1 April 2008

Hub launches leadership training courses on popular culture

Managers woefully inept at connecting with gen Y get help from the Hub.

Addressing concerns that managers are failing to connect with younger employees in the workforce – and in particular, generation Y – the Hub has launched a series of free training workshops aimed specifically at boosting understanding and improving communication between these groups of employees.

Navigate your way around Gen Y patois
The globe's incessant obsession with celebrity culture has now infiltrated the workplace. Generation Y is becoming so obsessed with and immersed in the lives of their favorite celebrities – such as Paris Hilton, Angelina Jolie, Ricky Tomlinson and Josh Lucas – that it's adopted a new "gen Y patois" – so impenetrable and littered with W.A.G terminology (slang terms used by the semi-famous "Wives And Girlfriends" of premier league footballers) that aging managers and leaders are seeking ways to get to grips with it.

The Hub's "Gen Y Patois" training course will provide vital language coaching, historic context and group conversational exercises to address just such needs.

Some managers show reluctance to train
Despite the obvious good sense in taking part in such training, one manager (who wishes to remain anonymous), who's been signed up by his CEO to take part in one of the forthcoming courses on "Bodypopping", fumed earlier today:

"Has the world gone mad?! It's utterly ridiculous! I was the Kentucky regional expert at the Hand Jive and The Mashed Potato back in my day, so I'm very comfortable with my abilities on the dancefloor – but what possible need can there be in the workplace for me to improve my dancing skills?"

Well, according to research conducted earlier this year in the Hub's core regions – Europe, North America and Australia – the subtle communication methods used within bodypopping by gen Y-ers have remarkable collaboration and knowledge-sharing elements built in. Managers could do well to learn from this system.

Innovate via employee interest groups
Other free courses offered as part of the Hub's month-long blitz on poor inter-generational communication include:

• "Txt Spk": A popular course which explains the shortened code language used for cellphone text-messaging;
• "How to communicate with gen Y using your clothes" – a short fashion-sense training course to help make attire choices that will resonate with your younger employees;
• "Innovation in the workplace: Why knitting and billiards have made a comeback and how encouraging such employee interest groups can improve communication at your organization"; and
• "Reality TV ambitions: How not to lose your valuable gen Y employees to the allure of reality TV auditions" (with a complementary module on The Boy Band phenomenon: its rise and fall).

View the full calendar of the Hub's free popular culture training courses.

Have your say
Do you think there's a need for older employees in the workforce, who are often managers, to make more of an effort to connect with younger employees? What methods do you employ at your company to encourage this relationship development? Do you think offering courses on bodypopping has taken it just too far?

Discuss these issues with other comms practitioners by joining the Internal Comms Hub members' group on the Communicators' Network.

Other recommendations:A communicator's guide to Generation Y

Pranking the CEO to get the message across at Sun

Got a news story? Contact the newsdesk

News archive