- Image via CrunchBase
Writing the the Wall Street Journal Gary Hamel makes this observation about what he calls Generation “F”
The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” – the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy.
If your company hopes to attract the most creative and energetic members of Gen F, it will need to understand these Internet-derived expectations, and then reinvent its management practices accordingly. Sure, it’s a buyer’s market for talent right now, but that won’t always be the case—and in the future, any company that lacks a vital core of Gen F employees will soon find itself stuck in the mud.
With that in mind, I compiled a list of 12 work-relevant characteristics of online life. These are the post-bureaucratic realities that tomorrow’s employees will use as yardsticks in determining whether your company is “with it” or “past it.”
Most of the people that I’ve worked with over the years are what geeky types call GenX or to put it in GenX terms they’re not wildly aware of social networking. Sure they may have signed up for a facebook account because everyone around them has but thats the limit of their social networking, but more and more of the people I interact with are slowly making the conversion to GenY. Many are listed on linkedin, some on plaxo and a few are using friendfeed and twitter. GenY people would find an engaged tone strange because they never hear them. When was the last time you heard an engaged tone, it’s nearly always default now for an unanswered phone to go to voicemail. Anyway, I digress. Do go and read the article HERE
