it is mistakenly lumped in with other generations, rather than being recognized as the distinct generation it actually is.

At my firm there are a number of attorneys who are Boomers (like me) and they are technically adept. They use Blogs or have Blogs, they use social networking sites for business, eg, Second Life, MySpace, LinkedIn.

Perhaps it is the phrasing of the questions? There is research that indicates that Boomers, X’ers and Millennials (Y'ers) don't communicate the same way or comprehend in the same way.

I for one am a Boomer who considers myself technically astute. I Twitter; I have a Facebook and LinkedIn page.

Go figure that ...

I can't say that I think this survey provides much in the way of useful information. It's clearly the case that generational use of technology changes and adapts. It's clearly the case that social mores change. Views of these changes are individually subjective; the value of a professional survey is in identifying trends, particularly if they have not hitherto been recognised. There is no doubt that use of technology is changing across the generations and we have to live and adapt to that. Examing these changes to consider whether they are good, bad, indifferent is perhaps more interesting.

As a regular employer of generation x and y, my concern is that I am reluctantly being forced to admit that the quality of the generation Y staff is inferior and getting worse: I have to interview more staff to find the nuggets, I have to invest more time and effort to polish them and I am having to get rid of more them more quickly. I am spending far more time and money than I wish to.

And there are two consistent causes (not the only ones, but the two that are most frequent):
selfishness and lack of attention to detail, which I believe are directly related to technology usage.

The selfishness comes mostly from the fact that Gen Ys (not all) seem to believe that their needs come first. That it is their right to use chat, email, twitter, their phone their PDA whatever, at work on work time. It's not - it's a privilege. A privilege that is extended to an adult on the assumption that they will use this technology judiciously and in a manner that benefits their working responsibilities. If you are called into a meeting to discuss, for example, business requirements, and you prioritise the SMS that has just arrived over either your work colleagues or the guy who is paying your salary, you are being discourteous and, to be honest, downright stupid in the latter case. I hear a lot about the social connected skills of gen-Ys - my observation is the converse. Making them into productive team members is taking much longer; they are more disruptive, inattentive and the propensity to adopt a prima donna attitude is markedly more common. I dont care if you are a warcraft raid guild leader or that you have 257 followers on Twitter, provided you do the job you are paid for. I do care if you spend all your time at work looking at non work related blogs, posting your iPhone snaps of the weekends fun filled parr-tay on Facebook and let down your team members by not delivering the work you are supposed to which means they all have to work late.

However all these problems pale into insignifance when faced with the regularity of failure when they are assigned a task that requires concentration.

Pure IT is an engineering discipline (and I am not talking here about web designers, they are not, with all due respect, software engineers, it's a different discipline) and consequently at some point you have to be able to sit down and author a significant document (yes I am afraid that corporations do still revolve around the production of documents: where they are posted doesnt matter).

Analysts have to produce requirements specifications. Designers and architects have to produce design specifications. Developers have to author programs. Testers have to read the preceding documents and author detailed testing scripts and so on. To do this you need to be able to write more than 160 characters of soundbite text, and if you can't then I am not going to give you a salary increase and I am not going to promote you and if you keep failing I am going to kick you out as a waste of space. The production of these documents requires hours of concentrated effort - typically our requirements documents may end up being 100 pages. We brainstorm, we use wiki, we collaborate. we have multiple authors contributing - but at the end of the day someone sits down and writes the final document, others read and comment. It's what we do. The same applies to the design documents, to the source code. It's work that requires you focus and the trait that I am most alarmed about in the gen-ys is their lack of ability to do that simple thing. Focus.

IT software engineering depends upon the continual influx of intelligent, motivated inspirational youngsters. I have nurtured 4 entire IT departments and helped them leave the nest and fly. The current crop is the worst I have seen and my peers report the same thing. They are rude, they are self absorbed and they have the attention spans of gnats and mostly this seems to me to come from the fact that they spend their entire time, not multi-tasking, but chatting about themselves on every available technological platform to their friends.

