On the Net Generation moving jobs in Grown Up Digital:
“The Net Gener arrives at work, eager to use his social networking tools to collaborate and create and contribute to the company. For starters, he’s shocked to find that the company’s technology tools are more primitive than the ones he used in high school. The company he works for still thinks the Net is about web sites presenting information, rather than a Web 2.0 collaboration platform. And they are surprised, perhaps naively, to learn that corporations have antiquated ways of working. Then the company bans Facebook at the office because it suspects Net Geners are wasting time chatting with friends and throwing digital snowballs when they should be working – thus depriving Net Geners of their link to friends, to fun, to coworkers. Pretty soon, the talent heads for the exit.”
There are a lot of things that have changed in the last few decades of corporate life.
While the corporate environment used to be the place for innovation and advanced technology, the fear mongering on security and productivity have all but driven innovation into the consumer market. Take for example, my 2-year-old laptop which is faster and much more feature rich than my work laptop. At home I’ve got a webcam, powerful video editing software, enterprise-class server software, extensive software development tools, and a plethora of other modern applications that keep me productive and able to collaborate with distributed teams. And that’s just what came included with my computer – no extra purchase necessary. When I want to make a good impression at work, I use my personal laptop to create presentations, not my work one.
The tool set on my work computer is very minimal (essentially Microsoft Office, and Internet Explorer), after which they take the restrictions up a notch by blocking free tools like YouTube (allegedly for bandwidth reasons) and Google Image Search (no naughty pictures!) Even when I was expecting all of this, I was still shocked to discover they actively block tabbed browsing – an ancient browser feature for anyone not stuck with IE. Perhaps “tabbed browsing” is an esoteric complaint from a computer geek, but I can not make any sense of the policy. In my mind, I would rather have tabs in my browser than a phone on my desk. Along the same lines, my work laptop could have a webcam, but to keep things secure, it was replaced with a ridiculous-looking pop-out keyboard light.
As for Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites? They certainly have value from a marketing-department perspective, but even beyond that, these are simply the equivalent to a digital smoke break. It’s just a quick way to get away from work to refocus thinking. “Thought breaks” are vital for those of us in the knowledge worker business, and blocking them just makes people bitter and (ironically) unproductive.
The way I see it, the internet is just like the telephone and photocopier. It’s a resource that is provided for employees to be productive. They can be used for good or for bad, and if you can’t trust your employees to make the right choice and be productive at work, then you had no business hiring them in the first place. Mullenweg, the cofounder of wordpress.com says:
“If you have bad people, you need a lot of process and structure. If you have good people, you need way less process and bureaucracy.”
It is no wonder Net Geners don’t stick around for long. The corporate way, which was once innovative and cutting edge, has languished. The real innovation today is happening with small, globally distributed, teams. In exchange for byzantine corporate policies, the Net Geners favor simple employee trust. Which it turns out, is a pretty solid business plan.
Tags: business culture, emerging tech, innovation, leadership
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I like the parallel on the smoke breaks. As far as the security, I know where the backdoors are and how to get around. Ha!
I’m not entirely convinced that the corporate environment was ever the place for innovation (at least in most instances). Even 20+ years ago, it seems like it was quite the reverse – a place where creativity goes to die.
And I have some sympathy for network infrastructure people who need to manage the demands on network bandwidth and security. The typical user is very ignorant about how their day-long audio streaming can impact the network, and all you need is a few people doing this to really muck up many environments. (And of course that typical user will install lots of useless crap on their computer, then complain that it has viruses or is running slowly. Duh!)
That being said, the absurd policies that often result from these legitimate concerns affect not just net geners. The fact that I was more willing to invest in making my work more productive than my employer was one of the driving forces behind my move to freelancing. And I know a lot of 40-somethings like myself who have responded similarly.