The Technology Generation Gap at Work is Oh So Wide
Recently, business information solutions provider LexisNexis released the results of a study that examined how technology was used in the American workplace. The focus of the study was on the differing opinions between generational groups. Their findings? The generation gap at work is really wide with vast discrepancies when it comes to what the appropriate use of technology is - a problem that leads to increasing tensions in the workplace.
The Findings: Boomers and Gen Y are Worlds Apart at Work
The survey compared technology and software usage among generations of working professionals, including Boomers (ages 44-60), Generation X (ages 29-43) and Generation Y (ages 28 and younger). The total sample size was 700 legal and white collar professionals with 250 coming from the legal profession.
According to the survey:
- Two-thirds of all Boomers agree that Personal Digital Assistants (like the Blackberry, for example) and mobile phones contribute to a decline in proper workplace etiquette, and believe the use of a laptop during in-person meetings is "distracting," less than half of Gen Y workers agree.
- Only 17% of Boomers believe using laptops or PDAs during in-person meetings is "efficient," while more than one third of Gen Y do.
- Only 28% percent of Boomers think blogging about work-related issues is acceptable, while forty percent of Gen Y workers do.
Yikes! Phones and PDAs are distracting and inefficient tools? Blogging is unacceptable? Who are these people? Unfortunately, they're the people who still have a lot of power when it comes to the decisions being made at the workplace. Baby boomers are the executives, the CEOs, the bosses, etc. while Gen Y is just now getting their foot in the door. But it's clear that these two generations strongly disagree on how technology is to be used.
More Findings
Another issue being faced is the blurring of boundaries between work and home. 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. That discrepancy could have something to do with the fact that Gen Y spends a lot more of their day online - they spend 10.6 hours per day accessing social networks, news sites, blogs, forums, and multimedia sharing sites versus only 5.6 hours reported by Boomers.
The study also found that Gen Y workers multi-task at higher levels, but it's here that the numbers get kind of confusing. According to the report, Gen Y workers spend an average of 22.9 hours per day using email, web browsers, IM, productivity applications while Boomers reported 10.3 hours with the same programs. But seriously, 22.9 hours? That begs the question: when does Gen Y eat or sleep? Who even stays up for 22.9 straight hours? The problem apparently comes from how the question was asked. Respondents were asked to report on how much time they spent on each of four types of applications in an average work day. The average time reported for "using" each application every day added up to a total of 15.9 hours, much longer than the standard 8-hour work day.
What this actually means is that workers are keeping many applications open at the same time and accessing them concurrently. (They're not staying up 20-some hours each day to work). However, we think that data could have been presented in a more straightforward manner. Still, the end result proves that Gen Y switches back and forth between applications far more than the Boomers do.
Wait, So Do Boomers Get Tech or Not?
The last time we wrote about Boomers' and their use of social media, we got a lot of heated responses in the comments about how "not all Boomers" are out-of-touch, so stop saying that! But actually, at the time, we weren't. We were instead sharing data from Forrester which stated that over 60% of Boomers were using socially created content. Yet that study seems to be a bit in conflict with this one. How can the hip-to-blogs (and videos, and podcasts, etc.) Baby Boomers of the Forrester study exist in the same world as those interviewed by LexisNexis? Which study is right? Or maybe, in a way, they both are. Maybe the stuffy old lawyers interviewed for this latest study don't care for blogs, but there are plenty of Boomers out there who do. We know from the comments of the last post that there are certainly plenty of Boomers who read this blog, at least.
Image credit: Boomer: unclebumpy; Who's going to Hire a Gen Y? Anthony Weate
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Can we pre-boomers continue to exist, is that OK with you?
Have you noticed that you are providing a wonderful justification for age discrimination.
A simple question along the lines of how many hours on average per day do you spend online doing non-work related activities would have made this study more meaningful and cleared up the confusing totals. Seriously 10.6 hours per day?
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.
Interesting blog and post, but it’s missing an important part of the equation: Generation Jones, born 1954-1965, between the Boomers and Generation X. Google Generation Jones, and you’ll see it’s gotten a ton of media attention, and many top commentators from many top publications and networks (Washington Post, Time magazine, NBC, Newsweek, ABC, etc.) now specifically use this term.
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.
Ya, liek it wont matter much anymore cause the boomers will die off soon anyway. Seee jou in hell, dinosenior! Ya gen y!
As a Boomer and CIO for a large law firm I find the results of the Lexis-Nexis study interesting but I'm not convinced that the results really tell the true story.
