Chris Scalet first realized that the next generation of workers will require drastically different IT tools and policies when he recently watched his 20-year-old daughter studying for her college classes.
Scalet, senior vice president and CIO of Merck & Co., noticed that as his daughter studied, she simultaneously listened to her iPod, sent text messages and browsed through pages of the Facebook social network.
"How she will work in the future will be very different from how we work today," Scalet said. "She is going to expect [collaboration] tools ... to be able to work. What scared me is that we don't think that way today as corporations. We think as baby boomers [about] this very traditional, structured, formal [work environment]."
Scalet is among a growing number of IT executives who are in the early stages of planning on how to prepare their companies to adequately meet the needs of the 80 million children of baby boomers who are now or will soon enter the workforce.
Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, a book about how the Internet and mass collaboration will dramatically affect the global economy, said that he has recently been studying the work habits of this next generation of employees. For businesses to create and manage what Tapscott describes as "the next-generation enterprise," they will have to find a way to adapt to new types of technologies that younger workers are increasingly demanding.
"If you have generation that is coming into the workforce that has grown up using new collaboration models, business ought to care," Tapscott said. "[The collaboration models] are going to dominate the 21st century marketplace. If you don't understand that, you're going to fail economically."
Tapscott and Scalet were among a group of experts who spoke Thursday about how businesses must now begin preparing for technology and cultural changes that the next generation of workers will bring to the fore. They spoke at a press conference in New York announcing that the BSG Alliance Corp. has acquired Tapscott's company, New Paradigm.
Merck's Scalet said that while he is not yet sure how technologies will evolve to meet the needs of the new workforce, he does know that he will have to "think very differently about how I'm going to build future capabilities. This next generation of employees will pull corporations toward it. If you don't have that capability in place, they will pack up and go someplace that does. IT has to take a leadership role."
Brian Fetherstonhaugh, chairman and CEO of OgilvyOne Worldwide, a direct marketing firm, likened the gap between the needs of older employees and the demands of the new generation of workers to how the marketing arms of many large companies lag behind their customers. While many consumers are spending as much as 25% of their time online, many companies today are only allotting 8% of their advertising budgets to Web endeavors, he noted.
"Anytime a marketer is that far behind a consumer, nothing good can come of it," he noted.
Just as those companies need to keenly observe consumer behavior, they should also learn from their younger workers, he added.
Ogilvy has begun leveraging an entry-level associate program it established three years ago to try to find a way to blend the traditional work methods with some new technologies used by the next generation. The new workers, he noted, "know a lot of cool stuff we don't know."
Fetherstonhaugh added that he underestimated the different learning styles and needs of younger workers after until he began meeting monthly with employees from the entry-level program. "The issue of talent and finding and keeping it is critical," he noted. "Their patience is different. Their appetite for work and play is extremely high."
At Merck, there is one camp of workers who maintain that the technologies needed to support the new workers are "a huge part of our business in the future." Another camp said that the new tools are "a fad that will pass," Scalet added.
The company is working with each camp to come up with a compromise, and has also begun experimenting with encouraging employees to use social networks, he added.
This type of collaboration, he added, has the potential to dramatically change the company's traditional method for solving problems -- gathering four to five people in a meeting room to come up with a solution.
The future model, he said, could involve electronically explaining a business problem to all pertinent employees "and let 15,000 people solve it in an hour," he said. "That potentially is a very powerful model."
But while Merck is trying to find the middle ground between those two camps, Scalet is sure that the company will have to find a way to support the technology demands of the baby boomers' kids. "There are 80 million potential workers who are coming at us with these types of capabilities," he noted. "We're going to have to deal with that."
Community Comments