I AM a digital nomad!
I find myself working mostly on the road these days with the rest of my time split between home and the office. I have been known to take a conference call from my car parked on the 
shoulder of the road with my laptop propped open to a webcast. I stay connected with my Dell Latitude D610, Blackberry 8700, and my Palm Pilot. I work for Aon Consulting in the Human Capital Group, partnering with large and mid-sized businesses to enhance employee communications, most recently through Web 2.0 and social media.
Aon’s Human Capital consultants have just completed a survey (click here to download) that reveals a broad use of Web 2.0 in the workplace for work purposes among all generations. This is of interest since the millennial generation is helping drive Web 2.0 media into the workplace. In fewer than 10 years, this generation will make up a majority of the U.S. workforce (more than fifty percent of all employees).
I think you’ll find the results fascinating. If you have read the report, please be kind enough to let me know your thoughts on the use of social media to communicate with employees and your experience. In particular, we want to know how others leverage social media in the workplace to recruit, educate, engage, and retain employees. Here are some questions as a starting point for your comments.
- What, if any, “aha” moment came from reading our report?
- How do you use Web 2.0 in your corporate/employee communications?
- If you do not currently use Web 2.0 media, why not?
So, what do you think? What impact do you think the millenial generation will have on the global corporate workplace? Are there differences by region?
Trackback URL for this post: http://www.digitalnomads.com/2009/03/the-impact-of-digital-nomads-on-the-corporate-workforce/trackback
Comments (7)
Trackbacks and Pingbacks
-
This just in: digital nomads, social networking in the workplace, Burger King Studio reprise - how to manage social media…
I have to tell you that the guys who created Burger King Studio — Mess Marketing in Chicago — demonstrated awesome social media management skills. You will recall my post wherein I gushed about the cool t-shirts you can make……
Comment
Nomad Contributors
I am the embodiment of the average demo in your study. I am 42 right between the generations. I am being pushed along the web 2.0 adoption curve by my staff. My assistant has a blog, a brand and thousands of followers. One of my business development staff members is a regular speaker on social media trends throughout Chicago. I have found the tools empowering and have used them both for my primary role as a regional manager of a specialized staffing firm as well as for my board role with a professional organization. I look forward to reading your study in more depth. Believe it or not - I actually printed it out to read on the train. How old school of me!
With apologies “to the songwriter, “I read it on the grapevine” is the new version of that old Marvin Gaye song. That’s because social media is the electronic version of the grapevine. People don’t have to talk about the message, they can IM, TM and twitter it. It’s reshaping employee communication. A message that once cascaded vertically from central office to the shoproom floor in an orderly process now enters the social media age to explode in every direction with little control or process management. With less control over the message, there’s a stronger need for trust and credibility in the message maker and, with less control over how the message is reshaped during this process, a stronger need to monitor how people are reacting to it.
One of my former VP’s, Andy Lark, has a theory that email is outdated. He contends, and I can’t disagree, that social media tools like internal group message boards, Twitter, IM, etc, will eventually render the cumbersome inbox obsolete. Seems to me that less control over how the message is reshaped could be just another word for collaboration.
I work with social media to build the Earth.org brand and the Earth.org team is 100% virtual. Here is how we work: http://www.earth.org/pages/remote-work
In addition to email, Skype and Google Chat we use Yammer to stay in touch.
I love being a Digital Nomad. Freedom and flexibility are one of the keys to happiness.
I forget to mention that we use Google documents for collaborative work as well as a behind the scenes blog to stay abreast of our latest developments.
With my current employer, there is chatter at the corporate level about embracing social media and engaging our customers, but most of the actual action is being taken independently by individual employees. Our employees, our vendors and customers are connecting through sites like LinkedIn and personal Twitter or Facebook accounts.
The problem I see is that for a company as massively large as mine, there is no unified push to truly take advantage of these sites and technologies. The piecemeal approach is working for isolated pockets, but not the company as a whole. The recent adoption of an instant messenger client in our IS division is one of the only company-wide actions I’ve seen.
I also agree strongly that email will be dead soon. On a personal level, I stay better connected through telephone calls and social media than email. Even my hippie parents made it on Twitter before I did and I get messages from them through Facebook fare more often than email. Upcoming platforms like Google Wave will accelerate that move away from email.