So why is trying to get some actual work done at a meeting suddenly a bad thing? If we are trapped in a room being told what we already know, we can at least try to find out some new info, right? Or are Gen XYZ'ers not supposed to learn from the wry observations of Boomer cartoonists? Or are we misunderstanding the joke? Is Dilbert parody and not commentary? Someone should let us know. Put it on the company internal blog, because no one reads those pieces of dead tree called "memos" rotting in our physical mailboxes. Who wastes their time reading those?

And you're going back and forth between customers/QA testers a whole bunch, right? The concept that "no one really knows what software they want" and the values of split testing and QA click tracking suggest that if you write a 100 page document after meeting the customer once, half of that won't be relevant by the end. Maybe write a 25 page document, then some unit tests (for test first), and after your write the tests go recommit everything you learned to the document? And you can still bill it as "specifications" on the time card.

The model that workers should be walled gardens of focus with deadlines that fall into place precisely on a Gantt chart in the middle of a 40 page powerpoint presentation creates a framework that many successful companies with refined project management methodology have shown to be false. If we posit generations deride their predecessors in a linear fashion, perhaps this Gen Y exponential drop* in your evaluation might mean you should reconsider your value framework and your creation process.

*cartesian joke intentional

That was a nice 'watercooler' rant, back to debugging web servers.

But picking on boomers is wrong. Who are we to say what technology is good for everything. These people still believe in personal relationships, not in reading someone's status in facebook. Believe that business should be between people, driven by will and backed up by hard work, not by a pretty graph, and who prefer a face to face confirmation, or a message that took more than 3 minutes to write. The problem with the boomers is that they are still trying to live in the real world.

I love technology, I really do, I couldn't imagine my life without my laptop. But I also know I should use it wisely. There is oh so much more to life.

And honestly... cell phones... they are the biggest annoyance. No more time for youself. If a prick decides he wants to annoy you he can. At any time.

Anyway. Learn to make friends not add as friends.

Thanks!

I think that it is useful to separate deficiencies with different techniques of work, especially when those new techniques have were foreshadowed. Older generations fretted about life becoming more harried. And then the next generation didn't make life less harried. They just assumed that high interruption was the norm. Previous generations got *some* information from scuttlebutt. What is social networking and valuing the freshness of info but trying to refine the usefulness and accuracy of gossip? If we weren't supposed to trust anyone over 30, maybe the new generation took it to heart, but didn't feel the need to put it on a button anymore. Obviously all my examples are bad in their most extreme forms, but in their moderate forms, they're skills, even if they sound a little gruesome.

You said: "Boomers know how to make money & Gen Y knows how to use Social Media... How can the two work together?"

How about working with those of us in Gen X? We're the perfect mix of Boomer business expertise and Gen Y tech sensibilities.

Did you happen to notice that Gen X wasn't even included in the article other than to mention our age range?

I fall somewhere between boomers and Gen Y. Sure, when I was 18, I had headphones on ALL THE TIME. It wasn't until I'd run myself ragged after three years in a very intense job that I finally developed a sense of appreciation for quiet pauses here and there.

What really cracks me up are the folks who keep their phones glued to their ears ALL THE TIME. We know you're just trying to look important! No voice mail messages, or conversations, or what have you, could possibly keep you so occupied every single moment that you have to walk through the main part of the building! Buck up and chat person to person for a change. I dare ya'!

When I was 18, I was the same - I had headphones on all the time. It wasn't until I'd run myself ragged after three years in a demanding role that I began to appreciate quiet pauses.

I think it's more of a rite of passage. When you're young, you want that constant stimulation. After a while, you get sick of it. I'm not a boomer, but my guess is that it's not about whether they've learned how to use it. Nor is it about old-fashioned values. I think it's just that eventually, you realize that you want and need some balance between computers and offline time.

It is important to distinguish between the post-WWII demographic boom in births vs. the cultural generations born during that era. Generations are a function of the common formative experiences of its members, not the fertility rates of its parents. Many experts now believe it breaks down this way:

DEMOGRAPHIC boom in babies: 1946-1964
Baby Boom GENERATION: 1942-1953
Generation Jones: 1954-1965
Generation X: 1966-1978

Here is a recent op-ed about GenJones as the new generation of leadership in USA TODAY:
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20090127/column27_st.art.htm