Email is SO Last Year

In my sessions I tell the story of a young, Generation Y employee in my office. For some reason, he rarely responded to my e-mails. In fact, he rarely checked his e-mail. I thought that was odd -- don't the kids these days like to communicate electronically? Turns out that e-mail is not the thing anymore. Nope. I know that's frustrating because you just figured out how to use it. In fact, the 18 to 25 year olds now communicate via IM, text messaging, Skype and a whole bunch of other more chatty, less formal means. In the case of my young employee, he showed me how to load IM on my Blackberry and our joint productivity sky-rocketed. It wasn't, as I had originally suspected, that he was ignoring me. The problem was that I was communicating with him through a means that to him was the equivalent of the carrier pigeon. This anecdotal evidence is born out in the experiences of corporate America. The generation born and raised in the era of instant messaging is now entering the workforce, and they are bringing their communications practices with them. At I.B.M. they send 2.5 million instant messages a day. In fact, if you leave a voice mail or e-mail message at one of a dozen different computer companies, you might as well just tell them that you don't really want to hear back. For them, it's all about the instant message -- and if your organization doesn't figure out how to use it (and fast), you'll be toodling around the Internet on an Edsel in a super-sonic jet world. For more information on this shift in communications patterns and how it's playing out in the real world, check out the NYT's article on this issue at:

http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=9B07E2DF1030F936A35757C0A9609C8B63