Closing the Communication-Generation Gap
Most people, at one point or another, picked up their cell phone to receive a text message and had to figure out something like the following…
“Are you doing 2 dnr l8r? So!”
love k-man
If it weren’t for the number displayed on the phone, you might not even know who this “K-Man” person is. Also, you are not sure if this person ever received any kind of formal education. Like it or not, this is where communication has brought us into the electronic age, where even waiting for the phone to ring is wildly inefficient.
This is a trend that we are also seeing in the world of work. In the age of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and FriendFeed, communication must not only be instant, but information must reach a large number of people and be extremely simple to spread the word. Whether it’s an important document to share or a simple “out of office” notice, there is a growing demand for instant information.
This article is titled Closing the Generation/Communication Gap because with today’s technology, that generation gap is getting quite wide. There are many different types of workers in the workforce today with varying levels of technical proficiency. If you look closely enough, you may find someone at your company where anything beyond snail mail is witchcraft. Then there are the Gen Y people who have grown up with instant messaging, text messaging, Facebook accounts, and all kinds of expectations of social media. When trying to build a work environment that speaks to everyone, there needs to be something that your entire workforce is committed to.
Many companies are turning to an intranet to provide collaboration tools at work and create a corporate culture that is easy for all generations to participate in. Fortune 500 companies are leading the way with innovative social intranets combined with more traditional business and document management tools. Intranets provide employees with an area where they can share ideas and retrieve corporate information in a quick and easy format. Ease of use should be a key factor when choosing intranet software or creating your own intranet. Provide the social experience, but in a format that the tech-challenged can easily use.
The beauty of a good piece of intranet software is how it can “WOW” these two groups with the same functionality. Those with less technical knowledge can still contribute, as long as adding content and documents is as simple as clicking the “add” button. The younger generations will look forward to this ease of use so they can get in on the action on the site and own their share.
This equates to a fast and effective communication tool that everyone in the company can accept. If you’re looking for a way to improve communication and bridge that gap between generations, an intranet would be a great place to start.