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 ...
Boomer: early adopter: UK , in IT for 30 years, current IT Director.
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.
The Boomers are the ones with all the Dilbert cartoons on their cubes, right? That's the comic that says meetings are largely a waste of time. I'm told this is a genre of humor called "funny 'cause it's true". Which I'm told Boomers prefer to much more modern forms of humor like mockery, sarcasm, and parody.
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?
Lakonic: 100+ page requirements documents? You're not writing that all at once are you? Like, at the beginning before making anything? And tell me that's many many authors. Don't confuse attention to detail with a waste of time from premature busywork. Agile development and constant refactoring of your code should be evolving a document that your programmers will actually read and comprehend in a time frame that makes business sense.
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.
well in response to that Andy, we use and have used agile ... where and only where it is appropriate - my context was illustrative. Agile for the sake of agile and inappropriately is as useless as waterfall is. Couldnt agree with you more about writing wholely unnecessary code - we drum it into everyone - my generation made that mistake again and again and again - coding for things that never happened. I had to drag people kicking and screaming to read Ward Cunningham when the WikiWiku came out .. my point was illustrative ... and your beautifully worded third paragraph is a joy .. but based upon an erroneous set of assumptions. Powerpoint we threw out along with the gant chart a long time ago. Perhaps I did sound as if I was deriding - but if so, its based upon sound observation that within the last 5 years the concentration span of our younger engineers has dropped off markedly - and thats comes from my senior engineers - borderline gen-x/gen-y
Look, I'm a Generation X and one that is very used to technology. I grew up with the industry, and I am a programmer, working through so many diffent types of technology and purposes as you can imagine.
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.
my generation grew up pretty much with the Internet as long as I can remember. there is a lot of digital security safe practices that a lot of the older generation arent aware of. since everything is going digital, its good to be digitally smart about things, there is this decent free resource website called www.justaskgemalto.com, it doesnt have all the answers and info but its a good place to start.
Absolutely
Thanks!
Lakonic: I'm certainly exaggerating a gulf for effect (not unlike the above article). It sounds like in your case, you're trying to sensibly pick up the best aspects of the stylish new techniques. And most certainly, all new employees/generations arrive to the workplace lacking skills. It sounds like your workplace and team will ultimately train up the new people in useful ways without wasting resources intergenerational battles.
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.
Brett Kopf:
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?
Is this about technology? Or is it about attention, and the need for CONSTANT distraction?
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'!
Is this about technology? Or a need for constant distraction?
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.
The 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.
Protip from a Gen-Y: instead of having so many useless meetings how about boomers actually let us get about the business of working? Remember email and all that tech built to keep people connected? Use that. Meetings should be for when decisions need to be made, not information dispersal.
The bias here is heavy and obvious: You can only be hip, plugged-in, and relevant if you use Facebook, blogs, etc. As a Boomer (at the very tail end) in the IT field, I'm finding no need for Facebook, Twitter, or blogs. Mainly, they are distractions, though perhaps if I had more liesure time, I'd use Facebook. As for blogs, for most people they are useless. By that I mean creating one, not reading then. Reading blogs can just be another way of getting info off the web and staying current. Gen Y'ers have not grown out of peer pressure, so they see everyone doing FB, Twitter, texting, etc. and they have to do it, too. Boomers are more immune to that pressure and they have learned what's really imporant. While Gen Y'ers tend to just follow the crowd (and a lot of where the crowd goes will turn out to be worthless fads), Boomers know better how to assess what's really important and worthwhile. Gen Y'ers will learn that over time. Sure, if a job really requires Social Media then anyone working that job should learn it, but some much of the usage of Social Media is just "me too" usage that, in the end, is a waste of time.
Geez so I am older than 60 and I read and write blogs as well as Tweet on my iPhone .. guess I am way ahead of my pack .. by the way am I a pre-Blogger or just a dinosaur? Either way I am phisically that but mentally a Gen-Y or do I want to say that? Gen Ys are so "out of touch" :-))
Interesting blog and post, but it’s missing an important part of the equation: Generation Jones, born 1954-1965, between the Boomers and Generation X. Google Generation Jones, and you’ll see it’s gotten a ton of media attention, and many top commentators from many top publications and networks (Washington Post, Time magazine, NBC, Newsweek, ABC, etc.) now specifically use this term.
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
The latest annoyance is "BBM Me!".
More than anything these guys with ipods plugged in and constantly looking down at their mobile phones while texting, are looking to get run over.
Previous 1 2