56% Of Young Professionals Won’t Work At A Company That Bans Twitter And Facebook

Shea Bennett via AllTwitter

Cisco surveyed 2,800 college students and recently employed graduates and discovered that two thirds will actively enquire about a firm’s social media policies during a job interview, with some 56% refusing to work at a company that bans social media.

When you consider that a third of the students polled “consider the Internet to be as important as air, water, food, and shelter”, this isn’t all that surprising, especially as the internet for many young people nowadays is Facebook and Twitter.

Other key takeaways:

  • A third of the students polled prioritized social media freedom over salary
  • 4/5 students want to be able to choose the devices they use in their jobs
  • 68% of the employed graduates believe that corporate devices should be used for social media and personal use

The Entrepreneurial Generation - William Deriesiewicz

William Deriesiewicz via NYTimes.com

Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet.

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.

Call it Generation Sell.

Bands are still bands, but now they’re little businesses, as well: self-produced, self-published, self-managed. When I hear from young people who want to get off the careerist treadmill and do something meaningful, they talk, most often, about opening a restaurant. Nonprofits are still hip, but students don’t dream about joining one, they dream about starting one. In any case, what’s really hip is social entrepreneurship — companies that try to make money responsibly, then give it all away.

It’s striking. Forty years ago, even 20 years ago, a young person’s first thought, or even second or third thought, was certainly not to start a business. That was selling out — an idea that has rather tellingly disappeared from our vocabulary. Where did it come from, this change? Less Reaganism, as a former student suggested to me, than Clintonism — the heroic age of dot-com entrepreneurship that emerged during the Millennials’ childhood and youth. Add a distrust of large organizations, including government, as well as the sense, a legacy of the last decade, that it’s every man for himself.

Because this isn’t only them. The small business is the idealized social form of our time. Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.

A culture more attuned to powerpoint than poetry, and a generation of young people dreaming of Aeron chairs instead of world peace.

Here Come The Millennials!

Gary Curtis, Chief Technology Strategist of Accenture, condenses recent research the consulting firm has compiled on Millennials’ views of the workplace:

Gary Curtis, Give your workplace a Millennial makeover

The key lessons that CIOs need to learn are:

1. Millennials expect to use the technology and devices of their choice. From mobility devices to reading devices, from the use of applications to accessing social networks, expect to be allowed to use the devices they know and prefer. They don’t want to be told what they can and cannot use.

Millennials have learned how to make the team work, as opposed to making the individuals work as part of a team.

2. They either don’t care about or won’t obey corporate IT policies. Large majorities of working Millennials in nearly every country said they either don’t read or won’t obey corporate IT policies – a scary thought to CIOs whose mission is to protect the enterprise’s digital assets by constraining what employees do inside the firewall. Having literally grown up with technology, Millennials know how and are willing to work around policies and firewalls.

3. They have an entirely different view of privacy than previous generations. Millennials are prepared to ignore boundaries, which includes sharing proprietary information with friends on the Internet and in social media sites if they believe it can help them solve problems.

4. They have little use for corporate email as a major collaboration tool. They consider email antique and archaic, favoring instead more real-time, interactive and collaborative ways of communicating. Recently the CIO of a major US bank discovered that a large portion of new employees had not initialised their enterprise email boxes. On investigation, including several one-on-one interviews, they learned that the new, Millennial employees had no intention of using corporate email, but strongly preferred text messages, social networks and blogs.

Basically, they have been strongly shaped by the tools we have given them, and the ways that they and their peers have determined best how to use them collectively.

Curtis’s recommendations are fairly direct, and can be boiled down to a few almost obvious ideas:

  • Listen and learn from Millennials, since they have come from the future and can help you with technology, especially around collaboration tools and techniques. These folks learned on World Of Warcraft.
  • Expect Millennials to disregard all rules that prohibit the use of technologies that they know are worthwhile, so change the rules to suit. As Curtis says, “All too often corporate policies lie somewhere between incomprehensible and punishing. They are often to protect the company legally and won’t be accepted by Millennials, who will do what they want or leave the organisation.”
  • “Millennials tend to see the world as flat from a collaborative perspective - as opposed to the traditional world which is often hierarchical and has well-defined team, company, and country boundaries. Millennials have learned how to make the team work, as opposed to making the individuals work as part of a team.”

I can see how this is going to be a real challenge for lumbering industrial era dinosaurs, but companies that are committed to communal approaches to effectiveness and who have an open attitude to using new technology to foster collaboration are likely to benefit from a wave of Millennials shaking things up.

via Luis Suarez