Workforce | The Complete Innovator

The Myth of the Millennial Social Movement

7 05 2013

Hardly a day goes by without me hearing a senior executive at some major company cite the growing influence of the upcoming “Millennial Generation” as the reason for their foray into the enterprise social world.

But I wonder if they’re missing a trick here – look at almost any study of who actually uses Social Media in the modern world – and you’ll see that the major users are not those born in 2000+ (who are yet to get into the workforce) – but rather you see an almost even split between those in the 25-34 age and those in the 35-44 range.

Compare that then with the average working age for most industries at late 30s-early 40s, and suddenly you come to the realization that most companies must have somewhere between 25-50% of their EXISTING workforce is already actively involved in the social world – and not just active in it – but actively leading it. It’s almost like we’ve missed out on an entire “social generation” that is/should be the real driver of social technologies in the enterprise.

Although there are plenty of reasons I can think of why Millennials and their ilk don’t use social to the same extent as older generations (age and access come to mind) – the rise of Social Media in our personal lives – driven by our desire to communicate with, interact with and influence our friends, relatives, and to gain access to information which has become available at an unprecedented level – has driven the familiarity and adoption of Social Media way ahead of the expected Millennial boom.

Some organizations already get this of course – I was recently talking to the CEO of a large retailer who shared by vision that social technologies are no longer a nice to have – but rather a must have for the modern enterprise.

We live in a strange period in time where for the first time in history, our personal technology use and sophistication actually outstrips that which we have available at the workplace.

Your top employees go home and are afforded the ability to influence the world around them through online social tools like Facebook and LinkedIn – they can not only share information, find out what others are doing, work together virtually to achieve important personal projects (birthday parties, group travel, weddings, and more) and to rationalize and support the important decisions and purchases in their lives.

So isn’t it weird that we then employ these “personally powerful” people into our organizations and then don’t give them the tools to work as effectively as they can at home?

Indeed, many organizations see the demand and desire from employees for social technologies and processes in the workplace to outrank the “traditional” fringe benefits that have been the focus of Silicon Valley HR orgs since the early 2000s – pool and ping pong tables and “chill out rooms” are making way for flexible working and the ability to feel deeply engaged at a value-level via social tools to the work of their company. Social technologies in reality are no longer a nice to have, but are very much a must have!

Of course – this means wide ranging organizational changes for most companies. The Social world thrives on standards of high levels of transparency, engagement, and accountability that most organizations aren’t currently prepared for. In my mind, making these necessary changes will undoubtedly present themselves as the Change Management Challenge for the decade in most enterprises.

Do you see these at your org? – let me know!

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Tags: 2000, accountability, ages, average working age, CEO, challenge, change management, engagement, facebook, generation, HR, Human resources, information, linkedin, Millennial, online communities, organizations, personal projects, Silicon Valley, social, social media, social networks, social technologies, technology, transparency, Workforce
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Should we be starting single sex Innovation Labs?

10 04 2012

Stephen Dubner of “Freaknomics” fame recently tackled an interesting aspect of innovation on the NPR show “Marketplace” . In the show he pointed to a patent gap – namely the gender gap in patent applications.

Apparently women are only responsible for 7.5% of all patents filed and Jenny Hunt, an economist at Rutgers University reckoned that closing that male to female patent gap in science and engineering could have a dramatic effect on the economy – raising it by up to 2.7% – a pretty sizeable gain.

There are multiple reasons for this gap existing – but one of the most interesting ones that were discussed was the relative attitude towards risk between the sexes. Specifically, men are bigger risk takers than women.

Why would this be important? Well, Innovation, after all, is a risky endeavor – with average new product failure rates still hovering at the 75% level, you have to be reasonably thick skinned and willing to “go big” occasionally in order to achieve noticeable results. You have to, in short, have a reasonable tolerance for taking on risk.

Allison Booth, a British economist, cooked up an experiment that looked at the male/female risk gap by measuring the relative risk in choices between various student groups of women and/or men. She found that women who were in single sex groups were exhibiting similar risk profiles to the men who were in single sex groups. However, the women who were in co-educational groups were making less risky choices. It seemed that women were competing more aggresively (by taking bigger chances to win) when they were up against other women – but would defer/dial it down when men were also in the group.

I guess this shouldn’t come as to much of a surprise as you only need to look at the school tables in the UK to see that single sex schools tend to dominate the top of the leaderboards – especially with regards to female education – but does this mean that maybe we should continue this segregation beyond the development years?

Potential legal issues aside, would we gain more from a segregated workforce? Should we start setting up single sex Innovation Labs to maximize the competitive elements that drive creativity? Would we double the amount of innovation happening in our companies by segregating staff into men/women-only divisions?