28 August 2008
Smaller firms should do more with web 2.0 to attract gen Y
But survey reveals many CEOs are now making the effort to blog.
The ThoughtFarmer Blog has reported the results of an independent survey conducted with delegates at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston earlier this year. Asked to gauge the “2.0-ness” of their intranets, 72 conference attendees answered questions including:
- Can the average employee at your company edit content on your intranet?
- How often do you contribute content?
- Does your CEO participate?
Larger companies are more 2.0 savvy
Delegates' feedback revealed a huge opportunity to make the average intranet more democratic and collaborative, two factors that help attract generation Y employees:
- 60% said employees can edit nothing or very little on their intranet.
- 34% said they personally don’t add or edit content at all.
Interestingly, larger companies reported better intranet practices:
- 47% said employees could edit a fair amount or almost everything.
- 27% said they add or edit content 20+ times a week (see Figure 1, below).
A significant percentage (40%) of participants from the larger companies said their CEO adds content regularly, compared with 20% overall, and more than half of respondents said their intranet search rarely helps them find what they're looking for.
Figure 1. How often Enterprise 2.0 conference attendees update their intranet
How to retain "digital natives"
The audience for this survey wasn’t exactly typical, says the blog – these Enterprise 2.0 conference attendees were typically early adopters of new technology and social software.
But there are definitely advantages for companies in updating their intranet with the latest applications like blogs and social networking forums – not least to help attract generation Y employees (or "digital natives"), a group who typically use such applications to connect with their friends out of the office, and value these tools being available within work environments too.
Chris McGrath, co-creator of ThoughtFarmer and a consultant on web and intranet projects, says that "Many businesses see that a move to more democratic, collaborative internal communications platforms is necessary in order to attract and retain employees, especially 'digital natives'".
If a company’s intranet does not encourage free communication and collaboration, it misses a big opportunity.
Don't miss your chance to connect with gen Y
McGrath discusses this point in more detail on the ThoughtFarmer blog, asking what happens when a young college graduate joins a firm but finds a staid, traditional intranet with a tightly controlled publishing model?
"They hate it," he says. "These twentysomethings operate on principles of openness, participation and interactivity. If a company’s technology infrastructure, including the intranet, does not encourage free communication and collaboration, it misses a big opportunity. Worse, it alienates these younger, internet-savvy employees.
Choose channels that resonate
Brian Fugere, a partner at Deloitte Consulting, discusses in a new Hub article how he also realized the need to engage younger employees using a channel that would resonate with them – in this case, employee-made videos. His idea spawned the hugely successful "Deloitte Film Festival".
"It all began when I was on vacation with my kids and they were spending all their time sitting at the computer, laughing uncontrollably at the videos on YouTube," says Fugere (pictured, right). “And one of my sons spent the rest of the vacation making videos.”
Fugere witnessed this transaction – generations Y and Z being completely comfortable with being amateur filmmakers, having all the technology to support it, and eagerly sharing their work on video-sharing sites – and recognized that here was an unrealized opportunity in the formal world of internal communication. “I thought: There’s something in this. There’s something here we need to be tapping into. And that’s how the Deloitte Film Festival was born.”
Tips from "The Gen Y Guy"
If you want to find out more about connecting with generation Y employees, check out the keynote from Jason Ryan Dorsey (a.k.a, "The Gen Y Guy") at the forthcoming Strategic Communication Management Summit in Chicago.
You can also listen to Ryan Dorsey discuss his suggestions for ways to engage generation Y employees, in a podcast interview recorded earlier this year.
Have your say
Is one of the main reasons you're revamping your intranet because you want to bring it up to speed with users online experience expectations? Perhaps you're still fighting to free up budget to put into developing your intranet or portal?
Or maybe you're lucky and have a CEO who buys into social media an 2.0 technologies and even blogs regularly themself? Share your experiences and suggestions with us below.
Recommended resources:
Melcrum report: How to use Social Media to Engage Employees
TOP TIPS: 8 ways to be a great blog coach for your CEO
Q&A: What should social media priorities be and how should each social media tool be implemented?
How Deloitte's video competition engages internal and external audiences
Got a news story? Contact the newsdesk